I made a salad to clear out my refrigerator of a whole bunch of vegetables to make room for MORE vegetables. There’s about six swiss and rainbow chard leaves as the base of the salad. I then threw a whole zucchini squash, one large carrot, and two small beets into my processor with the shred attachment on. That’s like 500 servings of vegetables.

The beets produce a nice juice when shredded that coats all the ingredients. I threw on some olive oil and vinegar and went to town. Near the end of it I thought I was going to die from veg-overload but I powered through.

Always remember that color is your friend, and as a general rule of thumb, eat the rainbow. The more colors you have in any raw or cooked dish, the greater the supply of nutrients you’ll be getting.

Read more about how to do this and what to eat for each color here: http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/yf/foods/fn595w.htm.

Our imaginary subscriber base asked us “Is wine considered a raw food?” This is our answer – unscientific, awesome, and St. Supery cabernet-powered. Check the video for the full story.

One of the most inspiring purchases I have made in my raw food journey was a package of nori sheets. It happened while I was at the grocery store looking for flour tortillas. These, on the other hand, are much healthier and can be used in a similar manner. Nori is a source of vitamin A, B, C1, iodine, protein, fiber, and carotene. Flour tortillas are primarily salt and carbohydrates.

I spent about 30 minutes preparing this dish but it could have been done more quickly. You can throw just about anything you’d like in a nori sheet and roll it up, however, in order to make sushi you need to be a little more strategic. It is important to have an item in your sushi that fills the nook and crannies. In this recipe I used the same dill summer cheeze that I used in the summer sandwich post. You’ll also want to pick something that has a little crunch to it, like carrots. The rest is up to you.

I chose to throw some anaheim peppers and chard into these sushi wraps. Spread the cheeze or other dip-like ingredient onto the nori sheet, lay your carrots, peppers, etc. along the whole sheet. Start with one end and tuck the sheet in tight, being rolling it much in the same manner that you would a yoga mat. Keep all the ingredients tight and make sure you don’t rip the nori sheet. You may need to apply a little water to the end of the nori sheet to get it to stick. You are now ready to cut the roll into 1 inch thick bites. A sharp knife makes this part of the process much easier.

I didn’t have any soy sauce around the house so I mixed some balsamic vinegar with a little lemon juice and salt for a nice substitute. The final product was even delicious enough to feed my 20-something, ex-marine, meet-eating, highly active, mountain man friend and he was satisfied. Now that’s practical!

It...blends.

As any raw foodist or foodista will tell you, life without a (proper) blender is no life at all. But what is a blender, really? Simply put, it is a machine that changes food from one shape or texture into another. Unlike a food processor, a blender…blends, instead of only chopping. It’s certainly useful when one wants to chop ice for mixed drinks, of course, but did you know that you can make raw soup in a blender? How about nut butter? Mousse? Liquid salad? OK, maybe that last one is a bad idea (details forthcoming), but you can put just about anything in a blender and make it awesome.

Living foods are tricky. Some vegetables can be pretty bland. Others can be tough to chew. A blender solves both of those problems.

As Mark has mentioned in previous posts about making big salads, you might be able to pull together the best collection of ingredients in the world – you’ve still got to chew it all up. A blender, while not necessarily a better option than chewing, certainly cuts down on the time that it takes to eat a salad.

The interesting thing about a nice blender (like the one pictured above) is that it can take things that are both hard to chew and difficult to eat in general and make them palatable. A few weeks ago I blended the following:

• Pint of strawberries
• Pint of blueberries
• 1 large beet (beet juice lowers blood pressure like no drug known to man)
• Cumin, cinnamon, salt, pepper, and cayenne powder – Taken together, these spices reduce blood pressure, promote anti-inflammatory response in tissue, and taste awesome.
• 10 cloves of garlic
• 2 tomatoes
• Bunch of romaine lettuce
• 1 jalapeno pepper
• Filtered water
• Probably lots of other stuff that I can’t remember

I threw all of these things into my Breville IKON blender and let it rip, literally. It turned this mess of food into an easy-to-swallow meal with all of the body-helping power of its constituent elements and a lot dishes to clean up. The result was a pink liquid that tasted like…nothing. It was absolutely neutral, except for the flavor of garlic.

I’m not saying that blending all meals is the best plan. Chewing helps to promote production of necessary digestive enzymes in the mouth and stomach. Chewing your food also helps to make sure that you don’t overeat. But I definitely found a happy balance with a blended salad like this.

The last thing my veggies see

Moral of the story: Blenders were invented to brings foods together. Let us blend.

Tim is an interfaith organizer and social web consultant living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. He holds a MA degree in International Studies from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Tim currently works with Ashoka Changemakers as a Community Mobilizer. He blogs at timbrauhn.com

One of my main concerns with incorporating more living foods into my diet was cost. Organic produce, and produce in general, is more expensive. What with Totino’s Pizzas for just 99 cents, who can spend $1.99 on a bunch of spinach? I need to be FULL after all! How can vegetables fill me up? These are all questions that an imaginary, hypothetical person may ask or state. Most guys are concerned about being full and so far that’s probably the biggest obstacle I’ve encountered in talking with people about eating raw.

My response to people concerned about cost is that eating healthy, living foods is an investment in your overall health and longevity. The money you save by eating heavily processed, sugar and salt packed foods, will contribute to long-term health effects down the road. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and obesity to name just a few. I personally hope to treat my body the same way you would treat a prized classic sports car, by giving it only the most quality fuel. It’s important to listen to your body and know what that fuel is exactly. Some people wont be able to eat 100% raw and may need yogurts and low fat cheeses, that’s fine, you just need to begin to tune-in to what your body tells you to know.

Training your body to feel full takes discipline. Our typical diet consists of foods that constantly keep us feeling unsatisfied: high amount of salt, refined sugar, starches, carbohydrates, etc. The good thing about eating raw foods is that you can eat as much as you’d like without feeling guilty. The most common thing I personally run into is feeling fairly hungry quickly after I eat a monstrous salad. The key is eating more and eating more frequently on a living foods diet. The typical three meals a day wont suffice for the average man or woman.

Mastering the art of snacking is important as well. If you don’t have time to eating five meals a day, you need to be able to hold yourself over until the next meal. That’s where high energy foods like nuts and seeds come in. These can be little bursts of energy and satisfaction that throughout the day contribute to a smooth transition between meals.

The general theme of this whole blog is eating well and investing in your health, so I’ll more than likely be touching on a lot of what I mentioned here in more detail down the road. Please leave comments if you’ve tried any of these approaches and it did or didn’t work for you and how you remedied your diet to match your body.