Practical Raw

Mercola’s “Glowing” Endorsement For Raw

Mark Mann — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:04:06 +0000

Dr. Joseph Mercola is not someone who generally avoids controversy; he spends a lot of time challenging the establishment of how we live and eat as Americans. We recently read one of his lamentations about the state of our diets, and we’re sure that it, too, will cause its fair share of controversy. But you couldn’t ask for a better endorsement for eating raw than one that comes from Dr. Mercola himself:

Eating much of your food raw is ideal. But most of us are not going to be able to accomplish a completely raw diet, and we’ll end up cooking some percentage of our food.

Check out the full article.

Of course the rest of the article is wonderful but I mainly wanted to highlight the bit about raw foods

Read on for doom and gloom about one of my least used kitchen appliances… THE MICROWAVE.

This is how we make salad

admin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:09:43 +0000

When raw foodies make salad, we make the hell out of a salad. For your viewing enjoyment:

Eat the Rainbow

Mark Mann — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:01:06 +0000

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.

Homemade Energy Bars

Mark Mann — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:09:29 +0000

One of my main concerns about eating a raw foods diet has been mobility. When I am not at home or near a Whole Foods, I find it a challenge to eat something raw and uncooked. A large aspect of me being motivated to try my hand at these bars is due to my friend Griffen’s own homemade energy bars.

These energy bars are all about the balance between nuttiness and sweetness. The ingredients are held together by the paste of the dates. So if you want less sweet, you’ll probably want to use something like raisins or another dried berry to replace the dates. I had to add a few extra cups of dates to the original amounts I had at the beginning. I lost track of my measurements, so use your best judgement, and remember you can always add more ingredients if you have them.

Start by adding the roughly chopped dates to a food processor and work them into a paste. Then remove the dates paste and set it aside.

Add the nuts (I used pecans and cashews), coconut, and any of your other ingredients to the food processor and work them into a powdery mix.

Throw both mixtures into a bowl and begin kneading the ingredients together. The nut mixture will act to take away the stickiness of the dates. When the ingredients stop crumbling out of the main mixture and your confident that everything is mixed well, lay it out on a cutting board. Cut the mix into bar shapes or small squares. Use plastic or foil and wrap them up individually or keep them all together and save the materials and take them out one at a time.

I was blown away by the balance of the nuttiness of the cashews and pecans to the intense brown sugary sweetness of the dates. I grabbed some notes from this recipe but for the most part made it up as I went a long. She included some nutrition information in her post so I left that for you below. This is for her recipe but I imagine there are similarities in nutritional content.

Nutrition per Serving (1 bar): Calories 207; Fat 9.4 g (sat .8g, mono 5.2g, poly 3.1g); Protein 3.9g; Cholesterol 0mg; Carbohydrate 24.9g; Sodium 0.4mg

Raw Vegan Sushi Party

Tim Brauhn — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:31:03 +0000

I built a sushi roll with lots of cool ingredients. It is a magical fantastic explosion of raw sushi goodness. Follow along and let us know what you think. Feel free to ask questions in the comments of this video or on the website itself.