Raw & Vegan

The girl who wrote the emo-esque post the other day has gone and is replaced with a hyper, back to 99% raw one! Yes - I’ve had the greatest weekend, filled with inspiration and meeting fantastic people… I feel like I have a new lease on life!

I’ve been helping Runi from rawpower.com.au with a project, RAWCOVERY, where we are collating stories from people who have healed illness, lost weight or made positive changes in their lives through following a raw foods lifestyle. Our aim is to collect 1000 stories, and provide a single reliable source of testimonials for this amazing lifestyle with links off to each individuals websites and other information, so you can follow their ongoing raw life stories.

This weekend, Runi and her fiance Anand have been visiting us on the far, far away west coast and presenting their Art of Organic Raw Food Preparation class. Having only ‘met’ Runi online, and working with her for the past few months, it was a fantastic opportunity to catch up in person.

Yesterday, I helped them out in preparing food - such as chopping the tops of 15 young coconuts to make a tasty Raw Laksa curry -

Gathering ingredients and whipping up a tasty salad for lunch:

I then had the absolute pleasure of having them around to our place for dinner along with my good friend May.

Now, I must admit it is really really scary serving up food to people who teach raw food uncooking for a living! I was so worried about what they would think! Thankfully, everything went smoothly.

May brought along incredible crackers that she is making as a taste tester for a fellow Aussie who is going into the cracker business - I can’t say too much, but they were very special and delish raw crackers and I can’t wait until these hit the stores! We had these with a scrummy guacamole and nibblies.

For dinner, we had two salads - one being Banana Celery Salad with Pistachios, and the other being the classic, never fail Kale Salad (step by step illustrated instructions). Chris made Persimmon Pie for dessert, based on the recipe in Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen.

After a night of delicious raw food, excellent conversation and idea planning for Rawcovery, our guests went home and Chris & I fell asleep exhausted!

Today, we arrived at Alive Organics in time to set up for some photography and take a breather before the class started. Anand and Runi shared their stories, and made 6 or 7 dishes including the very authentic tasting Laksa and chocolates like I’ve never tasted them before. Chris took some good pics:

We met some wonderful people attending the class too, including a few who are interested in our Perth Raw Foodies picnics - it is always great to get new faces and meet new people!

After all this, we sadly had to say goodbye and head on home. But, the energy and inspiration from the class and the attendees, the creativity of brainstorming for Rawcovery, and the absolute pleasure I get out of preparing beautiful raw foods has just inspired me that this is the way to live, it’s the way for me to lose weight and be happy with myself. I’m getting a better idea of where I want to be in the future, and one thing for certain is that I don’t just want to receive the energy and enthusiasm - I want to spread it around too!

So, I have heaps of ideas I want to share with you and things I want to write about — if there’s anything you want to know, please leave a comment or email me, and I’ll cover it in a future post!

Have a fantastic week!

I’ve been quiet lately and doing quite a bit of internal reflection. This has mainly come about because I have felt really depressed the last month or two, which I recently found out is most likely due to dangerously low B12 and Iron, and worsening on hearing that news because I know I have let myself down.

To deal with the deficiencies, I have been having B12 injections and doing my best to eat very nutritionally rich foods.  I’m having days where I feel great, but too many days without clarity. Hence, I have found it difficult to put words together to write about all the topics I have on my mind!

Additionally, something I had not blogged yet is that I have returned to university to do a Master’s degree.  Until early 2007, I had been studying part time for a research Master of Science and focusing on e-learning.  I was organising my wedding at the same time …

I have to interrup this post to say my darling husband has just returned from the local Asian market with Durian and Young Coconuts!  I haven’t seen young coconuts in the stores for so long, and this market (who is the main importer of them to W.A.) says that there hasn’t been any to buy, possibly a bad growing season.  Hopefully though these will be good, and have some meat in them!

Back to the story….

So organising my wedding, travelling long distance every day, working full time and study all became too much so I pulled out of the degree.  Feeling more settled this year, I decided to continue my research but thought of doing something completely different to what I had done in the past.  So I enrolled in a flexible coursework Masters where I could do make my own program of study culminating in a dissertation.  My research interests are in vegans / raw vegans and the internet, and looking at the new “green consumerism” and how raw/vegan is rarely looked at as an option - although many people are going this way, in popular media the solution is often seen as ‘happy meat‘ rather than abstinence from meat altogether.

This semester I have been doing a unit on Globalisation, and I have sadly failed it due to reasons outlined above - after all the research, but working full time (and starting a new job last week!) and being foggy brained, I was unable to put my research into words.  My major essay was examining emissions trading and whether or not it would work, which it won’t because it still gives people a reason to pollute. I focused on carbon trading in animal agriculture, and reading a whitepaper like the LEAD/UN report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” is chilling. I would have loved to have finished my academic paper on the subject, but when it came to the crunch and looming deadline (a few hours away) I felt I couldn’t put my ideas together.  Getting very upset and frustrated, I chose to leave it rather than put myself through the added stress and bring myself down further.  Couple with this was my husband’s ability to greatly procrastinate over meals, and being busy and short tempered resulted in getting cooked vegan take-away dinner, making me sluggish and the situation worse! It is really difficult when you have your fingers in too many (raw) pies, if you unbalance something everything falls out of place - at least that’s what I find: remember I’m an airy fairy Gemini, so maybe its just me!

The issues I have been studying have added to my feeling down, in that I don’t think I’m doing enough for the earth.  We, the western world, cannot continue “business as usual” - if we don’t make the choice to change away from the current unenvironmentally friendly lifestyle, then the choice will be made for us and it will come as a blow.  In the back of my mind since I was a child has been the notion of living completely sustainably on a property with good soil for growing food and an appropriate climate for effective passive/solar accomodation.  I so want this now! If I could have the money to buy a property in the country, and live while developing my garden, I would drop what I’m doing and go.  Alas, I’m too bound to working and feeding the golden arrow to drop out. So the next best thing is to work hard and rapidly to get the income to support this lifestyle, and get educated on sustainability in the meantime.

Chris and I have been discussing this, and wondered how one would go about being raw without electricity - since much raw food preparation requires a dehydrator and food processing. Being the wonderful source of knowledge that the internet is, I found some solutions:

• Instructions for building a Solar Dehydrator
• A similar Solar Food Dryer
• Preparing seed and nut milk with a mortar and pestle

Print these out so when the end is nigh you won’t need the ‘net for instructions!  End is nigh = joke ;-}

I’d better get back to the slog, looking forward to creating something exciting for dinner tonight and getting ready for work tomorrow.  The new job is good and safely away from quick n’ easy lunches (i.e. cafe’s) so I’m able to better stick to raw!

There are many more things I want to write about - Hubby will do a guest post about sprouting, as he’s figured out a great way to do buckwheat in bulk that doesn’t break the budget, we’ve been doing some excellent uncooking and have the photos to prove it, and must update you on our latest forays into Perth’s grocery markets that have raw food (there’s plenty out there, and I believe quite an underground movement!).

Also - Chia Seeds are now readily available at various grocers in Perth, and they’re West Australian grown too!  (Not sure if they are organic).  I bought several packets of black and white Chia yesterday, and hope the Omega-3 helps feed my brain so it’s not so foggy!

Bye for now!

Kate

My birthday is next Saturday and it would be wonderful to me if we could have a Perth Raw Foodies picnic that day. Nothing’s better than good raw food and conversation :) So if you’re interested in coming to a picnic (if it isn’t raining) but not on the Perth Raw Food Picnics mailing list, then please leave a comment along with your email or write to me via this form. If you’ve been thinking about coming to a picnic but haven’t yet made the leap, then this is a good opportunity!

Hope to see you there, and I hope that it’s not raining!!