Raw Foods for the Busy Bee. Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz

My friend Sharen asked on FB today: "Is someone willing to share your experiences and tips how a busy single person who practically everyday eat lunches and dinners out (because run everywhere due to a lot of activities) can manage raw vegan diet ? Nearest organic grocery store is MRTs away. No car. Lives alone."

This is truly the modern person's dilemma. We want to be to healthy, sexy, wealthy and loved....but boy there is no time. Often, many of us cut corners in the self-care department and spend more time in social and monetary pursuits.   

We want so much from life, but some things cannot be compromised in living it. Food for example. We know that there is so much crap out there. And as my teacher Dr Kim Le says, you eat the energy of those who prepare the food for you... so as far as possible make your own food. 

I am crazy busy too daily. But as a raw foodist who has worked out a routine and eat very simply, it becomes a little more manageable. 

Try these tips and see if it works for you too:

1) Stock up on seeds and nuts and dehydrate a monthly stash. Make a nut mix with sultanas or other tangy yummy things like cranberries, mulberries or golden berries. Place them everywhere. In your bag, your car, your office... Make nut butters.

2) Do weekly shopping for greens. Wash and spin dry and pack in portions for daily use. Some people freeze their greens. That diminishes the vitamins but they are still superior food choices as compared to any cooked dish out there. 

3) Cut and freeze your fruits for smoothie making. Buy, ripen, chop and freeze. 

4) Stock up and lay out your superfoods that could go into your smoothies. Chia, maca, green powder, lucuma, cacao, miso (no mistake!), kimchi (no kidding!), brewer's yeast, nut powders, flaxseeds etc. Having them at hand makes you a powerful meal in a drink. Not some insipid green liquid. 

5) Have a repertoire of raw food snacks that you can make beforehand - cookies, crackers, breads, ice-creams...go for a class. It is really worth it to learn. 

6) Go mono fruits for lunch sometimes, know it is GOOD for you and easy on the digestion. 

7) Stash up on good quality fats. Coconut oil, walnut oil, avocado oil, flaxseed oil. Add them to all your meals - breakfast in smoothies, in salads, in soups. 

8) Have a really trusty and powerful high speed blender. When you are in a hurry, just blend it. Period. 

9) Have a repertoire of savoury soups too. You can make them warm with hot water for those soothing evenings. And boy are they comforting. Plus a couple of power crackers and you are done. 

10) Stash up on seaweed. They are greens too! And portable and lightweight. Eat them with avocadoes or nut butters and salt. They are great nutritional additions. 

11) When you are out with friends, go buy fruits and eat your dried nuts and seeds with them. 

12) Get a good water system. Many toxins come from the piped water into our homes. Boiling worsens the toxicity. 

13) If you are living in the tropics like me... eat durians for dinner. They really are the perfect food.  If you don't live in the tropics, you've gotta move here.

All in all, the keywords are ROUTINIZE, SIMPLIFY, BE PREPARED, LOVE YOURSELF. You cannot do too much of any of these ;-)

Perfect Nut Butters

It is GREAT being a part of a multi-cultural society. It makes us cultural amphibians and gives us access to the wisdoms of the different races.

One example is my recent search for the best way to make fine nut butters. My super powered blender does quite well for oily nuts such as macadamia and pine, but for drier nuts like sunflower, almonds and sesame, I would need to use another carrier oil to coax the blade to run smoothly. These nut butters are generally chunkier than store bought versions too. Those of us with blenders without the stirrers might find this work even more difficult. My blenders are a vitamix and a cheap commercial blender with stirrers which are very good for performing this task already...but the result is nowhere near the runny refinement of my stone-mill.

I remember my childhood days when I watched the neighbours in the kampung grind down rice between two giant granite mortars. I searched the net for modern day equivalents and found this thing called the melanger (about $700 USD) which looks suspiciously like the wet-stone grinders that our Indian friends use for grinding down wet rice for thosai and idli. So, I scooted to little India and got one of those motorised wet-grinders and brought it home ($200) with excitement and trepidation. ("Grind nuts? Noooo, we don't use it like that..." the store-keeper at Karthika exclaimed.)

The first nuts I used is the oily macadamia - it jammed the grinder big time. I took out all the nuts, ran them through the food processor and then trickled them into the stone grinder - I had to wait for quite some time, but after twenty minutes or so, the result was a dream ;-).

I tried hulled sesame next - dry at first but with patience, but glistening smoothness at the end. Then the pumpkin seeds...and then mixtures like black sesame and macadamia, pumpkin and hulled sesame etc....all perfect as perfect can be. These are really better than store bought - I can make these with sprouted nuts and seeds that are free from enzyme inhibitors and oxalates....;-)

Woohoo....wonderful to be in potpourri Singapore.

Pumpkin seed butter