Raw Food Tuesday

Each month, I do a one-day raw food cleanse. It's kind of a quick detox from processed crap, coffee, and alcohol, and it's also a way for me to experiment with raw recipes. I usually do my cleanse on the first Monday of each month, but because I didn't realize flax crackers take eons to make in the dehydrator, I had to push it back one day this month.

For breakfast, I had a Purple Smoothie:


It's made with 1/4 cup hemp seed, 1 cup water, 2 tsp. agave nectar (not raw ... I can't find the raw kind around here), 1 frozen banana, 3-4 frozen strawberries, a handful of frozen blackberries, and 1/4 cup raw oats. Tasty, cute (cuz it's purple), and it kept me full until around 11 a.m.

At 11-ish, I snacked on celery sticks. Then at lunch, I had a Raw Sunny Burger with Baby Spinach and Tomato Slices sprinkled with Parma (raw Parmesan that my dad ordered from Cosmos Vegan Shoppe):


I adapted this from a recipe in an old vintage vegan cookbook called The Cookbook for People Who Love Animals by Michael Klaper. My mom's friend found it recently at a thrift store in a tiny Arkansas town. Totally lucky find!

Anyway, I think the book was intended for hippie commune use cause all the recipes make a crapload. The Sunny Burger recipe made 40 BURGERS! Using the ingredient list as a guide, I cut the recipe down like a million times to make 2 patties. And I changed some ingredients around based on availability.

Raw Sunny Burgers
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1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1 carrot, grated
1/2 beet, grated
1 stick celery, chopped
Tahini
Nutritional Yeast
Sesame Seeds
Soy Sauce (also not raw, but if you can find Namo Shoyu, buy it!)

Grind the veggies and seeds in a food processor. Add a splash of soy sauce and enough tahini to make the mixture pasty but not liquid-y. Blend again. Add 1/4 cup or so of nooch and blend again. Shape mixture into two patties and roll in sesame seeds. Note: If mixture is too liquid-y to shape into patties, add more nooch. If too hard, add more tahini.

Of course, I was actually starving again by 2 p.m., so I snacked on more celery at my desk. Before hitting up my boxing class at the gym at 5:30 p.m., I munched on a Pistachio Larabar. Unfortunately, I got a little dizzy-headed in my gym class even though I'd been snacking all day. Has anyone else had this problem when eating raw and doing extreme physical activity?

I rushed home after the gym because I was famished. I tore into this plate of Curried Carrot Raisin Salad, Crudite with Satay Sauce, and Jalapeno Flax Crackers:


The carrot salad is pretty simple — 3 carrots, one handful of raisins, 1 tablespoon safflower oil, a squirt of agave nectar, a good sprinklin' of curry powder, and a pinch of Himalayan salt.


For the Satay Sauce, I referred to a recipe in Alive in 5: Raw Gourmet Meals in Five Minutes by Angela Elliot. It's basically miso, nooch, agave, and tahini. Good stuff for veggie dippin'.


Finally, the highlight of my entire day were these crunchy flax crackers. I can't stay out of them! But that's partly because I can't stay full on this crazy dietary regimen.


Anyway, I borrowed my parents' dehydrator a few weeks ago to make these. Here's the recipe

Jalapeno Flax Crackers
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1 cup flax seed
8 sundried tomatoes
1 jalapeno, minced
1/2 red bell pepper, chopped
1/4 cup red onion, chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
Handful of fresh basil
2 tsp. fresh oregano
Salt to taste

Soak the flax seed and tomatoes overnight. The next day, drain excess water off flax and tomato mixture. Then add veggies and herbs. Process mixture in the food processor for a moment, just until veggies are well-minced. Make sure most flax seeds stay intact. Spoon onto small squares cut from a waxed paper roll and place on dehydrator sheets. Dehydrate for 12 hours or until crisp. Carefully peel crackers from wax paper.

Note: Some of the paper stuck to the bottom of a few of these, but I ate it anyway...probably not the best thing to do, but you can't taste it. I hear they make special dehydrator non-stick sheets though.