Eating in the Rawniverse

January always has me making plans for improving myself, making resolutions and basically planning out the year to come and what I hope to accomplish.  One of the biggest plans for this year is to get healthier than I already am and also to simplify my current lifestyle and to lose a preoccupation with food.  So with this in mind I have been trying out recipes from Ani Phyo's Raw Food Essentials.

Now I have read many books on this concept of a raw food diet, and tried a few recipes from other cookbooks, and then given up because I live in Northern British Columbia just on the other side of the Coast Mountains.  It's cold, and there is a lot of precipitation all year long which just seeps into my bones and has me shivering most of the time.  There are only a few short weeks when I do not feel cold and even then the sunny, warm days are rare.  Eating cold, raw food does not appeal to me at all, even though I know that I would thrive on it.   So I found Ani's book refreshing in her attitudes towards eating a small portion of cooked foods when living in a colder climate.  I like this kind of flexibility.   I found the  tip for leaving   my raw dishes out on the counter to get to room temperature a very useful one which has enabled me to eat a mostly raw diet this month, without getting chilled.  I think that this could work for me.  It has always bothered me during the coldest months that my consumption of raw foods dwindled to nil, and that after a while I would feel lack lustre, lethargic, and heavy.  By the time March rolls around I feel really unhealthy, with absolutely no energy to take up an exercise routine (because, inevitably the urge to exercise dwindles along with everything else but my waistline).

I tried to sample something from each chapter in the book (except the desserts),and I liked everything that I tried.  The recipes are simple, I liked the Rawnola (my combination was apricots, coconut and pecans) and the Green Smoothie.  The Tomato Chili with Taco Nut Meat was very good (and was also great made into the Taco Salad).  There are great suggestions here for experimentation.  What I think I liked the best was the ease of the recipes, and not the demand for expensive equipment with which to make the food in.  That always stopped me cold with other books.

Best of all was how I felt after eating this food.  Light, energetic and nourished.  I wasn't starving  an hour later, and I wasn't cold.   I like this book and would like to look at her other ones.