When All You Eat...

When all you eat (and drink) are veggies, apparently all your kids will want is veggies, too.

Eating raw has been different this time around. The first time was exciting, like an experiment. We kept it quiet from our beloved carnivore/omnivore friends and had an adrenaline rush that kept us digging for more information. This time around, Whole Foods has a raw section! And it has actually affected my excitement, I think. It now feels a little more common and well, common just isn't as exciting as uncommon. I am thrilled that the raw lifestyle is growing in popularity and we found some great treats in the raw section, but there was something special about those first trips to the farmer's market where I just grabbed everything green and made my husband eat it. We had lots of "fun."

But where the novelty may have worn off, there's nothing quite as adventurous as living with India. She's given this detox quite the motivation I needed, not to mention that I can't eat any of her same food allergens since I'm nursing.

And it turns out that her food allergies/sensitivities were a kind of answer to my prayer. I kept asking the Lord for a kick in the pants, so to speak, to eat better. But like I said before, too often settled for the goat cheese quesadilla. Nothing's wrong per se with a goat cheese quesadilla, but it's not very nutrient rich. And by the time dinner came around, even serving it with a salad still left me on the short end of the vitamin stick.

But when you take out eggs, wheat (all kinds), corn and a variety of "easy" fruits like strawberries and watermelon, well, you're left with veggies. Lots and lots of veggies. I think food choices have actually become easier now that we're raw vegans again. And our delightful girl who always preferred bread to carrots and pita to hummus, now prefers raw kale (mostly she gnaws on the stem or swirls it around in her mouth until she's licked all the dressing off, ha ha), steamed carrots and raw nut cheese. And this girl loves to juice! If juicers weren't so pricey, I'd recommend buying them as toys.

One of the easiest ways I've found to make dinner is simply steam whatever veggies we eat raw. So tonight we had a romaine and spinach salad with sesame oil and rice wine vinegar served with nut cheese (this stuff has always been popular with non-raw fooders, too!) on cabbage with broccoli, carrots, bell pepper and sprouts. So I threw the broccoli and carrots into the steamer with some added potato and voila! Combined with some garbanzo beans, Dia was like, "Bread? Bread who?" Yippee skippee!

Plus, Rory and I are chock-full of greens. Can you say "Win-win"?

And this is the video where I got my raw nut cheese (she calls it pate, I call it cheese or spread) recipe. It's still our favorite. And yes, we did buy and still use the tiffin. I highly recommend them! We love ours.