The Most Amazing Meal Yet And A Change Of Plans

So here is what I had for supper the other night

This is a spicy pizza on a flax cracker crust with nacho cheese sauce, spicy mango tomato salsa and sliced avocadoes. It may not look like much but I have to be honest with you, this was the best savory dish that I have made to date. The flavor reminded me of something SAD that I used to eat and love. Only I couldn't remember what it was. I only have a memory of eating something that tasted similar. No matter how much I taxed my brain I could not figure out what the flavor was reminding me of. This pizza was insanely good. The salsa was very spicy. It had quite the heat kick, but the sweetness of the mango and the creaminess of the avocado really played off the spiciness of the peppers that I put into it. It was a masterpiece with layers of flavor, amazingly delicious. So delicious in fact that I really overdid it. I ate way too much of it and I kept on eating it even when I was no longer hungry because it tasted so incredible. I felt pretty stuffed at the end of the day. Which leads me to my other topic:

It is time to change things up a bit. I have been overdoing it in the food department and I am not losing any weight. I have been stuck at the same weight for over three weeks now and I keep losing and gaining the same two pounds. So from now on through the summer I will be eating mostly fruits and green smoothies. I am going to eat much more simply based on the 80/10/10 principle of limited fat and lots of greens. It is the perfect time of year to really lighten up and clean up my eating habits. I am not saying that gourmet raw food is bad. It isn't bad at all. In fact the problem is that it is too good! And when I continue to eat and eat a food when I am no longer hungry whether it be a SAD food or raw food, that is bad for me.

I am going to try to post what I eat as well. This may help. Oh and try not to eat after 7 at night. And EXERCISE! I really need to try to squeeze that in somewhere.

Little Angel is calling so that is all for now.

I love raw!

Yum-O-Liscious

I wanted to share with you some of the amazing food that I have been eating recently.

First up is my take on Karyns pistachio basil pesto pasta. I liked my version better. This was super yummy and really fast and easy to make.
Here is a delicious pizza that I made using a flax seed dough, some of Karyns seed cheese, gaucamole and a tomato mango salsa that I made. It was incredible. Awesome. Absolutely fantastic!!

Next we have an incredible sandwich I made using Karyns bread and seed cheese, some ripe tomatoes and avocadoes and some spinach. The consistency of the bread was very soft and it was super yummy, but it did not hold up that great and sort of fell apart. Still it was really good and I did enjoy it.

Next up, Kayrns tamales from the restaurant. These came with a mango salsa on the side that was really good and inspired me to make my own version of mango salsa as well.

The food has been so yummy and I have really been enjoying it. I do not think that I am losing weight right now though and since that is the goal I think I need to curb the gourmet food kick that I have been on. It is wonderful to me that I can eat these amazing creations and maintain my weight. But for now I need to lose. So I am going to go back to the basics of fruit, juices, green smoothies and salads with treats as just that, treats. All of this food has been amazing and I really credit the awesome raw food with helping me to stay on track while hubby was gone on his trip. I still have a few more food pictures to post later. Enjoy!

I love raw!!

I Am Very Proud Of Myself

Things are going really well here for me food wise. I am really proud of how well I have been able to deal with the recent stress around here without abusing food. I also realize that Hubby went away on a trip and it was the first time, EVER, that I have not had a binge. And it wasn't even difficult. I never even thought about it. I just did it. This is a huge victory for me. So huge! Going to those raw food restaurants really made a big difference to me. It impacted me in such a big way. Instead of focusing on food and eating poorly I made delicious raw creations and took the children on a hike. It was wonderful. I am looking forward to our next hike. It was really fun!

The puppy seems to be getting better. We went to the vet and they took (way too many) x-rays and after being trapped at the vets office for 2 1/2 hours with seven children determined that they had no idea what was wrong with her. Thanks. But they had no problem charging me a ridiculous amount of money to tell me that! They ended up giving me steroids for her and antibiotics. I also need to keep her still and not let her move around much and just rest. So she is in a small crate for now. I need to bring her back in on Friday to get looked at. The good news is that she seems to be getting better. She was wagging her tail yesterday and this morning she was walking better on her back legs. I am cautiously optimistic about things. I really hope she gets better. She is such a beautiful puppy.

OK, food. I love food. I have been making some incredible food lately. Yummy broccoli and cauliflower in the dehydrator and the other day I made flax cracker pizza/bruschetta things with a mango salsa that were ridiculously good. I have more crusts in the dehydrator right now and cashews soaking for cheese so I am making some more for lunch. I will get pictures to post. I also still need to post pictures of the other food we got at Karyns. I will get to that. Promise!

I love raw!!!

Learning To Cope Without Using Food

Today has been stressful so far and it is only 10 AM. I woke up this morning to very loud little boys. When I got up to ask them to be quiet (at 6:14 AM) the baby woke up. No more sleeping for me. Then I went to go check on our puppy who is 4 weeks old and her back legs are wrong. She is not putting any weight on them and sort of dragging herself around. Lovely. This is the only surviving puppy from the litter that we lost when our dog Jetta had a flipped uterus and needed to get a C-section and had to get spayed. One puppy. And now she is having difficulty. I am thinking that she has gotten too much protein recently and this is causing problems. I hope it is as simple as that and nothing serious. I am going to lower her protein levels and watch her for a couple days to see how she does. I am just very overwhelmed about this. And worried. I am feeling very stressed out about the dogs. Very torn. I love them, I love having them and breeding the Danes. I would miss them terribly if I did not have them. But sometimes it is so hard. We have had a lot of problems lately and sometimes I wonder if it is really worth the hassle. I don't know.

So anyways, dealing with stress and not overeating, or eating the wrong types of food. It is a challenge because I have always been an emotional eater. But I am not eating my stress. I have been good and I am glad for that. I have noticed that I tend to feel things more though when I am not stuffing my feelings with food and numbing all of my emotions. This isn't always a good thing. I need to find other, more constructive ways to deal with stress. I have found that cleaning helps. My house has never been so clean, lol! And sometimes I think that every girl just needs a good cry. I am due for one. I really am. I fear that I am not explaining things very good here, but simply put I am stressed and overwhelmed, but happily not eating my feelings away and stuffing my stress levels with comfort food. For this I am grateful.

Another victory for me. Here it is. Hubby left early Friday morning to visit his brother and go fishing. He will be home late tonight. Normally when he goes away it is my time to eat junk food and lots of it. We get movies from the library, pop popcorn, make pizza and buy chips and chocolate candy bars. We will make homemade donuts, fried doughboys, indian tacos, anything fried, doughy and delicious. I have done this many times. Many, many times my "diet" has failed when Hubby has left time and I have gone nuts with the food while he was away. But NOT THIS TIME! This time I have been happily making delicious raw food creations such as flax cracker bruschettas and nachos and pina coladas. Mmmmm. And it hasn't even been difficult. It hasn't been a struggle for me to not go out and binge on foods that are bad for me while he is gone. It is like a whole new me. I even took all the children out for a nice 2 mile hike and we had a great time. Such a Victory!

Little Angel just woke up and needs some snuggles. I am off to go buy some special food for the puppy.

I am not eating out of stress.

I love raw.

More on Karyns

Hello, Sorry for the absentness of posts. Things have been very hectic since we got back and I have been feeling very inspired to try new foods and to create some yummy recipes. But before I get into all that I want to talk a bit more about Karyns and the food that we got there.

While we were in Chicago we had planned on going to Borrowed Earth Cafe in Downers Grove. But unfortunately they were not open on Sundays and did not open on Mondays until 4 PM. Originally we had planned on going to Borrowed Earth for an early supper on Monday but as the day wore on I was getting more and more tired. Not tired like gee I need a nap, but weary. And I knew that I had a HUGE 6 hour drive home. With that in mind we decided to order take out from Karyns to eat on the raod for supper and get an early start on the drive home.

So for our to go items we ordered Nachos, Bruschetta, Spaghetti with Pistachio Pesto, Some seafood wrap things whose name escapes me at the moment, and the Tamales. I had already tried the Tamales, and perhaps I should have ordered something else to try but I loved them so much. They were my favorite food from Sundays brunch and I really wanted to have them again. I also bought some things from the store. I picked up some chia seeds, some cocao butter, some agave, a couple peices of Karyns rye bread. some nut cheese spread and some Mayan truffles. More on that later. The bread was so good, a really wonderful consistency and texture. I made a sandwich out of it a couple days later. I took a picture and I will post it later. Hubby is on a fishing trip and he has my camera!

A couple of things about the to go items. First the portion sizes seemed small to me. We had ordered the nachos at the restaurant while we were there and then we ordered some to go as well because we loved them so much. The nachoes to go were significantly smaller than the at the restaurant portion and it was missing a few things. At the restaurant the nachoes were served with spicy gaucamole and sour cream. The to go portion did not have these with them and I was pretty dissapointed about that. Also when I got home and checked my receipt I saw that the store had charged me twice for one item. When I called them they were really friendly about it but seemed as though they would not refund me. They initially wanted to give me an in store credit until I explained that I lived 6 hours away. I did get a refund for the overcharged amount but it took three days and several phone calls before it happened. So, check your receipts and eat in if you can :)

Since I have been back I have been very creative in the kitchen. It is also in my mind how much I would love to open my own raw food cafes. A dream. It would be awesome though.

More later. I need to get all the littles ready for church now.

I love raw.

A Trip To Chicago - Two Raw Restaurant Reviews with Lots of Pictures

On Sunday we went to Chicago to sample some raw food restaurants. We have been looking forward to this trip for a long time. There are no raw food restaurants around where we live so we were very exicted. The first place we went to was Karyns. On Sundays they have a raw food buffet brunch from 11:30-3:30. It is an all you can eat sampler of a wide variety of items. Since I rarely get to go to these types of places I was very excited to get to try so many different things. Here is what we started with:

On the left hand side is corn chowder. This was sweet and delicious. Next to that are some flax crackers, both sweet and savory. I enjoyed the savory ones a lot. They had really good flavor. The sweet ones tasted good too, but I did not like them as much. The balls on the plate were seed cheese, beet cheese, and hummus. I really liked the hummus and the seed cheese but didn't care for the beet cheese. Also on the plate was a very spicy and very delicious gaucamole and some amazing corn chips. These chips were INSANE! I could not believe how good they were. They really blew us away. And last but not least there are two pieces of bread on the bottom of the plate that were so good. The flavor was spot on and the texture was just perfect, soft and chewy and just delicious! Out of all the appetizers my favorites were the chips and gaucamole and the breads and cheese dip. I could have sat there and eaten those all day. But it was time to move on to the main courses:

Top left are raviolis. I don't know what the "pasta" was made of. Maybe jicama? I don't know. They were good though. Next to that is a bowl of chili. I did not like the chili. It was crunchy. Next to the chili was the lasagna. I also did not care for the lasagna which is strange for me since I have made and love raw lasagna. It is possible that the other foods were so amazingly delicious that the lasagna paled in comparison. Possibly if I had only had the lasagna I would have liked it. But it was one of the last things I tasted and it didn't blow me away. Underneath the lasagna is something that did blow me away however, the burger. Oh my goodness!! This was incredible. So amazingly good I could not believe how delicious it was. To the left of the burger of yumminess was a sweet potato pancake with homemade ketchup sauce. This was different. It had an unusual flavor that was pretty good. I liked it. To the left of the pancake thing was my other favortie dish, the tamales. Oh these were sooooo good. Words can not express how amazing these were. They were meaty and delectable and totally satisfying. Above the tamale, that corn looking stuff, that was some sort of a dressing that I didn't like because it was very heavy on the cilantro and I don't care for a lot of cilantro. Underneath the tamale is the nut loaf which I was surprised to not hate. I didn't love it. It was ok. But it was nice to not hate it. I have never liked any nut loaf as most are made with walnuts and I don't like walnuts in savory dishes. But this wasn't bad. It had mushrooms in it and had a very mild flavor. Next to the nut loaf was the empanadas. These were so good. The filling was delicious, the bready consistency of the wrap was unbeleivable. I don't know how they make those bready wraps but they are so wonderful. Next to that and directly under the burger was the sage burrito, which was not like a burrito at all but was non the less incredibly yummy. It had some cabbage on the bottom of it. On the bottom right of the plate was a samosa which I didn't like that much and on the other side of the plate was the pizza which was really yummy. Phew! I think I got it all. The food was delish. The really neat thing about Karyns food was the complexity of the flavors. They were so deep. There were layers of flavors that made you think, hmm, wow, what is that? That is so good! Really and truly amazing stuff. After our main meal it was time for dessert which we ate so fast that I didn't get a chance to take a picture but here are a few of them on the serving trays:

Cheesecake

Chocolate cheesecake. There was also strawberry cheesecake that was really yummy too, but for some reason I didn't get a picture of those. They were my favorite too. I seriously could have sat at Karyns and eaten for hours and never tiring of the food but Little Angel started to get a wee bit cranky so it was time to go. I enjoyed this meal more than words can say. It was a wonderful way to taste a wide variety of raw food which is perfect for someone who rarely gets the privilege of eating gourmet raw that is prepared by someone other than herself! I love, love, love, love, loved it!!

After walking around town for a bit and seeing some of the beautiful sites of Chicago it was time for dinner at:

I had read mixed reviews about Cousins. A lot of mixed reviews. But we decided to give it a try. We were interested in their all you can eat buffet. It sounded like a good plan. So in we went.

Little Angel waiting adorably. She was such a good baby. She was very patient as we dragged her around from place to place. Since she is still solely nursing she didn't get to enjoy any of the food. She was just along for the ride.

The all you can eat buffet looked unappetizing to say the least. It was a soggy collection of wilty looking salad items that all looked the same. So we opted to get appetizers since we read a few good reviews about those.

We ordered the trio of taco, the stuffed mushrooms and the mini pizzas. The tacos were ok. Just ok. The flavors were predictable and uninspired and the mango in the salsa was not ripe. It tasted bitter. The mushrooms were bland, very cold, hard and had too much parsley. The pizzas were good but I could have done without the olive sauce on them. I don't like olives. But the tomato sauce on the pizza was really good. The other thing on the plate was these little chip things made out of zuchini. These were the best things we ate. The flavor was very mild and they were pleasantly sweet. We didn't finish all of the food. It just wasn't that good. The words I would use to describe it would be boring, predictable, uninspired and bland. Bland seemed to be the theme. And that was too bad. I really wanted to like this place, but they could not hold a candle to the amazing food at Karyns.

We also ordered bread which had the consistency of cardboard and the flavor to match. The sauces that accompanied the bread were likewise bland and boring.

For dessert we tried the mango cheesecake. This was was strange. The texture of the cheesecake was amazing, soft and velvety. It was very creamy and smooth. But the flavor was off. It sort of tasted like coconut oil. Sort of waxy tasting like that. And the mango flavor was so subtle as to not be detactable.

One of the other complaints that I read about Cousins was that the service was slow. We did not experience this. Our waiter was very prompt and friendly. The restaurant was nice and clean. The food just wasn't that good. What was good though was the water. They have ionized water there and I couldn't seem to get enough of the stuff. Supposedly it is up to 6 times more hydrating than regular water. I don't know about that though because I was drinking a lot of it and I don't normally drink that much. So maybe I was extremely dehydrated? I doubt it. It did taste good though :)

On Monday we went back to Karyns for lunch! See how happy My Big Helper is to be back at Karyns where the food is incredible?

We decided to order an appetizer and started out with:

The NACHOS!! Mmmmmmmmm! These were incredible!! Unbelievable! Awesome and amazing!!!!!

See, we ate them all up! And yes, that is a finger mark from one of us cleaning the plate!

For lunch My Big Helper had the wild rice medley. This was yummy. The flavors were very rich and deep. I don't know what they put in this but it was very savory and delicious.

I had the Pad Thai. Nice curry flavor. This was really yummy too.

For dessert we had:

Fig and caramel crepes with a citrus sauce. Unbeleivable! I can't even think of the right words to express how good this was. It was unreal. The crepe was soft and delicate. The sauce was so good. The filling was crushed pecans and figs with an orange taste as well. The flavors were so complex. It was that layering again. I don't kow how they do it but all of their food is just amazing. It makes me want to move to Chicago, seriously, just so I can eat there once a week. It was so incredible!!

We also ordered several dishes to go that I did not get pictures of. We ordered bruscetta with tomato salsa. That was good. We also got spagetti with pistachio basil pesto. That was good too. It had a very mild flavor. I personally would have enjoyed more basil flavor in mine, but it was good. We got the tiramisu cheesecake too and ate that once we got home last night. MMMMMmmmmmmmmmmm! That was yummy! And I don't like tiramisu!! But it didn't taste like tirimisu to me. It just tasted amazing.

I still have some food from Karyns in my fridge but it has taken me hours just to get this much written down so it will have to wait for a later post. I will talk more about Karyns in my next post too. I hope you all enjoyed my food pictures. :)

I LOVE RAW!!!!!!!!!!

Fruity Business

So last night we had our company and it was really nice. We all had a very good time, had a nice visit and the children enjoyed playing with each other too. This was the first time that we have had anyone over for dinner since moving here and it was nice. It was just an overall really nice evening.

Hubby made the brisket steaks for dinner with mashed potatoes and sauteed veggies. I put a nice big salad together for everyone. The pastors wife brought rolls and two desserts to share. I had my salad and no one even card that I didn't eat everything. They even asked me about being a vegan and it was really nice. The dessert that the pastors wife brought was one of my former favorites, chocolate peanut butter squares. But I was not even tempted by them. I was very happy about that.

After our guests left I made myself one of my most favorite things. Banana ice cream with thick creamy chocolate sauce. Mmmmmm! That is one of my all time favorite raw desserts and I have been craving it all week. I have not had this dessert, or any dessert really for about three weeks. As I began making my treat I looked at my box of oranges and my mouth watered. Suddenly I wanted oranges and not my oooey gooey treat! But, I pushed ahead, ignored my craving for fruit and made my ice cream treat and guess what? I didn't enjoy it. It tasted so rich to me. Don't get me wrong, it was good. Delicious. But I would have rather had that fruit. I wanted oranges. I should have listened to my body telling me what it wanted instead of my head telling me what I thought I wanted. The dessert would have been ok if it was just the ice cream, or just some chocolate. But all together it was overpowering and too much which was really weird. I have always loved that dessert.

Right now I am dehydrating some broccoli that has had olive oil drizzled over it and has been liberally seasoned with sea salt, cumin (hubby bought me more, yay!) chili powder and onion powder. It is cold and rainy today and I want something warm and satisfying. I am going to try to make a creamy broccoli soup with the dehydrated broccoli and some cashew cream. I'll post later about how it turns out.

We are leaving early early tomorrow morning for Chicago!! I have so much to do. I need to pack, write down addresses and get everything ready. I am so excited. My next post should be in Chicago after we have eaten at our first raw restaurant. Yay!!!

I love raw!!