The Raw Project

The journey of adopting a raw vegan diet.

Posts Tagged ‘sprouts’

Sprouts, Sneaky Quinoa & New Setup

July 28th, 2010

I woke up this morning thinking it was Thursday – wishful thinking. It’s been such a turbulent week already that it feels like it should be closer to the end! Another nice surprise was a nasty smell in the kitchen coming from a watermelon I bought over the weekend and it just started rotting and oozing all over the counter, down the cabinets and all over the floor last night. And watermelon ooze is really sticky as well as stinky. Good times cleaning it up and just a wonderful start to manically busy day.

My eats weren’t too exciting yesterday, I’ve been working on cleaning up and reconfiguring my home office for my new laptop this week and thankfully it’s almost done. I packed a meal smoothie in a Kleen Kanteen bottle for lunch so I could run to Best Buy on my lunch break in search of a new mouse and keyboard. My old laptop had a 15” screen and I’ve been using that size laptop for my primary personal computer for the last 5 years. My new laptop is smaller with a 14” screen, great for lighter traveling and using in coach airline seating, but the smaller screen and keyboard can be a bit cramped for full-time home use. So I’ve added a huge external monitor and mouse and keyboard for home use. I’m loving the new 23” widescreen LCD and can’t believe how cheap huge monitors are today! I remember paying over $400 for a 17” CRT not that long ago. But unlike monitors, decent cheap keyboards and mice aren’t easy to find and my trip to Best Buy was a little frustrating. I intended to just buy basic wired ones, but the few cheap options were ugly crap while the nice wired keyboards started at $40 and went up including a super gaming keyboard for $160! I ended up with this:

Wasn’t planning to go wireless because I didn’t want the battery maintenance, but that was the best combo for cheap oddly. Oh well, less cable clutter on my desk is a good thing. And while I was at Best Buy, I picked up Starcraft II for hubby which he had to try out on my new set up.

So that’s my excuse for not posting yesterday and I’m sticking to it. Actually I was fried after a stressful day at work and setting up new toys at home, so I went for a run and took a long bath.

There was free Chinese food in our break room yesterday for lunch that smelled awful and offered nothing for a vegan, it was leftovers from a training session that the guys flocked to. While I happily skipped the opportunity for free stale leftovers, I scored pretty well surfing the free farmer’s market at work.

A lot of co-workers bring in excess from their gardens to share and I try to make the rounds looking for handouts regularly and nabbed a funny cucumber and a bunch of plums yesterday – my type of free food!

For dinner last night I was craving my favorite pre-run food – quinoa, and created a loaded marinara sauce in the Vita-Mix to mix into the cooked quinoa as an experiment.

I also shredded more of the vegan nacho cheese alternative I impulse-bought from Whole Foods and stir-fried with cauliflower for a not-so-raw vegan dinner.

The quinoa came out great considering there was pureed tomatoes, carrots and broccoli in the sauce that didn’t change the texture, I could be on to a genius way to cram more easily digest-able veggies into meals. It was an interesting and tasty quinoa twist.

This mornings smoothie was a beautiful work of art to me, it looked better than anything from Jamba Juice!

In it was Trader Joe’s frozen Very Cherry Berry Mix, red cabbage, a carrot, an orange, Purely Chia white chia seed powder, SunWarrior Chocolate Protien Powder and stevia. It was a very filling breakfast that held me nicely until lunch 4.5 hours later. Good thing because those were very busy hours at work.

But I was feeling a bit fried at lunch and threw together a simple salad of spinach, red cabbage, red pepper, tomato and sunflower seeds dressed with balsamic vinegar and a small cup of re-heated lentil stew.

But dinner was a bit more exciting because my first batch of sprouts are ready to eat!

And I couldn’t wait to use them on a salad.

The salad is kale, sauerkraut, cherry tomatoes, yellow pepper, cucumber and carrots dressed with Kristen Suzanne’s Curry Hemp Sauce, topped with the sprouts with two small slices of sunflower seed bread to complete the meal salad. I’m proud of this salad for multiple reasons – the kale and tomatoes are from my garden, the cucumber is from a co-worker’s garden and the sprouts are home grown which is very cool to me since gardening was never a strong skill of mine before switching to a high-raw diet.

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Tags: sprouts

Lentil Soup & Sprouting

July 26th, 2010

Hello, how’s your Monday going? Mine consisted of a busy, yet dragging day at work, getting my first batch of kefir water brewing and moving along on my data/desk reorganization project while moving into a new laptop. I’ve also been playing with another fun thing hubby got me for my birthday, an Eye-Fi memory card for my digital camera. It’s a memory card with a built in wireless adapter that transfers pictures from your camera to computer automatically. It does require initial programming and a software client running on your computer, but thumbs up so far. It’s nice being able to leave my camera in the kitchen and find the photos already transferred. Or just walk in the house from a day of activities and simply turn the camera on to transfer pics to neatly organized dated folders.

For lunch I mixed leftovers from last night’s dinner – sauerkraut salad with baked curry tempeh chunks mixed in, the curry honey flavor on the tempeh went well with the mild sesame dressing on the salad.

Lately I’ve been focusing on eating healthy and cheaply, cutting costs and utilizing what I have where I can growing/producing more at home. For my birthday I got a simple jar sprouting kit with a variety of sprout seeds and started the first batch Saturday.

It’s a wild mix of dried lentils, chickpeas and other beans that I’d never think to sprout, very cool and it’s only been a day and a half. Supposedly this batch will be ready in two more days, can’t wait. I’m excited about this because sprouts aren’t cheap and I typically go through at least one container a week, so this will save me $5 a week or so. But it’s also a fun science experiment to keep and watch in the center of the kitchen. I have a more sophisticated multi-level sprout grower that uses special clothes, but I haven’t been using it because it’s kind of a pain to wash and the sprouts can’t get that big in the levels. Plus it’ll grow fuzz if I’m not on top of it. The jar allows me to grow smaller batches faster and being able to easily flush and rinse the sprouts easily multiple times a day.

Anyway, this is a great article about a dedicated raw foodie in the south.

But she cautions: “I don’t think people should be too fanatic. I think as soon as you become too stressed about what to eat and what not to eat, you lose that purpose of healing yourself and feeling better.”

So true and something anyone who’s suffered with disordered eating probably knows all too well. When first getting into raw, I struggled with this a bit, trying to maintain a high-percentage raw because it was healthy and probably voiding the benefits with the added stress. While I try to keep a high raw diet now, I have no problem giving into a cooked meal or an occasional non-raw treat. Tonight was one of those nights, I was craving something hot and rich. Currently I have a massive jar full of dried red lentils and a garden thriving in yellow squash and broccoli greens and decided to vegan-ize and add to a lentil recipe.

Sweet Red Lentil Stew

3 tbsp. olive oil
1 yellow onion, chopped
1 cup dry red lentils
1 tbsp. salt
4 cups water
1 bunch broccoli greens, kale and/or collard greens
2 medium yellow squashes, sliced
1 tbsp. cumin
1 tsp. cinnamon
2 cloves garlic, minced

Place 1 tbsp. olive oil, onion and salt in saucepan over medium heat and cook until onions are soft. Add lentils and water, then bring to boil and simmer for about 15 minutes.

Heat rest of oil in skillet over high heat, add yellow squash and greens and cook for about 10 minutes. Then pour into lentil mixture and add cumin, cinnamon and garlic. Simmer for another 10 minutes and enjoy.

Cinnamon and cumin are an unexpected, but fun combo of savory with a sweet finish and added a rich, smooth, comforting taste to the lentils. I’ll be frequently making this in the winter.