The Easiest Recipe in the World
Just starting with the easiest raw food in the entire world. Not-peanut butter cookies. We make them all the time, because they take about 5 minutes.
Put the following in a food processor (S-Blade, of course!):
1/2 Cup Raw Almond Butter
1/4 Cup Agave Nectar
1/2 Tsp Vanilla (you can add a little more if you want)
Dash of Sea Salt
If you wish, add a table spoon of raw cacao powder.
Process it until it’s smooth and doughy. Form balls, flatten into cookies. Roll in about 1/2 cup of ground almonds (you can grind them in the food processor, or if your magic bullet blender isn’t broken like mine that works well).
Put them on a plate in the freezer. Freeze them as long as you want, or just eat them. The more frozen they are (and stay) the more consistency of a cookie. But we like to eat them as a doughy mess, too.
This recipe is orginally from from Raw Food Made Easy by Jennifer Cornbleet.
Adventures in Raw
Less than a year ago, I hated vegans. Wait, scratch that, I hated going out to eat with friends who were vegan. I thought they were annoying and ridiculous; I remember one night after a Patti Smith concert in Central Park, running around upper Manhattan in the middle of the night trying to find somewhere (anywhere) Tiffany could eat. We settled on a Chinese place that was still open, but we had to verify what they cooked everything in and that the oils had never mixed with things that touched things that had thought of animals. Wah, wah, wah.
As it turns out, thought, I am actually quite prone to taking ridiculous dares. Competitive? Maybe. My friend Kat had been Raw Vegan on and off for a few months when she bet me I wouldn’t be able to last one week. A week was nothing!
A week, as it happens, is not nothing. It was brutal. I went a week without any cooked or processed foods. No sugar, no cheeseburgers, NO COFFEE. Things got really, really ugly. My 7th graders still tremble in fear when I ask them if they ever want to go through that again. One likes to dive under a desk. I was mean, cranky, and just a generally awful person to be aroud. The first four or five days were akin to having my fingernails plucked out slowly, one at a time.
But around day five, something crazy happened. I felt ok. I didn’t want to kill anyone. And then, even crazier, I started to feel better. Better than better. I felt good. I realized that I hadn’t felt good in years: I’ve always been on crash diets, up and down with my weight, stressed out, overworked, a few coffees a day, a pitcher of beer every once in a while. Maybe we were on to something…
This was the first week of September. It is now mid-January. That makes four and a half months. This isn’t to say I haven’t cheated; I’ve had my moments. But, going not-raw, however briefly, makes me feel gross and I wander back to Raw. I am not entirely Raw Vegan (I have had sashimi a few times, and honey is necessary to my diet). I’ve been reading up on Rawness, and there are goods and bads to it. But, as far as I can tell, there are enough goods to justify it. I have lost about 25 pounds (at between a pound and two a week, that is healthy and normal!) and I feel 100 times better. I have more energy, I find myself being nicer… Life is good.
I remember my prejudice against Vegan people and try not to be annoying when I eat out; I still am. But I still love eating out. I find that I can eat vicariously through other people. Some people think that’s weird, others just accept it as a new quirk of mine and oblige when I ask them to, say, try a bite of every dessert at a potluck (thanks Katie!)
Kat and I have been trying to figure out how to organize the recipes we like, and remember our Raw Food Adventures. Michele has recently decided that maybe she wants to try raw. Being across the country (I’m in Phoenix, she’s in New York) she suggested that maybe I should start emailing her recipes. Then she thought, maybe a blog. She likes Tumblr. So here I am! I will post some of our favorite recipes from the past few months, and then I’ll try to update with new things we try, new places we eat, and all that. You know the drill.
