[Scotty H]Spending time away from home with a little cooking

Scotty H has posted a new item, 'Spending time away from home with a little cooking'

My last seven days have been spent away from home.

My Mother needs full time care and I am the back up caregiver for my older sister who lives with her full time. To give my sister some much deserved time off I have spent the last 7 days living with my Mom who lives 50 miles away from me. She is not a raw foodist. She doesn’t have much of an opinion about the food she eats, so it’s pretty easy to feed her the things that I like and not get any complaints. For me, it was a challenge to try to include items that #1 were available and #2 that she could manage. Whole nuts and seeds are out of the question for her abilities. Salads are a push. And without a good blender I could not include as much of these items into our diet as I would like. So I modified things as much as I could to keep her system (and mine) from going into shock and or detox.

For breakfast we always had fresh fruit. Without a blender I couldn’t make smoothies, so whole fresh fruit was the basis. She gets yogurt, (Yoplait is NOT yogurt) one of the brands we purchase for her is Brown Cow.

Luckily we both love seafood. And since her home is in Eureka California, there is an abundance of great seafood available. Over 7 days we had Halibut, shrimp salads, shrimp sandwiches, salmon, fish tacos, tuna sandwiches and tuna salads. Everything was always complimented with fresh vegetables and very little if any bread. For the salads I just had to modify the size of the spinach and lettuce. By cutting everything into 1/2 inch bite size pieces Mom was able to pick them up with a spoon. Fresh green beans were easy to poke with a fork. Mashed potatoes were easy to eat with a spoon.

I had planned on doing more raw items, but again, not having a blender, I had to make do with items that were easy to eat and readily available. I left feeling great, although I am excited about adding nuts and seeds back into my own diet.

I didn’t die eating more cooked food. I still tried to eat at least 70% raw, the one item that was cooked was the fish. I tried to eat most of my vegetables raw or lightly steamed. I don’t wish to continue eating that much cooked food in the future, mostly because of all the extra work. If you think raw is hard, you’ve never tried it. Cooking is WAY more work!

For the most part I would like to share with all the “newbies” trying raw that you don’t have to be a fanatic. Yes, we were when we started. Look at our blog title! We have learned over the year and a half that we have been doing this that it is almost impossible to keep 100% raw (or even 90%). Adding small amounts of cooked items can actually be good for you. We do include organic brown rice in our diet very often now and we are still feeling and looking great. Everybody…. and, every body is different. But none of us require preservatives, additives or chemicals in our food, we’re not chemically deficient! That’s the important issue to keep in mind. We need to get back to the basics, making our food at home from fresh grains and produce. We know everyone lives in a house with a kitchen (hopefully) so we would like you to use it. That’s what our food classes are about. We are not trying to make everyone go raw vegan. Although we always base our recipes on those premises. We demonstrate raw and vegan recipes to show how easy and tasty those dishes can be. We recommend that you add more fresh uncooked items into your diet. If you think about it, everything is really a salad…so add a fun raw dish to any plate and you shouldn’t get any complaints.

You may view the latest post at
http://blog.wewantraw.com/2010/10/21/spending-time-away-from-home.aspx?ref=rss