Eating Raw

So I thought now that I’m eating vegan anyway, I might as well try to eat as many fruit and vegetables raw or just very lightly cooked.

What I sometimes do is cut up some vegetables and stir them into pasta or couscous after I turned the heat off. I eat a fruit salad with a toast for breakfast and then maybe another one or some more toast for second breakfast/lunch.

Because it’s so fucking exhausting to get organic fresh produce in Melbourne we skipped the shopping last weekend and were eating more breads and pasta.

And of curz just a few days later I got a pretty bad stomach bug. Now, I might have gotten that from work, some guys apparently just don’t know how wash their hands after using the toilet. Wtf?! Apparently the statistics for men not washing their hands after using the toilet are pretty high. Most men are just gross! Anyways, so, not sure if someones been spreading their germs or what was going on, but I got sick!

I have been feeling so much better since I changed my diet to more fresh raw plant stuffs. It took me a while to notice the effects, about 2 months, but I generally feel much more energetic, happier and balanced. I’m also less tired and as I’ve heard lots of vegan athletes say, I recover better.

Now, of curz that’s propbably also due to some other lifestyle changes, but diet is a big part of it. Anyways, after I got sick I jumped right back onto the wagon and went to the supermarket to buy all sorts of fruits and nuts and vegetables and now I’m feeling better again!

Here is a cute link about the advantages of eating raw.

And here is a video of a 30-day raw food challenge

I didn’t know Woody Harrelson was a raw vegan.

And I’m just posting this coz it’s trashy! It’s a real laugh and kinda cool you should watch it.

Eating raw is simple!

I can’t stop staring at this guys beard and he’s got see through vegetables too, how trippy!

I like checking out peoples raw food videos or blogs, but I hate it when they try to sell you shit in every fucking video. Their books, their products, subscribe.. whatever.. it get’s annoying. Fair enough they mention it, but do they have to go on about it?! It’s seems to be kind of epidemic, but I haven’t checked out too many videos yet.

Anyways, I love watching videos, some of them are very entertaining and I love learning new things.

Beach Picnics

This is our fridge, pretty healthy right?!

I LOVE WATERMELON!

For our beach picnic last night I made the kale chips I was talking about in this post. They were nice, but I heat blasted the fuck out of them. Next time, less heat. I stuck to the recipe, but used aluminium foil instead of baking paper, that might have sped up the process a bit. I’d rather have them take longer at a lower heat.

Crunchy!

Also I used extra salt, as it said in the recipe and coz I like it. Well, they ended up being REALLY salty. But I would definitely recommend making kale chips! I wanna try kale in a green smoothie sometime. I sauteed it last time and it wasn’t very nice, very chewy.

The sky was just stunning!

We were really busy at the weekend, doing food shopping all over the city and several other crazy things and didn’t have a lot of down time and time with each other, so I thought to go to the beach for a dinner picnic would be nice. And it was!

Love Beach Picnics!

Lucky we live relatively close to the beach, it’s like a 20 minute car ride from our house.

So dramatic

What do you do to treat yourself after a hard days work? How do you like to unwind?

I’m Beat

Melbourne doesn’t have many great organic, whole foods shops, so each weekend we have to drive across the whole city just to visit a couple of them. It takes half a day, most of the time we go to a market too, and by the time we get back I’m completely beat!

Pisses me off it’s so difficult to get organic produce. There is nothing in our area, so we just go to the normal supermarket during the week, they only have regular produce and a tiny, sad looking organic section, which is obviously not great.

We are trying to eat more raw, vegan foods. We are definitely eating healthier all the time and I think, after two to three months now, it makes me feel better. More energetic and I feel cleaner.

Today we had baby spinach, kale and rocket with brown rice and red quinoa for lunch, which was nice. The grains are hidden under the kale in the bowl.

Looks pretty healthy

The kale wasn’t great, but it’s the first time I cooked it that I can remember. I just sauteed it with some olive oil and salt. It was really chewy.

Somebody on twitter sent me this link to a kale chips recipe. Now this looks delicious! I’ll try that tomorrow.

So yeah, we are eating healthier, more raw, organic produce, but sourcing that crap can be frustrating.

Is it easy where you live to source fresh, organic vegetables? How do you organize shopping for healthy foods?

Cooking Is Like Blogging And Something About Meditation

Writing a blog post is to me a lot like cooking. I go into the kitchen/on the computer and look at what I’ve got. Sometimes I’ve got an idea of what to write/to cook, normally I just collect bits and pieces and try to make something out of them. Usually that works quite well.
Thought I’d give you an update on my de-cluttering, healthy lifestyle challenge.

Markets, I never quite liked them, but now that we are going to the farmer’s market every weekend I’m a bit less apprehensive. I hate being pounced on and I feel bad sometimes going up to peoples stalls and looking at their stuff and not buying anything. And some people are trying the hard sell on you. In the beginning I was like, “Fuuuck, what am I gonna get??” coz obviously I couldn’t see the produce very well, from my safety distance. Which was only aggravated by the fact that I’m pretty short sighted.

I’ve also started meditation again. I’ve started it years and years ago, strangely enough reading and listening to more instructions on how to meditate correctly, I kind of lost the enthusiasm for it. I got really twitchy and itchy every time I sat down for it and I felt like my head is going to explode, after like a minute, while at the same time I felt like I had a whole ant colony running over my body. Well now, that may just be slightly over exaggerated.. but it wasn’t good. Now I’m back to freestyling it. Waaayy better!!

Today, I stayed in bed the whole day and just read books and napped. IT WAS AWESOME!! Good for clearing your head and getting a rest.
We also had some healthy meals and cleaned up the whole house in the evening. Which is nice, coz I like a clean, orderly house. I wanted to go camping this weekend, but the weather report said it would rain both days, so I thought I’d stay at home getting rid off stuff, relax and buy some healthy food. Well, obviously it hardly rained at all. What are these people doing in their weather stations?! I mean, I can do a better weather report by looking out of the window in the morning. I can tell you it will be raining tomorrow or the sun will shine and half of the time I would be right, which is basically just as often as the weather people get it right! This is supposed to be highly technological! I’m not impressed.

The de-cluttering is in full force. I pulled all the unfinished projects into my studio, which, it hardly needs mentioning, looks like shit now. I hate having so many unfinished projects in one room. It gives me headaches, it’s overwhelming. I don’t know where to start and I don’t even feel like setting a foot into the room. Ah well, I will deal with them tomorrow..

What have you been doing at the weekend? Did you finish any projects? Did you do anything exciting? Any de-cluttering?

Cheer Me Up

I got so frustrated before. I wrote this post, which was based on a documentary and now youtube has taken it down!! I thought it was a good post and a good documentary and I hadn’t even watched all of it. I’m frustrated, but I’m getting over it, to cheer me up I thought I’d post some funny, entertaining, moving videos.

This ones pretty cool and so creative!

This must be one of the best speeches made in a Hollywood movie. I found it very moving.

And this one is just plain hilarious. You don’t need to have watched Man vs. Wild to see how funny this is! So spot on!

I need some new funny and entertaining videos! So if you wanna cheer me up, post them in the comments!

Reflections On A Month Of Blogging

I started this blog spontaneously on the 1st of January this year. I decided to change my life in some ways and on the last day of 2011 I thought it would be great idea to blog about my progress every day, so I can see how I go, connect with people and learn from them and maybe inspire them to take action as well. You know, motivating each other and stuff..

Blogging has been pretty good, it takes up quite a bit of time, doing research for example, but it’s also a great tool to keep on track. If I have to research and write a post I’m automatically learning something new EVERY day! Which is pretty cool.

I thought I’d make a list of things we have changed so far.

FOOD

•baking half of our bread ourselves
•go to the farmer’s market every week
•at least two thirds of our food is organic
•less processed food
•more cooking, preparing food ourselves
•eat vegan
•foraging(which I didn’t like so far)

MINIMIZING

•sorting things into sell, give away, keep, use
•de-cluttering space
•selling things
•whittling away at the things we think we do need, reconsidering them

SPENDING

•not buying anything else then the absolute essentials, basically just food
•spending diary, have a look at expenses for the month

LEARNING

•about edible plants
•about food
•about people’s lifestyles
•about alternative lifestyles, especially frugal living and alternative housing
•how to make bread
•how to install warm water units and compost toilets(starting to learn anyways)
•about blogging and wordpress

RANDOM

•no more petrochemical cosmetics
•more reading books
•less wasting time

Hope I haven’t left anything out..

So yeah, this whole blogging thing is keeping me on track and it’s definitely awesome to learn new things and talk to people about it.

What have you learned lately? What aspect of your life do you like to work on?

Children’s Farm and a Lentil

Today we went to the farmer’s market at the Collingwood Children’s Farm in Abbotsford. They had animals in enclosures(which i don’t like, but i like patting the animals), different plants growing everywhere, a cafe and music, all in a really pretty foresty setting. But why is the market only once a month???

Got some very nice produce and then we went to eat at Lentil As Anything, which is a not for profit community restaurant where you can ‘pay as you feel’ for a really nice vegetarian/vegan buffet. It was delicious! I’m thinking of volunteering there, but it’s a bit tricky at the moment with working full-time and at the weekends i just wanna make my own food and go for drives in the country..

After that we went to the wholefoods shop.

When we got back i made a roast with our finds from the market, so inspiring to cook with veggies in all these odd shapes and gorgeous colours.

The roast I made

And i made another bread, which turned out nicer and much less messy then the one from last week. I put heaps of spices in it, that’s why i call it the Pepper Bread..

The Pepper Bread

We also found heaps of rosemary growing in a library car park. Now how cool is that?! That went straight into the roast! It smells so nice! I wish i could eat like this every day.

So yeah, lots of food foraging and cooking today and hopefully some more eating and relaxing with some youtube clips coming up!

Ah yeah, and i watched this.

Watch it! It’s good. It’s about kids and how they get marketed to and turned into mini consumers so they can grow up to be big consumers. Nice, right?! I hate brands and marketing and consumer crap. That shit should be outlawed! Or better, people should stop being so stupid and buy all this shit trying to fill the voids in their lives.. and stop buying this crap for their kids too.

I wish you all a happy weekend!! What are your plans? I might go for a drive in the country tomorrow..

Salt

Salt. It’s important. But apparently it’s bad for you.

Well, first of all there are different types of salt, i split them into 3 groups, table salt, sea salt and Himalayan salt.

Table salt is bleached and stripped of it’s minerals, so you just have 2 compounds left, Sodium and Chloride, then some anti-caking agents are added, maybe they will even add iodine and flouride, there you have your nice table salt.. Pretty gross.
Don’t get me started on flouridating salt, water or toothpaste.. That’s a topic for a later post.

Sea salt is better, natural, should be unbleached and has more minerals in it, but is obviously contaminated from all the rubbish that we dump into our oceans.

And then there is Himalayan crystal salt. I love Himalayan salt! It’s the best! Seriously, it tastes awesome, doesn’t leave that  burning sensation in your mouth like table salt does, is milder, but still saltier. And it’s all so healthy with the minerals and trace elements it contains. You know, the shit your body needs!

This dude explains it quite well. Watch it!

Salt is supposed to be bad for you and i find it unfair that all kinds of salt are just thrown into the same box and all of them are getting a bad rep.  While large quantities of table salt are, crystal salt is good for you, because, among other things, it is supposed to balance your blood pressure and the water content in your body.

We used to use sea salt, because it took me a while to find Himalayan salt in Australia(i used to use it back in the day..). Now i use it all the time. When i’m eating somewhere where there is only table salt available i won’t use it. I hate food that isn’t salted enough, but i’ll rather pass on the table salt, it’s disgusting.

Some of my favourite condiments. Organic cayenne pepper, organic dulse flakes and organic Himalayan crystal salt. I love my pincher jars

Don’t put the Himalayan salt in a salt shaker, it won’t work and will just clog it up. Use a pincher instead, i use small wide jars(they used to be antipasto jars), they are perfect and look pretty awesome!

Salt is more important then you think.

Here is another interesting video.

Growing Stuff, Potatoes And Things

I was talking with one of my friends about his garden yesterday and he told me he thought potatoes are too difficult to grow. So i was like “They look like the easiest thing to grow ever! I watched some youtube videos about them! And it looks well easy!” Well, i haven’t got my own garden at the moment, but i know potatoes grow in a fucking plastic bag, with no soil in it, in the cupboard, that’s proof enough to me. They are like crazy!!

Anyways, i also watched some videos on them a couple of days ago and thought one thing that is so interesting about them is that once they are growing you just top them up with soil or compost or whatever and they keep growing and making more potatoes, it explains itself when you’re watching the video. Also the contraption used in the video makes them really easy to harvest, no crazy digging and shit. There are several different contraptions on the net that you can check out, but the one i will show you seems to be one of the easiest and cheapest. Check it out!

 

Okay, so i’m not an experienced gardener or something, but the topic interests me and yeah, here is a video of a guy self pollinating corn. Don’t forget, if you grow shit inside you might wanna check if it needs bees or something or how to pollinate those plants yourself. Thing to think about.

 

Then there is this video i found interesting, coz it shows you a different container option to grow your plants in, like if you live in a colder climate and have to move shit around or have a limited amount of space, that option might be good for you. Dude is growing some ginger.

 

If you grow food, like spuds and things and you wanna make your own seedlings, go buy the organic produce. Some people might think the chemicals vegetables are treated with aren’t so bad or wash off(like wtf?). Check out this video to see why. Such a sweet and clever video, well worth the watch.

 

And a little bonus, Zoe asked me about the charcoal discs and tree sap i was blogging about yesterday and how it works so i thought i post another quick video to show you how it works. I used to to this all the time and it is sooo much better then most incense!!! Really!(i didn’t use it with the salt, but i guess you can experiment with that)