Raw food = Slow food

I admit, I love to cook. I am kind of obsessed with food and yes, I’ve been called a restaurant snob. I try to eat well, but I admit, I’m not always that exciting. I tend to eat the same things again and again, day in and day out. The work lunch is very predictable: homemade soup, carrots, an apple, and some crackers or yogurt. 4 days out of 5, it’s the same soup. But there’s a reason: it’s tasty.
Keeping this in mind, I’ve recently been taking steps to change. I’ve gone though my cookbooks and made a collection of recipes I want to try. And yes, I’ve tried a lot of them already. Some have flopped and others were great and will be revisited. New cookbooks are currently en route from India, too (I wanted some good, authentic Indian recipes; none of this North Americanized, watered down curry BS). Another thing I’ve been doing: trying the recipes from the paper’s food section.
One of these sections a few weeks back was on a new movement called Raw Food. Raw foodies are extreme vegans. Now, granted vegans are pretty extreme on their own, but these raw food vegans take the extremism to a whole new level. Vegans don’t eat any meat or fish, and won’t touch anything that comes from an animal in it: no milk or eggs or cheese, and nothing with any animal byproducts in it. The next level, the raw level, is no cooking.
Cooking destroys many of the vitamins and nutrients in food, this is a fact. It’s no secret that microwaving essentially obliterates the goodness of veggies and ther foods, but cooking — on a stove or in an oven — also weakens the nutritional punch of foods.
So raw foodies don’t cook anything. That’s why it’s called raw, genius.
The raw food movement here in Ottawa is being led by a woman whose name escapes me right now, but it doesn’t matter. She runs simplyraw.ca and gives cooking (um, vegetable slicing, pureeing, and chopping?) classes/detox workshops as well.
Those who prescribe to the raw food regime dehydrate some things, including their pancakes, which take 8 hours to make (nothing like getting up at 3 a.m. to start breakfast). But even when dehydrating isn’t necessary, raw food can take a long time.
A lot of the recipes I use (the ones that require traditional cooking) take a while. And I’m patient, since I love cooking and know the time is well-invested. But the raw meal I made tonight was just silly.
I made “living lasagna.” I used my fancy new mandoline slicer to trim zucchini into lasagna noodle-thin noodles (you can’t use regular noodles in raw food: they’ve been processed, and require, um, cooking) and made my tomato sauce from scratch using my hand blender to puree everything.
Since raw foodies are vegan and therefore don’t eat cheese, I followed the instructions to make a ricotta substitute out of cashews and pine nuts. The nuts had to soak for 2-4 hours before being pureed along with salt, some oil, and lemon juice into a ricotta-like paste.
I also chopped mushrooms and peppers, and minced leaves of fresh spinach and basil into a beautiful and fragrant mélange.
The reason I tried this recipe was three fold: I wanted to try something new, I like vegetables and healthy eating, and the regime came highly recommended from both a cousin of mine who took a raw food workshop a few months ago and the paper’s food critic.
I started soaking the nuts at 2 p.m. The sundried tomatoes started their bath at four. And at six, I started getting ready to put it all together. To be fair, let’s say I started at 6:30. Two hours of chopping, mincing, slicing, and pureeing later, I had my lasagna. I couldn’t believe it took that long to put the damn thing together — and I made a half recipe! That’s just crazy. I’d hate to think how long it’d take if I had to cook it, too.
I guess this fast paced life of mine has made me impatient. I like to have my meals quick. 30 minutes? Perfect. And hour? Hmm, ok, if I didn’t have to work late. But two hours for a cold meal? Come on.
I didn’t bother eating it. I put it in the fridge to sit and marinate and hopefully become tasty overnight. I wanted a hot dinner, so I boiled some veggie dogs, which were just fine. Not “bright” tasting (as the previously mentioned food critic sang as he praised the raw food) but they hit the spot.
I’ll let you know if the living lasagna turned out to be a disaster. But I doubt it will. I’ve already tried the “rawsome apple crumble” (which was so-so, but I didn’t use dates, as it suggested, and I think that’s why) and am totally sold on the marinated kale salad (massaged with salt and lemon juice to make it wilt and become easy to eat), which is great with diced yellow peppers, cherry tomatoes, and its dressing of avocado, celery, soy sauce and lemon juice).
I honestly wish I had more time to dedicate to nutrition. There is so much to research and explore… so many recipes waiting to be discoveres, so many tastes just waiting to be experienced. I think I could easily become obese in a very short time if I didn’t have a day job to distract me from this part-time obsession of mine.
Mind you, if all recipes took as long as the living lasagna, I’d be dead before I got through all of them. But then again, maybe not. Healthy eating (and moderate, not over-eating) leads to longevity, they say. Perhaps those crazy raw vegans are onto something.