As I mentioned in a previous blog raw food doesn't have to be carrot and celery sticks. The same creativity you use decorating a cake you use to make a raw dish. Its about letting go of limitations and just learning to combine the ingredients in another way.

As ridiculous as it sounds you just have not not be afraid of trying new things. Some people when it comes to cooking are afraid of trying new things.Making raw food is just about learn new skills and sometimes you do make mistakes (trust me I know!). Most people are brought up where most meals are cooked and so its about moving away from that.

To me making mistakes is one of the best parts of preparing food, there is something rather fun about standing there in the kitchen surrounded by cocoa because you forgot to put the lid on the blender.

It takes time sometimes to move away from standard recipes and learn how to do raw food. I like starting by trying to reinvent classic recipes like; spaghetti and cake cake and ones that we grew up with because its fantastic when they work out!
And as long as you balance your diet you still get all the nutrition you need (regardless of what people say!) Often the things we cook are not that beneficial for us any way (like meat!)

The thing I aim for most when making recipes is not to make it boring, even when its something simple like a salad try not to make it all green, throw some colour in there!

Why Raw?

When I tell people about raw food I get a lot of blank looks or the 'is she crazy?' face. Even though the concept is quite simple...you don't cook the food!.....it challenges people's perceptions and ideas about the food we eat.

A question I often get asked is "Well what do you eat?"
Well there are a lot of things I can eat. Raw food isn't boring or just about eating carrot sticks for days on end (unless you really like carrots!) You just need to be creative, just liking people learn to cook, its as simple as learning to make stuff just without the oven.

People also don't realise that yes you can get decents amounts of protein and iron and amino acids etc. They just happen to not come from an animal. Eating raw food, if you balance your diets, can actually make it easier for you to get these things. This is because cooking denatures proteins, essentially making them useless. It also greatly decreases the amount of nurtrients and enzymes in foods. This happens because when you cook the food the proteins and nutrients lose their structure and their structure is one of the main reasons our body is able to utilize them. Just like if our bones didn't have structure then we would have a hard time of trying....well basically anything....we wouldn't be able to function properly just like the proteins and enzymes when cooked. So the saying that you can only get enough protein from meat is quite silly in my opinion, as cooking destroys a lot of the protein in meat and you can get it else where.

Like I said before raw food does not have to be boring, you just need to get creative. There are recipies for tacos, pizzas, cakes, ice-cream etc and even really nice non-boring salads! So no I don't only eat carrot and celery sticks!

Concious Eating

How many people these days actually take time out to enjoy the food they are eating? There aren't a whole lot of people that are actually concious of the food they are eating. When we are in a rush we throw things together and eat it.
How can we have a good relationship with our bodies when we don't take the time to aknowledge what we are putting in it.

When we aren't conscious what we are doing in terms of food, it also effects what we buy when we go to supermarkets. There is so much packaged foods that actually have little resemblance to anything actually good for us. It is sad because parents then pass taht habit on to their children and we then have another generation of people who aren' making conscious decisions.

We need to be able to make the choice of what we eat ours not putting ours lives, essentially, into the hands of corporations that only care about make money by selling us food that damages our heath.

Raw food is amazing because it is as nature intended it to be, ready for us to eat and has no added flavours or colours, it just is. Yet advertisments all around us are telling us we need their food because it is good for us and it has so much less fat than this other brand etc etc. The food has been altered so much that it has little resemblance to the ingredients in it. Surely if the food was actually good for us it would be present in nature.