My SCOBY farm...

Passionfruit kombucha = tropical-ish February

Tasty lately's...

Here are some of the lovely raw foods I have been making in the past month or so. I am feeling incommunicado for the past 6 months. Big shifts are occurring. Love and bright blessings to anyone reading this. xxoo

Update

I am just posting a little update in an attempt to keep track of my own self... I am currently focusing on raw foods again. I am not exclusively raw as I eat out in ethnic restaurants about twice per week. However, my usual program goes something like this: first thing in morning- green tea or yerba mate tea with honey and lemon/lime and my handful of supplements that includes a raw women's multivitamin, resveratrol, vitamin d3, vitamin c, spirulina, blue-green algae, probiotic pearls, vitamin b12, and some other stuff that I can't remember and don't take regularly anyway... Then about 1/2 hour later I make a green juice with apple, lemon, and ginger. Then at about 10 or 11 am I make a smoothie with hemp seeds, hemp oil, flax seeds, fruit, vanilla, and some honey if it isn't sweet enough. I also sometimes add superfoods like raw cacao powder, camu powder, lacuma, fo-ti, reishi mushroom extract, maca powder, etc. I don't usually eat again until mid-afternoon when I have a salad meal or sometimes another smoothie or a green smoothie. For my evening meal I eat veggies, usually cooked, with sweet potatoes or rice or sometimes Ezekiel bread, but I am really trying to avoid eating grains. When I go out to eat I try to avoid gluten and dairy, but am only successful about 70% of the time. I do still "lose it and go crazy" about 3 times per month and end up eating pizza or some other foolishness... So basically I am all over the place but still doing OK. I have finally given up worrying about my weight and am just focusing on being healthy and feeling great. This is helping immensely and I highly recommend it... I have been very busy lately with multiple projects always happening simultaneously. This is actually a blessing as I think that it is indicating that I am finally moving through my recent bout of depression which lasted from late September until about Christmas time. This depression was caused by my own retardation. I took a job in February of 2009 as a chef/kitchen manager at a natural foods store in CT with my best friend and business partner Jamaica Barbara, you remember her, right? So Lincoln and I moved up to CT away from sunny Florida and darling husband Felix in the middle of February to take said job. You can already see where this is going, can't you... Anyhow, long story very short, the job sucked and wasn't what I moved up here to do, but the people that I worked with (not for) were great and the people who ate our food every day and were so lovely and kind and were such a blessing. Me and Barbara made some crazy vegan and raw foods in the middle of uptight, yuppie CT and people loved it, which is a very good sign. The job dissolved in a very tacky and unpleasant way at the end of September and I felt like a dumb and stupid failure until the insanity of Christmas overtook my brooding and I snapped out of it. Oh, and by the way, during all of this, me and Felix also went through the entirely-too-stressful INS permanent residency process which, thanks to all benevolent deities, resulted in him FINALLY being granted a green card after us being married for SEVEN years. Your tax dollars at work folks... A true extravaganza of red tape at it's finest. So here I am in CT, living at my Mom's, with my son who is attending public school. Felix is working in Florida and we are waiting for the city to buy our house so they can expand the already obnoxious airport and build slanted, elevated runways over two major highways... I could have moved back to Florida after the j-o-b ended but Lincoln was loving school and who wants to move back to a house that could be sold at any moment anyway? So it is not fun being away from my husband but it is fun spending all my time rearranging and redesigning my Mom's house (excuse me, the family home as she now insists we call it) and attending reggae shows in the snow. Jamaica Barbara and I are working some angles and will be selling food again soon to all of the hungry lunchers in Mystic, CT who can't find anything healthy to eat EVEN AT THE F-ING HEALTH FOOD STORE...
Signing off for now.
Blessing you all with love and scintillating light beams.

Thank-Full

We return thanks to our Mother, the Earth, which sustains us.
We return thanks to the rivers and streams,
which supply us with water.
We return thanks to all herbs,
which furnish medicines for the cure of our diseases.
We return thanks to the moon and stars,
which have given to us their light when the sun was gone.
We return thanks to the sun,
that has looked upon the earth with a beneficent eye.
Lastly, we return thanks to the Great Spirit,
in whom is embodied all goodness,
and who directs all things for the good of her children.
~ an Iroquois Thanksgiving Prayer (adapted)

Chili Miso Kelp Noodles

1 package sea tangles kelp noodles, rinsed and drained
4 carrots, shredded
3/4 c. halved cherry tomatoes

toss together in a large salad bowl

dressing:
2 tsp. sweet white miso
1 tsp. honey
2 tsp. cider vinegar
2 cloves garlic, pressed
1 tsp. grated fresh ginger
1 Tbsp. braggs liquid aminos or shoyu/tamari
1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
2 Tbsp. sesame or olive oil

combine in small bowl and toss with salad ingredients
garnish with sesame seeds, thai basil, chives, and whole chili peppers

Me and Linc, lately

My! What a pretty papaya you have!

100% pure Floribbean homegrown!

Green Smoothie Experience... Day 2

So far so good darlings!
Just wanted to post this recipe real quickly-like.
Do yourself a favor and make this at once!

Royal Purple Smoothie

makes 2 qts.

5 Tbsp. shelled hempseeds
2/3 c. goji berries soaked overnight in 1 qt. water
2 T. green powder (mine was a homemade concoction of barley grass powder, spirulina, crystal manna, etc.)
1 T. honey
2 T. flax seed oil
1 lb. frozen blueberries

add to blender:
hempseeds & goji berry soaking water, reserve gojis, and blend for 1 minute

add to blender:
reserved goji berries and everything else

blend until very smooth, sometimes as long as two minutes.

Enjoy and go to antioxidant heaven.

Green Smoothie Experience... Day One

It has been almost a year since I last posted here. Many incredible things have happened, maybe too many. I intend to share them with you as we go along, but right now I just want to focus on green smoothies. I have embarked on a new adventure, my very own green smoothie experience. Green Smoothies make me feel great. I feel the best when I consume mostly/only green smoothies. My goal right now is to do 30 days of exclusively green smoothies. We will see how it goes.

Here is the recipe for my current concoction:

1 c. frozen pineapple
1 c. frozen peaches
2 frozen bananas
3 huge leaves kale
1 T. raw, local honey
1 T. coconut oil
2 T. flax meal
1 t. vanilla
1/4 t. sea salt
2 c. water

blend, blend, blend some more...

love and blessings all the time...

New Blog, Different Day

In light of many new developments in my life, I have started a new blog. I have ceased to be so obsessed about raw food but make no mistake about it, I am still a huge believer in its healing, magical powers. I have settled into a very comfortable and stress-free vegan (well, actually bee-gan) diet and am feeling very happy and contented with it. It feels good to be so unconcerned with what I'm going to eat all the time and being vegan feels very easy to me. I realized about 2 months ago that constantly trying to stay raw was really stressing me out. And that just wasn't healthy for me. So I decided to just be vegan for a while and see how I felt. The verdict is that I feel pretty great. My depression is staying away even under stressful conditions, my weight is gradually decreasing, and my family is happy with their diet, too. Plus we are finding that it is much less expensive to eat cooked vegan vs. raw vegan and that is a huge help to us financially right now. I am just allowing my body to guide me and we are taking stress-free baby steps toward my ultimate health goals. Don't worry, I will still be posting here on this blog when I have something raw-centric to express or when I make up a really good raw recipe or have any naked cooking fiascoes to to share with you...

Now, on to my new blog... You can find it at www.sisterlightheart.blogspot.com. It will be about my daily life, spirituality, parenting, music, anything that I feel like sharing with the entire world. And that is pretty much everything, as you all know...

Hope to see you all at my new blog and sending a big dose of light beam love in your direction! Peace and one love.

The dangers of naked cooking...

The other morning at about 6:30 am, as Felix was giving Lincoln his shower, I put a couple of pieces of Ezekiel bread under the broiler to toast. Then I went into my bedroom to get ready/dressed to bring Linc to school. In the middle of dressing, a.k.a. completely topless, I heard one of the pieces of toast fall through the grate and onto the bottom of the oven so I went to investigate, topless. The piece of toast had landed on the heating element on the floor of the oven, and as I reached in to retrieve it from it's impending incineration, my naked, very ample, right boobie landed on and pressed itself firmly into the unbelievably scorching hot oven door. It fried like an egg folks. Not joking, at all. I swore so loudly and for so long that I even amazed my own self. So, I have spent the past 3 days in a fog of non-adhesive wound dressings, triple anti-biotic ointment, overly adhesive (as in pull off all remaining boobie skin) medical tape, and elasticized tank tops.
Do you think someone is trying to tell me something?
Do you think it will leave a scar?
And, no, I will not post a picture of it. Even I have my limits.

I've been workin' my way back to you, babe...

OK darlings... I'm just gonna let you know that I feel like a dork blogging here when I am not eating all raw... Which just happens, you know. I definitely do not want to put myself out there as some sort of "100% successful raw foodist" poser. Ewww. But, I have decided to just get over myself and blog about my raw journey, issues and all, because my intention is always to eat raw, even if my addictions/emotional issues sometimes cause me to sabotage myself... Plus, I have noticed that writing about my challenges really helps me to process them and sometimes even helps me to release behaviors that are holding me back. So here goes, the story of my summer slide down the slippery slopes of my mountain of issues. I think I just fell completely off track during my "wanna-be-a-juice-feaster" phase which brought up every craving, addiction, and self-discipline issue that I could ever even imagine having plus a few more... Now, I'm not bashing juice feasting in any way!!! It is an amazing process with huge cleansing and restorative power. Unfortunately, it just sent me right off my rocker, which, let's face it, doesn't take much. So, after I gave up the juice feasting I just really white-knuckled it trying to resist the cravings for fried starch with sugar... Gross. Anyhow, will power, self-discipline, or whatever you want to call it, just isn't one of my greatest gifts. Needless to say, I began the lovely ping pong game of cooked (vegetarian but not always vegan) vs. raw... A game nearly as boring as watching a real ping pong game except on top of being boring it also makes you fatter, depressed and comes with a lovely feeling of self-defeat. After a while of that I was (understandably) feeling really weak and tired all the time. So I somehow convinced myself that I needed to eat more protein which led to eating eggs and even fish on about 5 occasions. I also began drinking Dunkin Donuts coffee as well. For that I can only plead retardation... I told you it's a slippery slope. Anyhow, the eggs and fish did make me feel a little more balanced and I did have a little more energy (coulda been the coffee), but I have also gained about 15-20 lbs... Ugghhh. I do have to say that I am grateful to have realized that I am the kind of person who gains weight when I eat inappropriate food for humans. Because if I didn't I would probably continue eating it until it killed me, without much concern because I would be thin anyway, seriously. The bottom line is that I get high off of cooked food. And, I have been high on it all my life. Not the easiest habit to kick. Plus, besides tasting good and being a socially acceptable addictive substance that I can get anywhere, it feels good for at least a few minutes after I eat it. However, my expanding midsection and tight clothes do not. Which brings me to where I am at right now. Experts say to replace your addiction with something that is good for you, for example, quit snorting piles of cocaine and take up jogging... I'm not sure that would work for me. I'm more apt to jog for about 5 minutes, break a sweat, and say "Fuck jogging. Snorting cocaine is so much more fun." Thank Goddess I don't have a cocaine issue. (Knocking on wood really hard) So I have decided that even though I may not be able to give up Dunkin Donuts lattes, bread, and cheese (the kind made from cow milk) for jogging, I may be able to bite the bullet and give up a cooked food high for a much healthier raw high. I know that getting high on food in general might not be considered PC in the "raw community" but I have finally made my peace with it. The bottom line is that everything we put into our bodies has an effect on how we feel. So we are all getting high on food regardless of what we eat. As an "addiction" prone person maybe the best thing I can do for myself is just to get the healthiest buzz I can manage. Maybe I can just learn to love and stop judging myself and trying to change all my "faults". So what if I like to get a good buzz on. At least my preferences in mind altering substances have improved, let me tell ya... Maybe if I can just accept that I am who I am and be happy about it I'll be OK. There is so much more to me than being fat and thin-obsessed. I'm just going to focus on doing what feels truly good and remembering that life really is one big raw-chocolate party... Maybe one day the feeling of having a healthy body will be all the high I need, but for now, it's all good. I am what I am. Peace out y'all. Big kisses and hugs. And don't forget to shake your ass today, OK?

Where the heck have I been?

Ok, so it seems I have taken the summer off from blogging... Well, I'm back now after a very introspective and revealing couple of months. As far as raw food goes, I have been bouncing between high raw, low raw, and, unfortunately, no raw, this whole time. I think that the whole juice feasting deal kind of upset my delicate equilibrium and sent me into a spin. I just don't think that I was ready for it. Anyhow, it has been a great summer of fun and household revitalization. Feng Shui to the rescue. Now that I have balanced my health area I am feeling much more motivated to get healthier. And I can't even tell you how fantastic the benefits of balancing my love/relationships area are...

Earlier this summer, I had the great experience of meeting one of my faithful readers in person, completely out of the blue! Felix and I were walking through the Swap Shop (a huge swap meet, flea market, farmers market monstrosity in Ft. Lauderdale) and a nice lady asks me "Do you have a raw food blog?" Of course, I answered "yes". Turns out, the lady's name is Samantha and she was in town to go on a Caribbean cruise with her family and we just both happened to be in the same place at the same time! Talk about synchronicity! So here is a big shout out and dose of blessings to Samantha! I hope you loved your cruise!

And now here are some pictures of our trip to the International Mango Festival in Miami...

A very nice dinner...

On Monday night we had curried coconut noodles for dinner. It was delicious. Felix the forager has been at it again... He is averaging 2-3 trunkloads of coconuts per week! I'd guess that is almost 100 per week! Sometimes they only have water in them and very little meat/jelly, but this latest batch has had tons of flesh and really sweet water. Fun!

Juice Feasting Ceasing...

I am officially done with juice feasting for now... I am so inspired to create new raw dishes and get on with living my life. I feel great and definitely feel like it was an enlightening experience to live on juice for 2 1/2 weeks. It put food into a whole new perspective for me. That is for sure. Here are some before and after pictures of my face. I'm not sure how much weight I lost but I'm guessing 10-15 lbs.

Before juice feasting- late April 2008


After juice feasting- May 25, 2008

Yes, Grasshopper...

Feeling fine today darlings, that is for sure! Life is grand! I had an epiphany yesterday and realized that sometimes I am just too uptight. I am too hard on myself and I over analyze everything. I just need to get over myself, seriously. All of this anal retentive worrying just isn't my style... So from here on out I am all about lightening up. Literally. My heavy thoughts and the attending heavy emotions are creating and enforcing the heaviness of my physical body. The ironic thing is that there is no need for it anymore. I am free to live however I choose. I am a grownup now. I am no longer under the oppressive heaviness that I experienced in my youth. I haven't actually been there in over 10 years. I was just emotionally stuck there, stuck in that perspective... I have been inadvertently reliving my past because I didn't know any better. It was all still too foggy, but when I began to live a more enlightened lifestyle the fog began to lift and I started to awaken and to remember, to get out of my own spiritual purgatory... It's actually a really cool experience (now that I am starting to understand what the hell is happening and I becoming am less afraid) And that, right there, is why I love raw food. It lifts the fog and lets us shine our true light. It lifts up our vibration and we begin to actualize our glorious human potential. The beauty and light that we begin to radiate comes from within. Raw food feeds the light and it begins to shine brighter and brighter. We begin to feel better and better and have more and more energy to... That is where I sometimes get confused. What am I supposed to do with all of this energy that I have all of a sudden? I would get all balled up and uptight because I didn't know what to do with myself. Now I do. I'm not supposed to do anything. I can do what ever I choose to do. I am free to do what ever I choose to do at the time. Isn't that fantastic? I am free. I made it. I am not "there" anymore. I am here now. It feels great.

Still Juicy...

I am still juice feasting though I have had a couple of challenges with it. The first challenge is that we were temporarily out of cash this week so I ended up doing more master cleanse drinks than juice and that didn't really work out too well. I would feel fine all day but by the evenings I was starving and couldn't resist the temptation of the cooked dinner that I made for the fam. I don't think that the master cleanse contains enough nutrition to keep me from feeling hungry. Green juice, on the other hand, makes me feel nourished and calm and happy. I am also a big fan of watermelon juice. There is a Jamaican guy who sells native watermelons on the side of the road right next to Lincoln's school! It is like a watermelon drive-thru! I am going to start buying them from him this week now that we have some money again... The other challenge that I have had is cooking and preparing the families cooked food. It is just torturous. The smells, the taste, the whole deal. It is like a heroin addict trying to kick his 20 year habit while preparing fixes for other junkies all day, every day. It sucks. So I have been really thinking and, honestly, praying about how I can be strong enough to resist this terrible temptation and finally heal from my lifelong crippling addiction to food. I have been over at least 100 scenarios in my mind about how I can continue to cook for my family and be successful as a juice feaster and ultimately as a raw foodist. This has been my challenge now for over two years and I am so tired of struggling with it. I really, really know in my heart that my true desire is to be healthy, vibrant, and free from constantly indulging in my addiction to cooked food. I know that living raw is my path to achieving this. I just feel that I need to be free to jump into and devote all of my energy to my chosen raw path without constantly having to go back to cooking everyday. I feel like I am trying to live in two worlds at once. It isn't fun. By last night I was ready to just give up the whole thing and throw in the towel and just try to accept a life of being fat and depressed. I was severely bummed out to say the least. Then Felix finally came home (he has been working 12 hour days for over a month straight) and I was discussing with him what he wanted for food this week as I was planning on going grocery shopping this morning. He announced that all he wants to eat is juice, smoothies, salads with avocado and raw Caesar dressing, an occasional piece of spouted bread, and some raw sweets of some sort. He said that the raw food I make is really delicious and that he has more energy when he doesn't eat any cooked food. He also admitted that he has been throwing out the cooked part of the lunches that I pack for him because he realized that he gets tired after he eats it. He said that he didn't want to tell me about throwing out the lunches because he knows how hard it is for me to constantly be dealing with cooked food when I am doing such a great job on my juice feast! HALLELUJAH!!! EUREKA!!! AMEN!!! And the best part of the whole thing is that I never even said a word to him about how I was struggling with cooking for him, etc... That means that this is a miracle, plain and simple. As far as cooking for Lincoln goes, I'm just not sure how to deal with that part yet. He already has a raw smoothie for breakfast and then I pack him a vegan/vegetarian/mostly organic lunch for school. That part is no big deal and he is very happy with his lunches even though they are different than the other kids who all eat the SAD. What to feed him for dinner is a little trickier... Right now he eats mostly grain based dinners like rice pasta and homemade sauce, rice and beans (though he usually picks out all of the beans...), pancakes, scrambled eggs and toast, veggie sandwiches on Ezekiel bread, potatoes, etc. It isn't really a big deal for me to make these foods for him usually but sometimes when I am feeling weak it is still a huge challenge. Plus, I know Lincoln would feel better if he would eat more raw, unprocessed food. Plus, he has quite the love affair with soy milk which we have to work on getting rid of... I'm just going to have to do the best I can to slowly improve his diet without him really noticing. If anyone out there has any ideas on how to do this I would love to hear your suggestions...

I am feeling pretty good health-wise. I am not going to day that I feel great because I am still very tired and often cranky but that could also be due to all the emotional stuff and stress that I have been going through. I am losing weight but am not sure how much because I have banished the scale. It makes me too mental to weigh myself because I end up obsessing over it and weighing myself constantly. I figure that it is doing more harm than good so I am avoiding it. Plus I have been having my period this week and that didn't help either...

This has definitely been a serious and challenging journey so far, but I am looking forward to see what the rest of it brings now that I am more free of my cooked food demon. I think I might be starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and for that I am very grateful...

Sista Barbara is also still juice feasting! She is doing great and her diabetes is healing! Hip Hip Horay! She drinks mostly green vegetable juice and some various melon juices. She is also a huge fan of coconut water which is "half orgasmic" as far as she is concerned... She also has added some raw cacao and spirulina to her supplement regime for added mineralization and because it tastes good. If she is overwhelmingly hungry in the evenings she eats some lettuce or spinach with some avocado or occaionally a banana. She is losing weight very quickly and is feeling great!

Love and lightbeams with blissful frequencies to you all, you darling humans you!

I feel weird...

Still Juice Feasting. Had a temporary detour yesterday when I thought I should have a green smoothie since I was actually salivating over the pulp left in the juicer... Bad idea since one not juice thing sort of led to another... No big deal really. I'm right back at it. Watermelon juice so far today. I am feeling very unsettled, flighty, and yet really tired. It is just really strong detoxification going on and I realize that but it still feels sort of yucky. And I am even more sensitive than usual which is always extra special. I keep seeing these brilliant flashes of light, red and white. I am being led to/finding the most interesting things in my everyday life. Plus I, who am not pregnant, feel sort of like I am in childbirthing labor... I just keep reassuring myself that it is all worth it and I am really blessing myself by undergoing this process. Ummm, ok.

Here are some more garden pictures.
Hope you are all doing great. Peace and blessings!

Juice Feasting Day 10

Yesterday morning I woke up feeling really low energy and depressed. It got worse throughout the day and finally by last night I felt just awful. I also had really bad heartburn and all the food that I prepared for my family looked really appetizing. I never really thought about quitting this feast but I did want to eat something. I hadn't taken my oils or msm or bee pollen in a couple of days and was wondering if that could have has something to do with it. However, I think the real culprit was the "fresh squeezed" OJ and grapefruit juice that I had bought at a local citrus outlet. I asked the lady who was selling it if it was pasteurized and she told me no very adamantly so I believed her. I think she was wrong. I also put some honey into a few cups of hot tea and realized after that I was probably cooking the honey. I will not do that again. The moral of this juice feasters story is-
Juice it yourself because cooked sugars do not do a body good.

Here is a picture of the frangipani that is blooming so nicely in our backyard... Too bad you cannot smell it through your screen. It is just heavenly I tell ya!

A love and light big up to all of you darling beings! Peace xxoo