New friends, recipes, and restaurants to enjoy
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 8:09 am
Sometimes I forget how much fun raw food can be. I’m mean, talk about an infinite number of tastes and dishes! Last Saturday I hosted the Chicago Young and Raw potluck at my place last and it was a great success. Ten people showed up, including some of my raw-friendly friends and boyfriend. Everyone made a dish and I was SO impressed by all of it. I think the two people that had never even made a single fancy raw dish before made two of the best ones! (They were all amazing really.) I was delighted. The desserts blew me away too. Raw food can be as complicated or as simple as you’d like. But anyone can do it. My stomach had shrunk a lot from my six day fast but I think I stretched it out a bit again after this meal!
My friend Anne made portabella mushroom burgers and I am still savoring the leftovers. (By the way, a huge benefit of hosting potlucks at your place: you get to keep most if not all of the leftovers! Woohoo!) Talk about easy and delicious: spread raw almond butter on a cleaned out portabella mushroom, top with lettuce leaf, tomato, onion, and bell pepper slices, and avocado. It’s all about the presentation too, and she did a top notch job. My boyfriend made a corn salad from Nomi Shannon’s The Raw Gourmet book and he didn’t let me keep the leftovers, he/everyone liked it that much. He’s really digging the raw food :) We’re working on making some seed cheeze right now for some pizza this weekend.
I rediscovered a fantastic website for raw food recipes. I’d come across it before but hadn’t been looking for new recipes for quite a while until last week. Even if you don’t have a powerful blender, juicer, food processor, and/or dehydrator, you can find pages and pages of recipes. At the bottom of the page you can just click on whatever equipment you don’t want to you use. http://goneraw.com/recipes/ Now there are no excuses. Treat yourself to a new recipe or two each week to stay inspired and delighted by raw food. That’s what I did in the beginning and it totally worked.
Another great website I just found: http://rawfoodrestaurantguide.com/blog/ I didn’t realize just how many raw food restaurants there are sprouting up everywhere (pun intended). There are over 200 now worldwide (I just heard David Wolfe say this)! About 20 years ago, there were zero. How lucky we are. It also makes me very excited to be working on perhaps the next raw/organic dining location in Chicago: “The Green Crush Smoothie Bar.” I can see it now. Opening Spring 2009!
The girl who owns and runs this website will send you a pdf file of all the current raw food restaurants in the USA and abroad. You never know…you may discover one by you that you didn’t even know about…;)
~Lenette
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