From Equinox to Equinox
Happy New Year Family!
Well since the sun is up, it is officially the Equinox! Many cultures consider this the New Year. Including myself. There are loads of calendars out there; Julian, Jewish, Astrological, Gregorian to name a few. But I want to mark mine on something that hasn’t been mixed diluted or tampered with in any form. So for me, the Equinox is the New Year. The Equinox is a Sun:Earth:Star event. When the Sun appears to rise on the Earth in the constellation of Aries, so begins the New Year. I’m waiting for the devil to try to mess with that!
The Equinox, for this blog, is the beginning of my “Rawness”. Last night, while preparing for a little party I’m having this evening, I prepared a bunch of raw dishes. I went to a raggedy farmer’s market and purchased produce earlier in the week. I cleaned up… windows, floors, surfaces, laundry… to get things in order for this evening. Still have a little more to do, but all is well.
The trick with raw food eating is planning, having enough food to eat and knowing when and how to cheat and come back. If you’re starving and should run out of food McDonald’s French fries staring you in the nose, guess what? You’re gonna eat them… quickly. If you are visiting some kinfolks that have gone to all kinds of trouble to fix you something to eat (when they know you don’t eat meat), but it’s cooked… What will you do? You will eat it, drink a lot of water, possibly fast and get back on the good foot. And not feel bad about it at all.
The first time I went raw was in the summer of 2006. There was very little information about the raw food diet. I actually heard of it from an Essence magazine. Y’all know the issue where they put all these older women who look REALLY good for their ages. There was this one woman in her 70’s that looked as fine as I did in my 30’s. I just could not stop looking at her. I want to look like that when I’m that age. Hell I want to look like that now! That woman reported to have been on a raw vegan food diet for years, months and days. What was raw? That got me looking online for exactly what that entailed. I have to admit, I found the rules rather limiting, but the professed benefits were amazing. I had to give it a shot.
Back then there wasn’t a lot of information on how this was done. There was rawfoodtalk.com and goneraw.com. Rawfoodtalk was really just a forum to sell Alissa Cohen’s book. Why couldn’t you get that book at the store? There was Storm and Shazzie too. But to get at that information, then… was gonna cost real change. And I can’t see paying for information on how to completely limit myself. I did buy one cookbook. RAW by Juliano. Cost me nearly $40 with the tax! I was not happy. All those recipes called for items I had never heard of and couldn’t find. I was salty. So I ate fruit and salads on and off before finally quitting out of limited boredom.
The next summer, there was more information out there on raw foodism. Some really good blogs with pics. It was a little better. I realized that I didn’t have all the toys. I had blender and a food processor that I hardly used; but I did not have a dehydrator or a saladaco. I bought them. I was able to make all these fine dishes that I saw online. But the fly in that ointment is… Planning. You don’t realize that to make lasagna you have to start 3 days before your planning to eat it. CRAZY!!!!! Who has that kind of time? Bread takes 24 hours to dry. Nuts have to be soaked. Beans have to be sprouted. There is just something that always has to be done. And then there is something about un-cooking something for days, hours and minutes and it not tasting good. That again was too much for me. I went to Taco Bell.
Last summer I had no intention of rawing it up again. I’d learned my lesson. I was done. I started slowly using the dehydrator for small things. Goddess chips and flax chips are my favorite. And then I had bought a bunch of Vidalias when they were in season, so why not make some onion bread? Well if you are gonna make onion bread you have to have something to eat with it, right? What am I gonna do with all this vegetable pulp from my chronic juicing habit? Next thing I knew, I didn’t remember when last I had cooked food. And finally, eating 6 apples for lunch didn’t seem crazy as it once did. I had made the paradigm shift. But there was a dark side. I felt like I had butterflies in my stomach all the time. I assumed that it would go away in time, but it didn’t. Then the headaches started kicking in. And we won’t discuss the bowel issues. Y’all don’t need to know me like that. I was at a loss to what and why this was happening. Then I went out with a friend for pizza. Cooked pizza with extra cheese! That fixed me. So I would eat raw until my stomach started ailing me and then eat a little cooked food. I felt great the whole summer with lots and lots of energy and vitality. Then it got cold. As much as I tried, I can’t stand being cold inside and out. And I really like soup. So off the raw bandwagon I went.
That summer taught me some valuable personal lessons. A book on Indian healing says you can’t help any one with anything you haven’t experienced in your own right. I learned that being raw is a personal decision. No one can define my dietary parameters but me. I learned the value of dietary Equality. And I learned to listen to my body. It will tell me what it likes and doesn’t like. What it wants and doesn’t want. I just have to listen. I keep learning to stop listening to other folks. Folks with chronic health problems who always have something to say about my non-having-any-real-health-problems self. I keep having to learn and re-learn this lesson. Guess I’m hard headed.
So heading into this New Year, I’m moving into it for the first time with what I would call ‘preparation’. I’m hoping to get it completely right this season. It’s my only expectation. In order to stay on top of things, I intend to always have something in the dehydrator, soaking or sprouting on the windowsill. I will keep staples already prepared in the refrigerator.
Will me your support and advice for keeping the fruit flies at bay!
Peace
Well since the sun is up, it is officially the Equinox! Many cultures consider this the New Year. Including myself. There are loads of calendars out there; Julian, Jewish, Astrological, Gregorian to name a few. But I want to mark mine on something that hasn’t been mixed diluted or tampered with in any form. So for me, the Equinox is the New Year. The Equinox is a Sun:Earth:Star event. When the Sun appears to rise on the Earth in the constellation of Aries, so begins the New Year. I’m waiting for the devil to try to mess with that!
The Equinox, for this blog, is the beginning of my “Rawness”. Last night, while preparing for a little party I’m having this evening, I prepared a bunch of raw dishes. I went to a raggedy farmer’s market and purchased produce earlier in the week. I cleaned up… windows, floors, surfaces, laundry… to get things in order for this evening. Still have a little more to do, but all is well.
The trick with raw food eating is planning, having enough food to eat and knowing when and how to cheat and come back. If you’re starving and should run out of food McDonald’s French fries staring you in the nose, guess what? You’re gonna eat them… quickly. If you are visiting some kinfolks that have gone to all kinds of trouble to fix you something to eat (when they know you don’t eat meat), but it’s cooked… What will you do? You will eat it, drink a lot of water, possibly fast and get back on the good foot. And not feel bad about it at all.
The first time I went raw was in the summer of 2006. There was very little information about the raw food diet. I actually heard of it from an Essence magazine. Y’all know the issue where they put all these older women who look REALLY good for their ages. There was this one woman in her 70’s that looked as fine as I did in my 30’s. I just could not stop looking at her. I want to look like that when I’m that age. Hell I want to look like that now! That woman reported to have been on a raw vegan food diet for years, months and days. What was raw? That got me looking online for exactly what that entailed. I have to admit, I found the rules rather limiting, but the professed benefits were amazing. I had to give it a shot.
Back then there wasn’t a lot of information on how this was done. There was rawfoodtalk.com and goneraw.com. Rawfoodtalk was really just a forum to sell Alissa Cohen’s book. Why couldn’t you get that book at the store? There was Storm and Shazzie too. But to get at that information, then… was gonna cost real change. And I can’t see paying for information on how to completely limit myself. I did buy one cookbook. RAW by Juliano. Cost me nearly $40 with the tax! I was not happy. All those recipes called for items I had never heard of and couldn’t find. I was salty. So I ate fruit and salads on and off before finally quitting out of limited boredom.
The next summer, there was more information out there on raw foodism. Some really good blogs with pics. It was a little better. I realized that I didn’t have all the toys. I had blender and a food processor that I hardly used; but I did not have a dehydrator or a saladaco. I bought them. I was able to make all these fine dishes that I saw online. But the fly in that ointment is… Planning. You don’t realize that to make lasagna you have to start 3 days before your planning to eat it. CRAZY!!!!! Who has that kind of time? Bread takes 24 hours to dry. Nuts have to be soaked. Beans have to be sprouted. There is just something that always has to be done. And then there is something about un-cooking something for days, hours and minutes and it not tasting good. That again was too much for me. I went to Taco Bell.
Last summer I had no intention of rawing it up again. I’d learned my lesson. I was done. I started slowly using the dehydrator for small things. Goddess chips and flax chips are my favorite. And then I had bought a bunch of Vidalias when they were in season, so why not make some onion bread? Well if you are gonna make onion bread you have to have something to eat with it, right? What am I gonna do with all this vegetable pulp from my chronic juicing habit? Next thing I knew, I didn’t remember when last I had cooked food. And finally, eating 6 apples for lunch didn’t seem crazy as it once did. I had made the paradigm shift. But there was a dark side. I felt like I had butterflies in my stomach all the time. I assumed that it would go away in time, but it didn’t. Then the headaches started kicking in. And we won’t discuss the bowel issues. Y’all don’t need to know me like that. I was at a loss to what and why this was happening. Then I went out with a friend for pizza. Cooked pizza with extra cheese! That fixed me. So I would eat raw until my stomach started ailing me and then eat a little cooked food. I felt great the whole summer with lots and lots of energy and vitality. Then it got cold. As much as I tried, I can’t stand being cold inside and out. And I really like soup. So off the raw bandwagon I went.
That summer taught me some valuable personal lessons. A book on Indian healing says you can’t help any one with anything you haven’t experienced in your own right. I learned that being raw is a personal decision. No one can define my dietary parameters but me. I learned the value of dietary Equality. And I learned to listen to my body. It will tell me what it likes and doesn’t like. What it wants and doesn’t want. I just have to listen. I keep learning to stop listening to other folks. Folks with chronic health problems who always have something to say about my non-having-any-real-health-problems self. I keep having to learn and re-learn this lesson. Guess I’m hard headed.
So heading into this New Year, I’m moving into it for the first time with what I would call ‘preparation’. I’m hoping to get it completely right this season. It’s my only expectation. In order to stay on top of things, I intend to always have something in the dehydrator, soaking or sprouting on the windowsill. I will keep staples already prepared in the refrigerator.
Will me your support and advice for keeping the fruit flies at bay!
Peace
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