How it all started.

My husband and I have always been interested in documentaries. Eric happens to be a bit, or shall I say alot, obsessed with Mt. Everest videos. Although I have enjoyed them in the past, you can only watch so many people freeze to death and lose much desired "parts" of their bodies! Sometime over the winter he asked me to watch, "Food Matters." As you can imagine I was thrilled that it wasn't another drama of survival on Mt. Everest, so I obliged. Well, let me just say that, "that is how it all started!" I LOVED it! I have always considered myself a healthy eater so it was right up my alley! Eric and I enjoyed it so much that we searched for other similar documentaries and found, "Food INC." Surprisingly enough, Eric was all for it and even said, "Gabe can't ever eat anything that's not organic again." That was a little extreme of course, but not a real problem since I buy almost all of our food with labels that read, "all natural" or "organic." There are of course times when Gabe eats processed foods, but he doesn't get it at our house:) Let me just tell you that Eric has a large sweet tooth that most of the time just doesn't quit, so he shares his "LARGE mcflurry with EXTRA Reese's" with Gabe! LOL! That is a joke between us. You should just hear how he orders it when we are in the drive through of McDonald's.

David Wolfe has a great website and wonderful books on raw foods and superfoods. "Raw Foods Real World" is my first raw cookbook. It has some wonderful recipes, but better suited to more advanced raw foodists. It is a wonderful resource on needed supplies and basic foods to have on hand.

These are just a few small appliances that I have had for a long time. They aren't the top of the line, but I make due just fine!

The "NINJA". My Aunt actually gave this blender to me some time ago because she got a free one with her purchase of another. I have overused this thing and love it! It makes amazing smoothies! Our regular blender got tossed because it didn't work:( 

Our food processor we received as a wedding gift.

Morning Green Juice ingredients. Spinach, which didn't juice so I opted for romaine instead, celery, cucumber, and lime.    When making green juices, lime and ginger are excellent choices for a burst of fun flavor!

Left over pulp. As you can see, the spinach is in large pieces. The Romaine did ok as a substitute.

Green juice from my Jack LaLanne juicer. It's actually pretty good for a completely "green" juice, just a little salty for my taste. Perhaps less celery would've been better and more spinach or romaine. 

Gabe liked it!

I do keep frozen "wheat grass" juice on hand since my juicer doesn't juice it.  From what I have read, wheat grass is harder to juice than any other green. They even make special juicers just for wheat grass. It's very healthy! I've been putting two frozen squares in my smoothies and it works great.

Since I don't currently have a banana slicer for dehydrating, I use my egg slicer.  Just cut the banana into smaller pieces and slice away! It's really important to get your foods sliced evenly when dehydrating. You want them to dehydrate evenly. 

These slices were from an older banana, and I prefer greenish bananas.  They took about 5 hours.  These are not pretreated. 

My excalibur! 5 tray! I really love this thing. It's quite a bit larger than I expected, but it really will be useful this summer when I have my CSA shares coming in. I did alot of research and this brand came up as the best overall machine.

My very first project was pineapple. It was AMAZING!! I don't have a pineapple slicer (yet) so I just tried to cut as evenly as possible with a knife. I did have to remove some slices that finished dehydrating before the others. These are also not pretreated. I think pineapple is going to be my favorite.  It took about 14 hours. Keep in mind that if you want to consider your dehydrated foods raw, they can't be heated above 118 degrees. The lower the temp, the longer it takes. 

Temperature control.

Here are my end products. The bananas turned out a bit brown, but remember I didn't pretreat them. I could've used ascorbic acid to prevent the brown color, but I didn't have any on hand. It's the natural option to prevent discoloration. 

I bought this temperature monitor so I could monitor exact temps. It can be used on anything. I just place the prong in the dehydrator and it keeps track of temps. Has a nice long timer too!

OK, back on track. Anyway, I was diagnosed with endometriosis back in 2001 and had a fair amount of pain issues over that past year while trying to conceive our second child, which we hasn't happened yet......but it will! I started going to see a woman named, Chandon, that does acupuncture and fertility massages. She has been a wealth of information and introduced me to the "endometriosis diet." It's basically many raw and unprocessed foods that won't cause elevations in estrogen or increase bad prostaglandins that cause inflammation. I have slowly incorporated more raw foods into my diet, but not consistently. I always thought to eat raw that you needed a hundred different gadgets. You do need a few appliances, but can work around the ones you don't have. I recently purchased a food dehydrator that has proven to be as amazing as I have read! I would love to have a vitamix, but I'm managing without for now. I'd also like to update to a new juicer (I've had mine for about 10 years) that properly juices greens. Mine just spits most of them into the pulp bucket!

In attempting to add more raw foods to our diet, I hope to teach Gabe healthy eating habits early. He already enjoys the juices and smoothies that I make and I try to make it fun for him! Since he is still so young, there are some things he can't eat yet, but soon he will be able to enjoy all of it. Now I just have to work on Eric:) Maybe once I master some amazing raw desserts, he will more willingly partake!

So, check back shortly to find out how my lunch preparation goes! I'm going to whip up a super easy raw soup!