Quenching My Thirst for Health

The sky is clouding up.  I hear thunder. 

Days like this I am grateful for.  Cloudy skies can bring rain to quench the thirst of the earth.  Today, my body’s thirst for healthy food has been quenched.   

I started out the day with a smoothie, rather than coffee.  I told myself that I could have coffee when Aya and I returned from our morning walk.  After the smoothie, I found I had little interest in the coffee, for once my belly started ‘singing’ to me, I recalled the burning sensation coffee creates in the pit of my stomach.  The smoothie felt so cool and nurturing in the heat of the morning.  It also felt energizing, and not the ‘cranked’ buzz I feel from coffee, but more of a steady, soaring sensation.

Coffee also stimulates the amino acids in my stomach, making me feel hungry.  With a smoothie, I find that I am satisfied until around eleven o’ clock, when I began snacking on my sunflower seed pate and celery while making a salad dressing and some almond cheese for my next batch of raw, delicious sustenance.

I soaked and am dehydrating my first batch of almonds in a REALLY LONG TIME.  I feel really great about it.  Soon, I will have something to bag up and take along in my purse in the event that I get hungry while I’m out and about for the day.  I find soaking and dehydrating almonds easy.  I didn’t even have time to deal with them the first morning after I had soaked them overnight, so I changed the water out, rinsed the almonds and let them soak another night until I had time to take care of them this morning.

Soaking and dehydrating was something I have never done before, even after being a chef for a few years.  However, this time around ‘going raw’, I found that I would get this horrible pain in my stomach - likely gas - when I would eat my pates or nuts in a significant quantity, so I decided to try it.  I will let you know how it turns out! 

A humbling experience I would like to share with you:

I went into my local health food store yesterday to get the card for the woman I need to contact in order to teach classes there - and to pick up my favorite sensitive skin face wash - my ongoing skin nurturing journey is another blog post entirely.  The girl at the counter looked at me, holding my five month old baby and politely asked, “So, you have another one on the way?”  Wow.  I glanced down at what I would consider to be a very small ‘pooch’ - at least in comparison to what it was a few weeks ago, and replied, “Nope, still working on the remnants of this one.”

It was a small reminder that I am definitely not the shining example of what is possible with the raw food cuisine - at least on the outside. Yet.  

However, on the inside, I am a much better person than I was even just one year ago when I was a pure “raw foody”, and although this has been a hard and humbling transition for me, I am grateful for experiences like this which remind me of what it is to be human.  Imperfect, yet in the perfect place to clean up my vibration.

“Sometimes you have to live in a house without enough windows, so that you can realize you want a house with more windows.”  -Abraham Hicks

I enjoy this quote for many reasons, one of them being that when I was raw the first time, it was such an easy transition for me that it left me unable to empathize with people’s struggle to ‘go raw’.  Now, being older and having a child - and a budget and money goals - things are different and I feel I am really grasping what it takes for some of us to achieve this goal of healthy eating in the face of adversity and not-so-healthy, but delicious and convenient food.

It is a joy to be in my kitchen creating food, keeping in mind the needs of people like me.   Simple, affordable and delightful cuisine for people on the move, people with children, and people with responsibility.

Thank you for sharing my journey with me.  Look for my almond cheese and salad dressing recipe on this blog.

I adore you.  I believe in you.

Love,

Andrea