food pics

So here are a few pictures of some meals I prepared during the last months. Enjoy! :-)

This was a spicy Thai coconut cream soup with veggies and goji berries (and a lot of ginger and other thai spices of course)

I call this some "pink sauerkraut". It is normal sauerkraut with some apple and strawberries added to give it a nice colour and some more sweetness. (I'm not a big fan of sauerkraut on it's own...)

This was a crepe I made out of veggie pulp leftovers from juicing, plus some extra added ones with a cashew creme filling.

In the two above pictures you see an attempt I made to replicate a meal my grandmother used to make for me when I was little, but in a raw version. The yellow stuff above should be like a semolina casserole she used to make. I made it with raw sweet corn as the main ingredient and the taste actually came out quite similar in the end.
To go along with it and to balance out the sweetness with a bit of sour I made an apple-rhubarb compote. This also tasted almost exactly like the original, but without the loss of texture and taste from overcooking the fruit! :-)
I first put the apple and rhubarb in the dehydrator for a while to make them a bit more soft and then added some water with agave nectar and cinnamon to it - very simple and just as tasty! ;-)

This was a delicious meal Chris made consisting of a variety of greens, fresh veggies, sprouts and marinated oyster mushrooms. - sooo delicious! :-)

I somehow just love making litte chocolate pralines... ;-)
These here were with some almond pieces inside.

This was a simple chocolate pidding with a banana as the base.

Chris made these delicious shaghetti with tomato sauce and rocket (it wasn't complete raw though. It had some pieces of smoked tofu as you can see in the picture)

I just love sweet corn for some reason. Here I made it with some red bell pepper, onions, fresh herbs from our balcony and some calendula flowers.

This is a cake I prepared for some friends who came over for a game evening. They loved it! :-)
Chris also made some zucchini spaghetti with tomatoe sauce and some raw "parmesan" that night and everyone loved it just as much as the cake, but I forgot to take some pictures unfortunately...

This was also made by Chris. It's a delicious lasagne with tomatoesauce and cremesauce. (The tomatoesauce also contained some blueberries - very jummy!) :-)

I made these desserts just a few days ago. We had ordered some jicamas along with our usual parcel from Thailand and I was trying out what I could do with them. At first I made a "potatoe salad" and then some Jicama wedges (the salad was jummy, but I used too much spice for the wedges, but with less spices they would have been very good too - next time ;-) ), but unfortunately I didn't take any pictures...
So with these desserts I tried if I could make some nice desserts without using any nuts, So they basically consist of jicama roots with a few things added. I got the pink and purple colour by adding strawberries and blueberries and used coconut flakes to seperate the layers and make it loke prettier (and I love the taste of them of course ;-) )

Huuuuuuge Update...

I haven't been blogging in a looong time, so a lot of things have happened since my last post, so here is a biiig update of all that has happened since then:

- first and most importantly - I got married last Tuesday!!! :-)
I'm sooo happy and excited about that!!!! :-D
It was a quite small celebration with very few people and we did not have a big ceremony in a church since we both are atheists, but the registrar at the register office held a nice speech and we chose some beautiful music for the ceremony, so we really enjoyed it, it was absolutely beautiful!! (Chris was crying most of the time ;-) )
After the ceremony we had a little party in the inner courtyard of a vegan restaurant. The yard, doesn't belong to the restaurant, but the owner was so kind to let us use it for our wedding and the people from the restaurant decorated everything soooo beautifully it was amazing!! :-)
We also had a life band there and found out that one of the guys from the band is vegan too and lives only a few minutes away from us! :-)
We had a delicious wedding cake (not raw unfortunately) and the food the restaurant provided was delicious as well, most of it was not raw, but everybody also had a mixed salad and they made some platters with fresh fruits, where everybody could just grab whatever they liked. For they main course people could pick out a meal out of a few options that Chris and I had decided on beforehand and they made extra litte menues just for the wedding! :-)
The restaurant's owner (she is from Taiwan) also played some music for us on an chinese zither (soooooooooo beautiful...) and came up with some funny activities for the party (I'll post pictures of everything as soon as I have them! promise!)
We also were really lucky with the weather. It was raining for weeks prior to our wedding (we had some serious floodings here in Austria...) and the weather forecast said there were going to be thunderstorms throughout the day, but we got plenty of sunshine and only a little bit of light rain late in the evening. :-)
What's also very exciting about the marriage is, that I took Chris' name, so I've got a completely new last name!! How exciting is that!! :-)

- ok, let's talk about what happened to my 100-day challenge...
I actually stopped after day 26... :-(
We had some friends from Germany visiting, so we bought a lot of non raw foods for them prior to their arrival and buying and having all this food in my hands and thinking about taking our friends to my favourite restaurants and having to watch them eat my favorite foods there somehow was too much for my discipline...
Of course I could have made it only a small exception, but that didn't work out. I had mainly non-raw foods for a few days and after that had some more raw foods again (but not only...).
Since then I've been going through phases of more and less raw foods...
After our wedding party, there was still quite a bit left from the cake, so Chris and I ate it all the following days, which left my face's skin looking like a 13 year old teenager's at the peak of puberty... (not very pretty!)
So this are my plans about raw foods for the future: I wan't to keep the percentage of raw foods very high, but I will not beat myself up if I add some healthy non-raw items to my meals and I also don't want to miss out on the social part of food, so I will also eat non-raw meals at restaurants when I'm meeting with friends/ going out with Chris, but I'll try to keep the non-raw foods limited and for the raw foods themselves I want to keep it more simple. I noticed that I feel a lot better when eating simple meals with lots of fresh greens, lots of fresh fruits etc. and less gourmet style meals wich ofter contain too many nuts/ too much oil etc., wich means less exciting food pictures for you, but better health for me ;-)

- We now get a big box of fresh fruits from Thailand every second Thursday from http://www.tropenkost.de/ , wich I'm veeery happy about! :-)
The fruit they send us is sooo much better than the one you can buy at the stores here... It's sent to us directly fresh and ripe from the trees, it's organic, mostly from wild trees, it's fair trade and they always send us what's in season at the moment (plus we ordered to have some extra durian and mangosteen whenever possible!)
This week there was a problem with the parcel service so we got it today instead of yesterday, but all the fruit was still intact luckily. The 2 kilos of mangosteen are already gone... ;-)

- My parents paid for a Vitamix blender as our wedding present which we received two days ago and, we've been using it excessively since then! ;-)
It's really amazing how powerful it is!
I always adored our Personal Blender, but I think it will not be used as much from now on... (but we'll still keep it for smaller things, as it is easier to clean)

- one of my friends has become very serious about raw foods. She's also writing about it in her blog. Check it out here: http://www.violetsrawjourney.blogspot.com/

Well, that's all of the news I can think of at the moment... ;-)
I'll post some pictures of food I prepared since my last post tomorrow!

Love,
Kathi RUNDA :-D

Day 20 - Pizza!

I made my first raw pizza today! :-)

Here are some pictures:

This is supposed to be a raw vegan "salami" (peperoni) in the preparation process. It consited mainly of walnuts and sundried tomatoes. The flavor came out great! :-)

This was my little loaf if cashew chesse. I had added some curcuma to give it a yellow colour, but that wasn't the best idea, since it came out a kind of grey-green colour, but the taste was nice too.

This is the pizza (the dough consists mainly of sprouted buckwheat and sundried tomatoes) with a tomatoe sauce, grated "cheese" and "salami"

Then I added some yellow bell pepper, red onion and marinated mushrooms

After that I added avocado, fresh tomatoes and rocket and dehydrated everything for about 15 minuted to warm it up a little and let the flavors combine.

So here is a picture of the finished product on our plates.
The tast was great, but it was a little bit dry, so next time I will make the tomatoe sauce a little more moist or sprincle some olive oil on top and some fresh garlic would have been nice too, but overall I'm very happy with what I created! :-)

Just across the street there is a huge center for expositions and there is an interior and design exposition at the moment so we went there to get some ideas for our new flat. It consisted of 4 huge halls with different themes, but it was sooo huge, we only got through half of the first one...
They always have special offers and prices there, so we had someone plan a kitchen for us, it's still quite expensive, but looks very nice, so we still need to think about that (we've got one week to decide in which we can get the special exposition offer)


What I ate today:

- 5 cinnamon balls

- 2 babybananas

- rasberrys

- 1/2 pizza

- we still had a little piece of cake left so we had that with a delicious strawberry sauce (somehow strawberrys seem to develog this really strong taste if you puree them...)

- a salad consisting of different kinds of lettuce, rocket, radish and apple with a rasberry-grapefruit-garlic dressing

- a smoothie with 1/3 banana, rasberrys and 1/2 apple

- 1 chocolate ball

- 1 date

Day 19 - movie review - Breakthrough

We watched the movie "Breakthrough" today from the people of thegardendiet.
This movie is about an all raw family and their personal story.
I found the movie a bit longbreathed at times and it could have been a bit more scientific (I'm a person of science - guess I'm on Jack's side here - lost-fans will know what I mean ;-) ), but except of that it was still a quite nice, interesting and motivating movie to watch and the kids were really cute! :-)
The only thing I really didn't like, was that there were a lot of scenes in which they went climbing with the kids without ropes or any other savety device. I'm a fan of all kinds of outdoor activities including rockclimbing (with ropes!), but doing something so dangerous should not be promoted in my eyes, especially if kids are involved.


Today's food:

- 1/2 small papaya

- a piece of cake

- 3 cinnamon-balls

- 1 chocolate-ball

- a salad with red and green lettuce, spinach, rocket, alfa-alfa sprouts, strawberries and an orangejuice-cream dressing

- 1 babybanana


I didn't take any pictures of today's food again, so here is a nice picture of a yellow bell pepper that I took a while ago:

Day 18 - snow...

The last few days it started to get slightly warmer (around 8 or 9 °C), but yesterday the temperature dropped again and there was heavy snowfall in the morning that later mixed with a little rain, so basically we got the kind of weather that will make your pants get wet up to your knees...
I love Vienna, it's a fantastic city, but the weather really sucks most of the time...

The smoke in the Pub on tuesday gave me a raspy throat, that grew into a slight caugh by now. :-(

Luckily there's also something fun to report about day 18.
Some of my friends have this show about animal rights once a week at a local radio station and Chris and I (and an other friend just started to help us as well) always record it and then put it online so that people who couldn't listen to the original show can listen to it later, but some shows from the last 3 years were still missing, so I went to the radio station to copy them from their archive. So, what's really exciting about it was is that they let me use a studio room to do so, so I worked in there alone (well almost - Snoopy was with me of course) with all the great professional sound equipment around me. :-D - very exciting!


What I ate today:

-I had to try all the nuts and other things that we got the day before, so I altogether I had quite a lot of those...

- 2 pieces of cake

- a peas and corn cream soup

- Chris made some fantastic pasta with spiralised zuchini and yellow carrots with a very garlicy oil sauce - very similar to aglio olio spaghetti! - and a side salad with a variety of leafy greens.

Day 17 - Cake!

On Day 17 we received a big box of raw nuts, bahree dates, agave, chacolate balls and cinnamon balls from Keimling (an online raw food shop in Germany).
I am absolutely addicted to the cinnamon balls... (but everything else we ordered tastes great too!)

I also made a cake. I made raw cakes before, but this was the first one since I started my raw food challenge, since I try to avoid eating too many nuts or fat, but you got to have some cake once in while! ;-)
The crust was made with brazil nuts, dates, cinnamon and vanilla, the cream was made with pureed coconut flakes (I'm actually nut sure if those were raw), bananas, blood oranges, strawberries, dates and maybe some other fruits that I can't remeber at the moment..., and the icing was made with mango, a little bit of orangejuice, and a teaspoon of melted cocoabutter.
I first wanted to make only a very small cake, but couldn't find anything to put it into, so I endet up using a quite big cake pan and therefore didn't have enough coconut flakes and kept adding fruit to my cream filling, so the cake ended up being too moist and didn't thicken up in the fridge, but it tasted nice anyways. :-)

Here is a picture:


Today's intake:

- a smoothie with 2 oranges, 1 banana, 1/2 mango, cinnamon and vanilla

- a very colourful salad with lamb's lettuce, corn, brown champignons (they have much more taste than the white ones), red bell pepper, red onion and herbs

- a package of Dr. Martin's green coconut juice

- 2 pieces of cake

- a cocktail made with the juice of 2/3 lemon and 1/2 orange and cillantro


sports:

- 30 minutes on the treadmill

- 30 minutes on the crosstrainer

Day 16 - St. Patricks Day

We'll move to a new flat next December (the house is being built at the moment), so we went to the installer today to choose a bathtub, washbasins and all that - boy did that cost a lot of money... :-(
We're already scared off all the other costs that are still to come...
But we're still looking forward to moving, since the new flat will be a lot sunnier, a bit bigger, warmer and hopefully we won't have such noisy neighbours anymore. ;-)

Well, it is St. Patricks Day, so we went to an Irish Pub with some of Chris' friends and had a lot of fun! :-)
We ordered an apple-walnut salad (but without the potatoes and cheesesauce that usually comes with it) and got a big mixed salad that had neither apples nor walnuts on it, but it was quite nice.

Oh, and I'm feeling great again, only my throat wasn't too happy about all the smoke in the pub... :-(
I really hope that there will be better smoking-laws in Austria soon!!


So here is what I ate today:

- I had strawberries for breakfast (they are starting to become flovourful)

- a big mixed salad with batavia, some red lettuce (I don't know what it's called), lamb's lettuce, corn and red onion

- a glass of fresh juice with carrots, apples and beets

- another big mixed salad at the pub with different kinds of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, onion, pinenuts and pumpkinseeds


I did not take any pictures of my food today so here is a picture I took a couple of days ago instead:

It's a hatching coconut!!!Unfortunately I had already gone bad when I opened it, thats probably the reason why the coconut meat did not stick to the shell, but that way I was able to take a funny picture :-)

My workout:

I didn't find any time to go to the fitnesscenter today, so I made a small but nevertheless intense muskleworkout on a fitnessmat at home.

Happy St. Patricks Day everyone!!! :-)

Day 15 - not feeling too well

I forgot to mention in my last post that I had this really stange feeling from my throat down to my stomach for the last few days... It doesn't really hurt, it's more a strange kind of pressure that comes and goes. I have no idea what it is. It started when I ate a salad with a little peanut oil (I've never had that oil before), but if it was some allergic reaction to the oil (I've never had problems with peanuts before) it should be gone by now since it's already been a few days...
Does anybody have an idea what this could be?

Today in the morning I also felt a bit dizzy and had a headache and I didn't have much appetite the
last few days...
But since about noon I started feeling good again.

It's been two weeks now and I've lost 2,7 kilos. I felt absolutely great during the first week, but I'm experiencing minor problems now, but as far as I know it's normal to go through such a phase, so let's just hope it will be over soon! ;-)

I also skipped the sports today, since I wasn't feeling well and I also didn't do as much as I should have last week, so I'll get back to my plan again tomorrow.

But except of this I'm having fun at the moment, I'm not craving anything at all and new ideas of what I could prepare are constantly coming to my mind. :-)

Oh, and something else quite funny I've noticed: Since I'm on the raw food diet early childhood memories keep coming to my head from one second to an other, no special events or anything just some really random situations... very funny!


What I ate today:

- A smoothie made with 1 banana, 1 orange, 1/2 grapefruit, gojiberries, cilantro and vanilla

- A salad with green and red lettuce, 1/3 avocado, a wild mango (they are very small and totally green on the outside, but have an orange-yellow flesh that is veeery delicious) and fresh herbs with a really nice dressing made with water, almondbutter, coconut cream, garlic, umeboshi, salt, a slice of ginger and some agave

- two cups of pea soup

Days 9-14 - the highlights

I did not blog for some days now, so I decided to just summarize the most important things that happened the last couple of days.

- best and most important thing first: Chris joined me on my raw food challenge on Saturday!!! :-)
He's actually the one who introduced me to this whole raw food thing (thank you Chris!), but when I decided to do this 100day challenge we still had a lot of non-raw things in our fridge that needed to be eaten up, but now they are gone and Chris is raw too! :-)

- I went to a restaurant being raw for the first time. Chris parents invited us to a new vegetarian restaurant and I war really afraid first that it would be really hard for me, but Chris convinced me to call there first, so I told them in advance and they made a really nice plate with different veggie sticks and dips for Chris and me.

- I had my first exam with a raw food diet, so I was very curious if I would notice any differences in my concentration level or in the time I needed to study, but to be honest I coudn't notice any differences... But I haven't been on this diet very long yet, so let's see if something will change next time.

- We went to visit my parents in Styria (a very rural region of Austria) since it was my father's birthday and my grandma's as well (she turned 80), so I had my first raw kind of travel experience. We took some fruit with us on the train, so we didn't have any problems there and we also found some things in my parents' kitchen that we could use.
We got my father to make some fresh apple and carrot juice (they hadn't used their juicer in years) and he was surprised how nice it was and said he would use it more often now. :-)
We also picked some very young wild garlic (delicious!) that we found and my mother collected some dandelion and some daisies for a salad.

- I made my first raw chocolate and it turned out really nice! :-)


Well here are some picures that I took during the last few days:

This is a taboule salad that I made with some quinoa sprouts, tomatoes, cucumber, onions, parsley and cilantro

This was one of my first raw chocolates that I made!!! :-)

This was the plate that we got at the vegetarian restaurant. The veggies were avocado, carrots, yellow bell pepper, turnip and fennel. The dips from left to right: a pumpkin seed oil dip, tahini, stawberry sauce and a garlic-lemon dip. I am really happy that my first expirience with going out on a raw food diet turned out so great! :-)

This is a carrot-sweet potato-"couscous" with blood orange and horseradish with a pinenut-coconut cream and black sesame seeds on top.

This is a picure of where I collected the wild garlic with my dad. It looked really pretty with all that white flowers! The wild garlic war growin in between these flowers, so we had to be very careful not to step on them or take some of their leaved by mistake.

I tried to take several pictures of Snoopy, but he was just racing around like totally crazy...

Here is a closeup of the nice springflowers

So here is the wild garlic we collected together with the daisies.
Chris and I already had some of the wild garlic all by itself on our way back in the car - wow sooo aromatic!!!

That picure was made in my parents' wintergarden by my dad. On the table you see a lamb's lettuce - dandelion salad with daisies on top, zucchini-fettuccine with a sauce made with mushrooms, wild garlic, sunflower seeds and an avocado (I wanted to make a cream out of the sunflowers, but all my parent's food processor managed were some crumbs... so I added the avocado), some fresh apple and carrot juice, Chris and my dad had some red wine as well and my parents had some (not raw) bread as well. I think they were afraid that raw food would not be filling enough for them...

So here is an other picure that I made, so you can see my dad on there as well (No he does not have a third eye, neither a bee-sting on his forehead, it's just a reflection from a mirror-mobile (not the one you can make calls with but this thing with a lot of little pieces of something on strings))

This was a really nice meal Chris made with patties made out of sweet potatoes, corn, red onin and ground rice, a sauce made with tomatoes and bell pepper and some salad. Sooo delicious!
The patties actually smelled like mushrooms when they were in the dehydrator. ;-)

Day 8

I had my first real cravings for cooked food today, but I didn't eat any greens today, so that could be the reason too.
I also have very sore muscles all over, especially in my legs from the treadmill yesterday and I've been feeling a lot more tired today than during the first few days... :-(


What I ate:

- a smoothie with 1 banana, 2 oranges, 1/3 mango, physalis, gojiberries, cinamon, vanilla

- blueberries
- a babybanana
- the rest of the indian-flavoured crackers I made on Thursday

- zucchini-fettuccine with a "cheesy" pinenut-almond cream (Chris loved them!)

- 2/3 mango


Today's workout:

- 10 minutes warmup on the crosstrainer
- full body muscle workout