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