Saturday, February 28, 2009

The number one question I'm asked since becoming a vegan...

"What do you eat?" So I thought I'd tell you, I guess as often as I feel like it. If I've posted a recipe for it or got it from an internet site, I'll include a link. If I used a cookbook and you would like the recipe, just let me know in a comment and I'll post it!

Today I've eaten...

Breakfast: Natural peanut butter and raw honey sandwich on whole wheat bread and a glass of almond milk. This is pretty much what I eat every morning. I know I should vary, so hopefully posting my meals will help me to vary soon.

Lunch: Leftover 15 bean soup with a sliced avocado, cilantro and tortilla chips, 2 pieces of a raw almond chocolate tart, and a glass of almond milk.

Dinner: A bowl of sliced frozen strawberries on my way to a church meeting. It was like lots of yummy little popsicles. Why? I guess because I really wasn't hungry for anything else after the large lunch.

There you have it. In retrospect, that doesn't seem like a lot, but I wasn't trying to limit myself and I never felt hungry or deprived. Any questions? Let me know!

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Friday, February 27, 2009

Homemade Teriyaki Sauce as a Vegetable Marinade

Asian sauces are notorious for containing harmful ingredients such as MSG and preservatives. That's why I was beyond excited to find this recipe for homemade teriyaki sauce at goneraw.com, one of my favorite sites for finding great raw vegan recipes. Here it is...

Ingredients:
1/2 cup nama shoyu (If you don't have access to this, you can just use regular soy sauce. Nama shoyu is just a healthy, unpasteurized version of soy sauce.)
1/2 cup sesame oil
1/4 cup agave nectar (If you don't have access to this, you can use honey.)
3 Tbsp lemon juice
2 Tbsp onion powder
2 tsp grated fresh ginger
1/2 tsp toasted sesame seeds, optional
1/8 tsp cayenne
6 cloves garlic, crushed

Place all of the above ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth.

Here's what I did with it...

Teriyaki Vegetable Stir Fry

The Raw Deal:
Many believe that vegetables contribute most to our health when consumed uncooked. I agree with this philosophy so I try to keep mine raw as often as I can. To prepare this dish, I used my food processor to slice a variety of vegetables I had in my fridge, such as...

-Carrots
-Zucchini
-Broccoli
-Cauliflower
-Red bell peppers
-Green bell peppers
-Mushrooms

You could really use any vegetables you have lying around. Get creative! Once my vegetables were sliced, I dumped them into a bowl, sprinkled some sliced almonds on top, poured on the teriyaki sauce and stirred until all the vegetables were coated.

The next step was to spread the veggies out on Teflex sheets in the dehydrator. If you don't have a dehydrator, you could lightly oil a large cookie sheet and spread the vegetables out on that. In the dehydrator, dehydrate for 1 to 2 hours at 125 degrees. If you are using the oven, turn it to it's lowest setting, prop the door open with a wooden spoon, and dehydrate until vegetables start softening, probably 1 to 2 hours as well.

I wish you could have smelled this as it was dehydrating. I couldn't help but sneak several tidbits as I walked by, but I didn't feel guilty at all!

The Cooked Version:
If you are cooking the veggies, simply pour the bowl of veggies, almonds and teriyaki sauce into a wok or pan and stir fry until the vegetables begin to soften. Don't cook them too long, because they will get soggy, and who wants soggy, sloppy veggies?

After preparing either the raw or cooked version of this recipe, spoon the veggies over cooked rice, sprinkle with sesame seeds and enjoy!


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Thursday, February 26, 2009

Vegan Food My Kids Like: 15 Bean Soup

Fifteen bean soup has always been a favorite of mine. As a vegan, I especially love it because it offers a vast variety of different nutrients and phytochemicals. Take a look at all the different beans this soup packs...


-Northern beans
-Pinto beans
-Large Lima beans
-Blackeye beans
-Garbanzo beans (chick peas)
-Baby lima beans
-Green split peas
-Kidney beans
-Cranberry beans
-White beans
-Pink beans
-Red beans
-Yellow split peas
-Lentils
-Navy beans
-Black beans
-White kidney beans

Protein, calcium and iron are the nutrients vegans need to take special care to include in their diets and just one cup of this soup has 20% of your daily iron requirement, 8% of your daily calcium requirement and 16 grams of protein! And it's SOOO easy to make. Here's how I do it...

Ingredients:
2 packages 15 bean soup
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 teaspoons salt
Pepper to taste
2 fresh tomatoes, diced
1 bunch cilantro, chopped
2 avocados, diced
Tortilla chips

Step 1: The night before you plan on making this, place the beans in a large bowl full of water and leave to soak overnight. This makes the beans a bit easier to digest, if you know what I mean.

Step 2: In the morning, drain and rinse the beans, then place them in a crock pot along with the garlic and fill the crock pot with water to 1 inch from the top. Turn the crockpot on high and cook for about six hours or longer, until the beans are soft and tender. You may need to add water periodically.

Step 3: There will be a seasoning packet in your bean bag. Throw it away. It has artificial ingredients and food additives that are hard to say. You don't need that. Just add the salt and pepper and stir. Your beans are now ready to serve. Garnish with chopped tomatoes, cilantro and avocados. My kids love to crumble tortilla chips on top (Nacho Libre-style), but since I'm more sophisticated, I like to eat mine like this...


Hope you enjoy this as much as we did tonight!

I am pleased to list this post @ Biblical Womanhood's "Frugal Friday". Check out her blog for TONS for great money-saving tips!
I am also pleased to list this post at...

-Tip Junkie's "Talk to me Tuesday",
-5 Minutes for Mom's "Tackle It Tuesday",
-Tammy's Recipe's "Kitchen Tip Tuesday",
-Blessed With Grace's "Tempt My Tummy Tuesday",
-The Cheese Slave and Kelli's "Real Food Wednesday",
-Mary's "Tightwad Tuesday",
Kim's Tasty Tuesday and
and
-The Lazy Organizer's "Talk About Tuesday".

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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

My Top 5 Food Poisons as an Onmivore (and a Few More Since Becoming a Vegan)

Thanks to an inspirational family and close friends who share an affinity for staying informed on nutritional issues, as of recent years I have tried to stay away from the following harmful substances:

#1 Hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils
#2 Artificial sweeteners
#3 High fructose corn syrum
#4 MSG (monosodium glutamate)
#5 Nitrates

Rather than explain the health risks of each and every one of these, if you are truly interested in the negatives effects of any of these food substances, just google them!

Now, as a raw foods-dominant vegan, I have added a few more things to my list of poisons:

-Meats
-Dairy products
-White flour
-Refined sugar or sweeteners or all kinds
-Artificial anything in my food, including artifical colors and flavors and preservatives

Many feel that this diet is extremely confining, but I feel just the opposite. I feel a wonderful sense of liberation knowing that I am taking control of my body and my health and possibly preventing diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and various autoimmune diseases. Did you know that the above listed diseases kill 80% of all Americans? Incredible, isn't it? But it doesn't have to be that way! With a diet that gets back to nature, we can take back our health and our lives and live the way God intended us to do so. I'm not saying that I think God wants us all to be vegans, but we could all stand to eat a few more natural foods, right? What a freeing feeling it is to be eating in a way that so close to the way nature intended!

Another way I feel free is that I have overcome ALL of my food addictions. I no longer HAVE to try everything at the dessert table at our church activites or HAVE to have a bowl of chocolate ice cream while I blog as a way to "wind down". Today, at a Boy Scout banquet, fajitas were served. Whereas they smelled wonderful and it was fun to watch the meat, onions and peppers being fried in an authentic Mexican "disco", I had no desire to consume any of it! I had shared a bowl of Raisin Bran with almond milk and strawberries with the twins and the toddler right before the dinner, and I felt completely satisfied with no desire to even have chips and guacamole, which is a favorite vegan snack of mine. As I got to thinking about why I wasn't hungry at all, even though I'd probably only had about half a bowl of cereal for dinner, a little light bulb went off in my head. Perhaps I have felt so satisfied and rarely hungry or tempted to eat things that are not good for me because my body is finally getting the nutrition it needs via vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, beans and grains. When I consumed the standard American diet (SAD), I was depleting my body of key nutrients and I believe my body was always telling me to eat more in a desperate attempt to get the nutrients I was missing. It makes so much sense to me that that is why my appetite has decreased so dramatically!

Just thought I'd share that with you. I'm so happy about this and thanks for listening!

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Sunday, February 22, 2009

Homemaker Monday: Shrek Shakes

Welcome to...


Thank you for joining us! If you're new to this carnival and would like to enter your post, please check HERE for the rules and regs. (By the way, if you have been featured on Homemaker Monday in the past, your name is on my left sidebar. Check it out!)

YOURS: This week's "YOURS" goes to Jen over at Balancing Bedlam and Beauty. Her post is about how she went shopping in her own home for new ways to decorate. And she had waaay too much fun with a can of spray paint! No, not that kind of fun, the good kind, like where you spray paint random things in your house just for fun! Check out this beauty...


...and learn what she did with plates, shelves, and plaques to create a beautiful new wall arrangement! Click HERE for her post. Thank you so much, Jen, for participating and inspirting us! Please feel free to take the "I Was Featured" button from my left sidebar!

MINE: We all know that green leafy vegetables are some of the healthiest things we can eat, right?


But how often are we able to get our kids to eat even just a little bit of greens, especially in their raw, fresh state? Kids who are fed the standard American diet (SAD) simply do not have enough exposure to fresh vegetables and are not able to develop a taste for them. The following is a recipe I tried for the twins and, as you will see, they couldn't get enough. I call it a Shrek shake, because it's bright green and I knew my older kids wouldn't try it if I called it a spinach/banana shake. And I am pleased to say that they now ask me to make this on a regular basis, even though they now know what's in it! We were made to eat this stuff, so let's help our kids develop their natural tastes for what's good for them! Here it is...

Ingredients:
A large handful of spinach
2 frozen bananas
1-2 cups of water or almond milk

Let's first talk about the bananas. The bananas for this shake are best when frozen right as they begin to turn brown. They are so sweet at this stage, the the shake needs no additional sweetener. I simply peel them, cut them into chunks, then lay them on a cookie sheet to flash freeze them. After about an hour, they are hard enough to place in ziploc bags to complete the freezing process. It's great to have lots of these on hand because they made the creamiest, coldest smoothies and shakes!

Simply put these ingredients in a blender, add water or almond milk to the desired consistency and serve...


(Behold the green-ness.)

As I was trying to do a photo shoot of the twins enjoying their shakes, in particular trying to get a photo of some green moustaches, I could not get Hyrum to stop drinking long enough to get a face shot!












(All right, mom, enough already with the picture taking!)

This final shot is one of the toddler with a Shrek Shake moustache, proving that at least three of my kids loved these shakes...


What I love about this photo is that Johnny's moustache matches the color of his sleeper, which matches the color of two of the mixing bowls in the background. Yes, things like that make me happy. I need a life. Enjoy the shakes!

OURS: Okay, now it's your turn! We love reading about how you enrich your lives with great homemaking tips, stories, recipes and inspiration. Thanks for linking up and have a great Homemaker Monday!



I am pleased to list this post at...

-Tip Junkie's "Talk to me Tuesday",
-5 Minutes for Mom's "Tackle It Tuesday",
-Tammy's Recipe's "Kitchen Tip Tuesday",
-Blessed With Grace's "Tempt My Tummy Tuesday",
-Forever Whenever's "Tasty Tuesday",
-Mary's "Tightwad Tuesday",
and
-The Lazy Organizer's "Talk About Tuesday".


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Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Have you ever wanted to be a vegetarian or vegan, but didn't think you had the will power to do it? So did I...

Here's why becoming a vegan...



Have ever you thought that being a vegetarian or a vegan sounded like a cool idea, but didn't think you would ever have the will power to go through with it? So did I. When I first heard the term vegan seven years ago, I couldn't possibly imagine ever having the capacity to make such a change. I knew there would be benefits, such as being like all the stick-thin vegans I have ever known, but I just couldn't give up my milk and cookies. On a side note, when I tell people I'm vegan, it's a little bit embarrassing because I am definitely NOT stick-thin and don't very well fit the "vegan" image. They probably walk away thinking, "Hmmm, she doesn't look like a vegan." Well, I hope time will tell, but truthfully, weight lost was only a pleasant side effect of my decision to make this life-style change. The change first came about when I received this book from my daughter...


I really didn't want to read this book, but I did it for my daughter in exchange for her reading a book I wanted her to read. It's fun to trade like that. This book discusses how a plant-based diet is beneficial in three ways: it enables the ethical treatment of animals, it's the healthiest way to eat, and it is the number one thing one can do to help the environment.

The first section discussed what goes on in the behemoth factory farms throughout The United States. My stomach hurt through most of the reading of this section and that was when I first began to wonder if I might be able to abstain from eating meat as a way of not supporting this ghastly abuse of God's creatures. I read the book for a few days more before I decided I would stop eating meat. I hadn't finished the book yet, but I had learned enough to change my mind about the merits of consuming animal carcasses for dinner. I went on to finish the book and felt like a new world of information had opened up to me. However, this book was published nearly 20 years ago, and I felt like the studies cited weren't recent enough and that I would need to do much further study.

This was when my true education began. During my breastfeeding hours (between four and six hours a day) I googled everything I could think of about being vegetarian. At the beginning of this process I had decided that I would continue to consume dairy products and eggs as they were coming from our own livestock, who I knew were being treated fairly. However, as I continued to learn, I began to feel that perhaps giving up diary and eggs was the way to go. It seemed so difficult, though, as I was truly a milk lover, but I thought, you know what? I am going to go for one day being a vegan, just to see how hard it is. I prepared by making a batch of almond milk and making sure I had lots of fresh fruits, veggies, nuts and seeds on hand and I realized it wasn't so bad. The next day I thought I might try it again, then I went the whole week without consuming dairy or eggs. I soon began to realize that I could be perfectly happy drinking almond milk with my PB&J's and I could live without melting cheese all over everything. It felt good and it felt right.

The "nail in the coffin" so to speak came when I was given the following book for my birthday two weeks ago...


"The China Study" is the most comprehensive study on nutrition every done and I devoured the book. It is written by one of the most experienced nutrition specialists in our country, a man who worked in the top levels of the U.S. government in the food and nutrition institutions. Over the years, however, he became disillusioned with the perverse effect corporations had on government policies, corporations such as the meat and dairy industries and the huge pharmaceutical companies. As I read this book, it made perfect sense and it cemented my desire to no longer consume animal products of any kind. Dr. Colin Campbell also offers some very helpful advice for those who would like to try a plant-based diet. He says that by consuming a plant-based diet, you will be introduced to the "new" food groups. These are...


Viewing food this way has opened a whole new world of food preparation to me. Instead of a diet consisting of salad and birdseed, a diet on which I thought most vegans subsisted, I am able to enjoy so many things I never even knew exsisted. Things such as various nut milk, nut cheeses, raw confections, "pasta" made of zuchini and squash, whole grain cereals and snacks and so many other healthy foods. I used to have a love/hate relationship with my food, loving to put it in my mouth, but feeling guilty about all the fat, sugar and additives in it. I almost always felt guilty after eating. Now, I love my food, I love how it makes me feel and I know I am eating the most healthy things my body needs. And the pounds of fat are dropping off at a rate of about two pounds per week, so my body is thanking me! To me, preparing delicious meals and snacks has been the key to successfully integrating the vegan way of thinking into my life. If you are interested, a couple of great recipe and technique books you might want to try are...



So there you have it. I was certainly the last person anyone thought would ever seek after this lifestyle change, but after trying and seeing the results, i.e. losing weight each week, alleviation of various health problems and an overall sense of well-being, I'm not going back any time soon! If you've ever wanted to be a vegan or vegetarian but thought you lacked the motivation, leave me a comment and let's talk!

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Monday, February 16, 2009

Please join us for this week's "Make It From Scratch" Carnival!

Welcome to this week's...


...blog carnival! Being the host, I got to be the first to see all of the wonderful things people are making from scratch in the blogosphere. Rather than tell you about them, here - let me show you!

IN THE KITCHEN...

-WiseBread presents Make Ahead Bread Mixes



-Nerd Family Food presents Zuppa Toscana Knock-Off

-Menu Maker Mom presents MAKE-A-MENU :: Meatballs, Lasagna, Chili, Salisbury Steak, and Hamburgers

-Kellie presents Peanut Butter Granola Bars



-One Krusty Mama presents Homemade Amish Bread

-Momelo presents Pissaladiere (French Onion Pie)



-Annie presents Sloppy Joe Pizza

-The Thinking Mother presents Home Cooked Smoked Baby Back Barbeque Ribs



-Christ's Bridge presents Blueberry Swirl Dessert

-Funny About Money presents Sweet Potato Carrot Soup



-Carie at Less is More presents Making a Master Shopping List

-The Chief Family Officer presents Meatball Sandwiches



-Cheap Healthy Good present Vegan Ginger Cookies



-Sunflowers in My Kitchen presents Fondue for Two



-My Frugal Front Porch presents Homemade Chocolate Toffee



-in Daily Living presents Black-Eyed Pea Soup

-11th Heaven's Homemaking Haven presents Homemade Sprouted Wheat Manna Bread



AROUND THE HOUSE...

-I've Got a Little Space to Fill presents "Make a Light Box!"



-Make It From Scratch presents Quick and Easy Hand Made Burp Cloths



-Potpourri Gift Catalog present Making Gifts From Potpourri



-Hawaiian WAHMs presents DIY Flat Gift Bags



-Happy Heart at Home presents Homemade Tea Cup Candle



-Promoting My Business presents DIY Advertising via Iron-On Transfers

IN THE BACKYARD...

-Off the Urban Grid presents Bee-Keeping in Your Backyard




TO BEAUTIFY...

-Brianne presents Be an Egg Head (It's Great For Your Hair!)

-Tips and Tricks For Me presents Your Homemade Tutti Fruitti Lip Balm

Thank you so much for joining us today and a HUGE thanks to Stephanie for allowing me to host this week's "Make It From Scratch"! Be sure to check out Mary at Simply Forties for next week's "Make It From Scratch"! If you'd like to enter your post, click HERE for the form. Thanks again!

I am pleased to list this post at...

-Tip Junkie's "Talk to me Tuesday",
-5 Minutes for Mom's "Tackle It Tuesday",
-Tammy's Recipe's "Kitchen Tip Tuesday",
-Blessed With Grace's "Tempt My Tummy Tuesday",
-Mary's "Tightwad Tuesday",
and
-The Lazy Organizer's "Talk About Tuesday".

If you liked this post and would like to join me here on a regular basis via email or other reader, please...
Subscribe

(You'll be helping to pay for at least one of the nine kid's college tuition.)
OR... bookmark or share this post by clicking the little beauty below... Thank you for your visit!