90 Days of Organic Raw Vegan-ness: week 8

After I got over our decision to add in fish (fish oil for me, raw fish for Cameron), the journey was back on. It was just another week of otherwise raw organic vegan-ness, until one night, by chance, I mentioned slicing my finger on our mandolin to one of my freelance clients. Well, naturally this sparked conversation as to what I was making, which lead to the story of our decision to go organic raw vegan for 90 days. My client was floored! He too, coincidentally, was testing the waters of organic vegan eating. This was entirely too exciting for both of us.

I related this feeling to the “buying a new car concept.” I’ve observed with several of my friends, including myself, that when you first get a new car suddenly everyone else that has that car stands out. You drive down the road and no matter what color, year, whatever, you seem to notice, “oh that person has my car too!” This is exactly what was happening in our minds when the words organic raw vegan left my lips and made their way, as vibrating sound waves, into his ear drums. There was that split second when our beings had to translate sounds into thought before the pure joy of being able to share knowledge and experiences fell over us.

Immediately he brought me into his kitchen to rant and rave about all the fine cooking equipment. Quickly searching for anything to scramble the words coming out of his mouth I happily found a piece of scrap paper to write down a few fantastic new books to look into, as well as webcasts, websites and other goodies including: rawfood.com, lovingraw.com (also on YouTube), the blog of Russell James, and another hard copy book, Raw Food Made Easy. Funny thing was, he had the same Raw Food/Real World book Cameron and I had been basing all of our recipes from. He also agreed this was one of his favorites.

Russell James, of the Raw Chef Blog & one of his raw vegan creations.

More Russell James organic raw vegan yumminess.

Philip McCluskey of LovingRaw, before and after loosing 200 lbs (half his body weight) on a raw food diet.

Our one hour meeting quickly turned into three, and it was time to make my way home. It was cold again, and I didn’t appreciate mother nature teasing me with warm summer days and then dropping it back down into the 40s again. As I was driving home, I caught a smell of some kind of baked yumminess and the warmth of that aroma overwhelmed my senses. It was happening again. I had my first craving since way back in week four. I thought to myself, I really don’t think I could pull this 80/20 thing of raw vegan in the winter time. I just long for warm foods when it’s cold outside. When I got back to Cameron’s house I decided that I was going to engage in one of our three indulgences and have a nice hot cup of spearmint tea. Well… that lead to two indulgences — a nice bar of Green and Black’s 70% Dark Chocolate. This was a great sharing week.