Friday, September 7, 2012

Salad creation - my new favourite pastime

After the night I spent investigating raw food diet, I decided on it being my long term goal. Or at least giving it a shot for a couple of months and seeing how I feel.

I've never had a strong enough will to go on any diet (or maybe I just never truly felt I needed one) and food/eating habits are the part of life I have most difficulties being strict with. Thus, I'm not looking to go all extreme and deprive myself of all the "goodies" ("badies" when you look at it from your health's persective) I'm used to, because it's not about loosing weight. It's about eating myself healthy instead of eating myself sick. I decided to start with being more aware of what I consume and also how much I consume of it, which will hopefully lead to healthier choices.

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"You can either pay the cost of health or pay the price for sickness"
                                       D. Graham


For quite a while now, I've been keeping a record of all my spendings, down to every penny. It helps you understand your spending habits and, if you so wish, enables you to easily see how you could be more efficient with your money (aka stop spedning on unnecessary sh**). Those last couple of days I took a new approach to reviewing my almighty Excel sheet, which is to say that I've classified one month's food spendings and gave different colours to "healthy", "sweets", "unnecessary" etc. Wow, I'm really bad at this health stuff! (even if I am getting better with $ management...)

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I've started avoiding meat and processed foods but hey, you can't change it all in one day! However, I've been trying to eat salads as the two main dishes during the day and munch only on raw products. I did slip by having another Limoni ice cream (seriously, their stuff is just too good), though I did take healthy (sounding) flavours at least! (banana, peanuts)

As I am already beginning to adapt a new approach to eating, I've decided to get more creative with heathy(er) food. 

For example today - for breakfast I made myself a salad consisting of: red grapes, red bell pepper, red and yellow cherry tomatoes, a nectarine and a tiny bit of blue cheese. While I was cutting all the ingredients, my dad was looking at me as if I were crazy. Admittedly, I considered putting some watermelon in there as well, but I chickened out. Maybe it's good that I did, because the taste was better than I imagined! The veggie-fruit combination interrupted by tiny chunks of blue cheese is a revelation to me.  I would have never guessed those things could go together so well. I think I need to trademark it or something. 

For lunch I had to turn to processing a bit - bought big courgettes a couple of days ago and I'm not sure if and how you eat those raw. A bit of olive oil, garlic, hot pepper and a couple of minutes on the frying pan resulted in the basis for my next salad invention. My parents brought a lot of cherry tomatoes from our summer house, so I added more of those to a bowl where the chopped courgette was waiting, plus some raisins and hazel nuts, a small piece of peccorino-like cheese from Milan, sun dried tomatoes and two spoons of natural yogurt. 
The result? Moist and crunchy veggies coupled with the spiciness of garlic and finely chopped hot pepper, the salty cheese mitigated by yogurt, which in turn stands in great contrast with the taste of sun dried tomates. We mustn't forget the occasional sweet surprise in the form of raisins, which are a winning combo with the very few nuts. 
D-e-l-i-c-i-o-u-s. (some sunflower seeds would have made it perfect)

If anyone's got any ideas for names for the two above, hit me up. 5% royalties is yours.

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