Posts Tagged ‘ weekly ’

Basic healing meals menu plan

February 27, 2012
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The mantra for Milly’s healing foods diet is simplicity.  Meals should be quick to pull together although they require some forethought in terms of soaking, sprouting, fermenting.   The menu follows a basic pattern:

Wheatgrass – 2 fl oz twice a day on an empty stomach

Rejevelac* – 64 fl oz per day, on an empty stomach

Snacks/Food with Medication/Antiemetic  – chia pudding,  flax crackers alone or with pate, gluten-free crackers

Breakfast: chia pudding & green juice or smoothie

Lunch:  OHI plate first** plus optional comfort foods***

Dinner: OHI plate first** plus optional comfort foods***

*Rejevelac is a pro-biotic beverage.  OHI protocol recommends consuming half one’s body weight in fluid ounces per day.  Optimizing digestive flora is essential for supporting elimination.

**an OHI plate mainly consists of salad with sprouts, sprouted seeds, and a non-oil dressing.  The salad takes up the 50-80% of the plate.  The remainder consists of at least 1/4 of living foods fermented veggies, usually sauerkraut or kim-chee.   There will also be 2 Tbsp – 1/4 cup of seed pate or guacamole with either flax crackers or crudites for dipping.  The mantra is “eat the OHI plate first.”  All foods are ok, but we have to ensure optimal nutrition before eating-for-emotions.

***don’t assume we’re 100% raw vegan or even 100% vegetarian.  Comfort foods are totally fine on Milly’s regimen.  Life is about joy.  Any food in moderation, eating with peace and love, does no harm.  The key for healing, is to sate hunger by eating the most nourishing food first.  As time passes, cravings for comfort diminish because the body becomes drawn to the best foods.

Healing foods

February 26, 2012
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M’s cancer has returned.  She thrived while spending time at OHI San Diego last month.  She has decided to continue eating in the OHI/Ann Wigmore/Living Foods vegan tradition – with the very occasional addition of meat, most likely wild salmon.  She will also eat whatever the hell she feels like in a joyous and loving manner.  The focus here is adding as many healing foods to her diet as possible without depriving herself of those things which provide emotional sustenance.  I will support her by eating the same foods and sitting down with her for meals wherever possible.

Food preparation itself is very simple.  No single action takes a lot of time with living foods, with the exception of juicing.  The very nature of sprouting and fermenting means planning ahead but in action it only takes a few minutes of soaking or rinsing each day.  Juicing can take about 45 min of cutting up veg and running them through the machine & clean-up.

We have team of volunteers helping us with nutrition.  Somebody will come by four days per week – Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.   The basic plan is to focus on juice and salads to begin with.  The team isn’t familiar with the living foods lifestyle so we’ll ease into it with the more accessible aspects.  Everybody knows how to make a salad.  It won’t be a stretch to do an “OHI plate” as Milly and I like to call it.

Next weekend the team will come by for an orientation to the equipment and the organization of our kitchen and pantry.  I plan on writing up the food prep schedule and instructions in a different post (or two or three)

Menu planning – Asian Week

June 19, 2010
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I’ve been quite remiss about sharing my weekly food prep. Quite shameful of me really, since this blog is about getting organized to make eating raw vegan as easy as possible. My goal is to someday get my food prep time down to less than 4 hours per week. It may be a bit ambitious. I think I sometimes make too much stuff and my life would be simpler if I repeated more meals. Fortunately, things like sprouts and dehydrates are low on the “hands-on” time even though they take a fair long while to get ready. I decided to go Asian this week. Here’s the plan (note: the re-use of items from day to day). The pate will keep for 2 weeks, so it may end up being Asian fortnight instead of Asian week.

Weekend prep

  • Sprouting  (I’m going with lentil)
  • Dehydrate kale chips for snacks
  • Dehydrate some gingered almonds
  • Make pates
  • Make salad dressing
  • Wash greens
  • Cut up sturdier vegetables (carrots, bell pepper, etc.)
  • Marinate some veggies (mushrooms, bell pepper, zucchini, etc.)

Breakfasts

  • Miso soup
  • Veggie scramble
  • Green juice or smoothie

Lunches

Dinners

  • Sushi
  • Pad Thai
  • Stir un-fry on parsnip rice
  • Spring rolls

Snacks

  • fruit
  • kale chips
  • veggies with asian pate dip

Week 1 menu & prep schedule – post-Thanksgiving leftovers

November 28, 2009
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Arranged Vegetables Creating a Face

Arranged Vegetables Creating a Face

I’m going to go with “holiday leftovers” for week 1 of this raw challenge.  It’s what I’ll have on hand. I guess the theme is “American traditional comfort food.”  I wasn’t going to go raw for Thanksgiving, but I realized I needed to do prep for week 1 anyway.  Might as well take advantage of all the holiday recipes abounding on the raw food blogosphere. And yeah, they’re not leftovers per se, since I didn’t actually make this stuff for Thanksgiving.  But they would have been!

I’ve already got a few staples on hand :

  • raw parmesan
  • flax crackers
  • tortilla chips
  • gRAWnola
  • chocolate macaroons
  • chai spices

Plus I made some cranberry relish the day before Thanksgiving.   There is still a fair amount of prep work to be done. The trick is to think a bit about when I’d like to eat what while considering how best to space out the work.

Here’s the menu with a rough prep schedule.  One can assume I’ll be eating other things besides these menu items. Those would be staples and/or simple salads which don’t require a recipe.  One can also assume that I prep stuff the night before I eat it if the recipe requires more than 10 minutes of preparation.   I do perishable staples a couple of times per week.  That means things like nut milk and washing and cutting up fruit and vegetables.

I probably spent about an 90 minutes doing the thinking today.  That means looking at recipes, writing shopping lists, and thinking about scheduling.   I’ll report at the end of the week how much hands-on time I actually spent preparing stuff.  My ultimate goal is to spend less than 4 (non-consecutive) hours per week making food and less than 2 hours per week shopping for it.  Raw can not become routine if it takes too much time .

Breakfasts

  • Green juice (Monday)
  • Orange and cranberry smoothie (Tuesday)
  • Pumpkin bread with nut butter (Saturday)
  • gRAWnola with nut milk  (already done, almond milk made twice each week)

Lunches

  • Marinated collards with spicy yam chips (greens Sunday, chips Saturday)
  • Waldorf salad (Monday)
  • Green smoothies (Wednesday & Friday)
  • Green bean almondine and flax crackers (Wednesday)

Dinners (all served with a big ass greens & sprouts salad)

Snacks

  • Veggies and dip (wash and cut veg twice a week)
  • Kale chips (Sunday)
  • Macaroons (already done!)
  • Fruit (cut up night before if juicing or making smoothies)
  • Almond milk chai (Saturday, more almond milk on Wednesday)

It seems like a lot.  Too much really.  I need to simplify more.  I think I get carried away with wanting to try out recipes.

Menu planning

November 28, 2009
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I’m beginning to think about what I’m going to eat on the December challenge.  I like to plan menus in advance because (a) raw food can take a lot of pre-preparation that needs thinking ahead (b) I’m anally organized and (c) I do better at sticking to a plan when there is a plan in place.

menuThe biggest thing I’ve learned about menu planning is to incorporate left-overs into the planning.  It eliminates waste.  I don’t want to be throwing away expensive organic produce thank-you-very-much.  It also adds variety.  Huh? How do you get variety when you’re eating leftovers?  By using them differently.  Given that I’m the only person in my family eating this way I do end up with a lot of leftovers.  I need to switch it up so I’m not bored senseless.

The easiest way for me to deal with left-overs is to do theme cuisine.  Regional/ethnic themes work best since they have the same flavor profiles.  Italian food, for example, makes use of garlic, oregano, basil.  A marinade from one meal can transform into a dressing for another.

A sample week of dinners might go something like this:

  1. Cesar Salad, zucchini angel hair pasta and marinara
  2. Antipasto with bruschetta
  3. Lasagna
  4. Minestrone, greens with vinaigrette
  5. Pesto-stuffed portobello mushrooms
  6. Pizza
  7. Fettuccine raw-fredo

And one could alternate some desserts like: gelato, biscotti, pine nut cookies.

The marinara sauce does quadruple duty in the pasta, bruschetta, lasagna, and pizza.  There is rawmasan in the cesar salad, bruschetta, pesto, and fettuccine. The antipasto becomes a layer in the lasagna, or it can be chopped finer and thrown into a minestrone.

You get the general idea.  Now, making 7 different meals is way more work than I can realistically handle.  I’m ok with repeating things so I try to do only 2-3 meals per week.   For an Italian week, I’d make a Cesar dressing, a vinaigrette, a marinara sauce, a pesto and hope like hell that I already had rawmasan and seed crusts on hand from a monthly prep session.

Guess I just started planned one of my weeks.

Mock Salmon Pate – Alissa Cohen

October 21, 2009
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This was the very 1st raw foods recipe I ever made, from the 1st recipe book on living foods that I ever bought, Alissa Cohen’s “Living on Live Foods.”  I couldn’t have made a better introduction to the deliciousness of raw foods.  This is so yummy.  My wife M., a confirmed carnivore, absolutely adores it and actually eats it — without being coaxed!  She loves my raw chef-y creations but on a case-by-case basis. This is her favorite.   Obviously, this recipe is a good one for sharing with non-raw friends and family.

This makes a huge amount of pate.   It lasts about a week in the fridge.  It’s a great make-ahead to have on hand for quick snacks and meals.  I use it on it’s own on top of salads, in lunch time sammiches, wraps, rolls etc.  It’s especially wonderful in raw sushi-maki.

Of course, I had to have some for my lunch today.

mock.salmon Allisa Cohen’s Mock Salmon Pate
Yield: 3 cups Servings: 12

2 cups walnuts
1 red pepper
1 scallion
4 cloves garlic
2 stalks celery
1 tsp salt (I use 1/2 tsp)

Mix it up in a food processor to combine until smooth (optional, I like mine a little chunky since I’m a texture fiend).

Serve with love.

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