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

• Asian marinated veggie wrap
• Spinach and seaweed salad with oranges and sesame dressing
• Three seaweed salad
• Vietnamese style cabbage salad

Dinners

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

Snacks

• fruit
• kale chips
• veggies with asian pate dip

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)

• Stuffing fantasy with cranberry relish (stuffing Sunday, cranberries already done)
• Mushroom soup (Tuesday)
• Roasted portobello mushroom with mashed ‘taters (taters Thursday, mushrooms Friday)

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.

The 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.

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.

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.