I'm finding that during the colder months, the fruit selections are limited in my area (upstate NY). We have some apples, bananas, oranges, etc; however the berries that were around during the summer are either too expensive, not sweet enough or just not available. I'm still forging ahead with my new way of eating, it's going so great and there is no turning back even if I wanted to. I'm just curious...how do you survive the winter months on raw? Is it okay to use frozen berries for smoothies?

Happy Holidays to everyone!

A lot of people freeze fruit in advance for the winter. Cascadian Farms frozen fruit is one of the only ones considered raw. Some will get food delivered from elsewhere, if you can afford it. Otherwise just need to get creative with what you have access to.

Simple Raw Recipes & Health Tips

I'm in upstate NY too. This time of year, local apples really become the calorie-wise staple of my diet. I went berry picking several times over the summer, and my freezer is now well stocked with strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and tart cherries. I spoke to a local blueberry farmer who makes blueberry vinegar, and made special arrangements with him for a jug of his vinegar unpasteurized. (He usually pasteurizes it because his bottling place won't bottle it unpasteurized.) Sprouting is amazingly easy, and can provide a great supply of super-healthy greens all winter. There are also farms in my area that produce greens all winter, either greenhouse grown or hydroponic. Carrots are important too, because of all the local winter-storage veggies, they're probably the most plentiful and the easiest to eat raw.


The motivation to stay local is a good one, but don't carry it to an extreme where you're at risk of getting depressed about your diet! I hate to import the bulk of my food, but I'm willing to import some of it. We're just now entering the best time of year for citrus fruits. The oranges and grapefruits are great, but I especially love having a constant supply of lovely lemons and limes to flavor all kinds of dishes this time of year. Bananas make a great additive to almost any fruit or green smoothie. Avocados are a plentiful imported fruit too. I like to buy other assorted imported veggies and fruits from time to time in order to keep things interesting. I bought a zucchini a couple of days ago to make a new salad dressing recipe that I saw in this blog post.

Eating well during an upstate winter can take practice. My advice is to do as well as you can and continue to expand your toolkit. It's too late to freeze or dehydrate for this winter, but if you haven't gotten into sprouting yet, now is a great time to start. You can mail order all kinds of sprouting seed if you don't have local suppliers. It's incredibly cost effective, and can add more variety to your diet than you might think. You can make sprouts with some really intriguing flavors, like garlic chives or fenugreek. (Fenugreek tastes a lot like licorice.)

If you feel yourself getting bored, mix things up as best you can. New salad dressings make a big difference to me. You can completely reshape the experience of a salad with a new salad dressing. You can also splurge on some overpriced tropical thing. I have a whole pineapple sitting on my kitchen counter right now. I know that pineapples don't travel well to the north, that they are always shipped unripe, and that this one is almost guaranteed to be acidic enough to cause my mouth real pain if I ate it all, but that just means I'll have to find a slower way to enjoy it.

Coming back to the apples, one of the reasons apples do make a good staple is their mild flavor. If you make a smoothie or a juice with 75% apples and 25% something rarer, the 25% will probably be primary taste you experience. It's a great way to stretch the experience of what you have little enough of.

P.S. The very first post I ever made on this forum was when I was just thinking about trying raw, and I had doubts about my ability to pull it off during the NYS winter. Over time, this has become less and less of a concern for me. The more I experience and read, the more possibilities there seem to be.

Hi Amarynth

I'm surprised you have such a poor selection of fruit in New York. In the UK our supermarkets have a wide selection of fruit throughout the winter - papayas and persimmons are particularly good right now.

Or is it, as Frances suggested, you're trying to eat local only? In the UK we have no fruit at all growing for at least six months of the year, so I definitely take advantage of the fact that people living in the climates that we are most suited to biologically (and originated from) share it with me! (And eating from a wide variety of locations means a wide variety of soils, minimising fears of nutrient loss through soil depletion - what one soil lacks another may have in abundance.)

Hence I don't use frozen fruit (although if all I had to choose from was apples, bananas and oranges I probably would!).

UK is covered with snow right now, and we've had sub-zero temperatures for the longest period in December that I can remember. But the papayas are still going down a treat!

This article on raw in winter might be helpful:

[debbietookrawforlife.blogspot.com]

Well I agree with you - it is really hard in the cold winter months. The fruit in England is under ripe and very expensive and very unappealing.

Just do the best you can and know that you are not alone.

Yes it is absolutely fine to use frozen berries - my staple is banana and thawed, frozen raspberries smoothies. Probably infar better condition than fresh raspberries.

I always find the 'unripe fruit' thing interesting. I eat mostly fruit and never eat unripe fruit. I sometimes buy the fruit unripe (eg bananas) but never eat them until they're ripe, and they do ripen beautifully on my window-sill.

Papayas have been beautiful for the last couple of months - peak of ripeness (soft, yellow), and so have persimmons. Mangoes are pretty tasteless, but then they so often are.

Is it expensive? A meal of six persimmons costs £3. I'd have spent at least that on my dinner in cooked food days.

Whereabouts are you, Philippa? (I seem to remember Devon?). Do you have a Waitrose near you? I do admit that I can't buy organic papayas and persimmons, but...

and satsumas are at their juiciest and sweetest right now!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/21/2009 09:33PM by debbietook.

Debbie, you have GOT to come to the southern hemisphere to get some good mangoes. They have a glorious taste! And besides, it's summer here.


My favorite raw vegan

Amarynth,
I think I understand, where I live the produce is often questionable any time of the year. I go to a local coop and the quality is higher, but usually a bit more in price, but its worth it for me. There is always the bannanas, oranges, apples, pears, avocados are usually not so great, but never are.

I am pleased that the kale is actually quite good right now. I also buy sprouts, and have started sprouting some of my own. I also discovered some wild frozen blueberries, and some really good frozen cherries. Its probably not optimal compared to the ideal fresh product, but it increases the variety. I am still transitioning, so I sometimes include some cooked stuff. I may not need to, but it is difficult sometimes to adjust to the feeling of being so light in the digestion of food.

Good evening, Thank you for the responses. I like the idea about freezing the fruit during the peak season and will strive to do that next spring/summer. It's not that there isn't a lot available, but I was in the local produce store the other day and missed seeing the peaches, plums, berries and nectarines that I had gotten used to in the summer. Indeed, there are plenty of apples, banana, avocados, etc. I was just worried about how I was going to survive on the limited selection, as I don't want to find myself straying...

And yes, I think I was trying to stay local, which would hinder my progress significantly. I've never had a papaya actually, so will have to see if I can find one. I love mangos and find them very tasty.

I see now that the key is preparation. Thank you all so much for your input!

Another question...does anyone know anything about Alissa Cohen and her book "Living on Live food"? I came across it while doing some web searching, but I wanted to get some feedback before I consider trying to find her book and reading it.

I have come up with a way of yearly eating that works for me. I eat almost all of my food as simple fresh raw meals with most meals being mono meals and a small % being two food meals like my breakfast wheatgrass juice with an orange juice chaser. There isn't as much diversity in selection as people who do recipes have to select from. I compensate for this by not eating my winter foods all year long. Here's how I do it: Make a list of the foods available to you right now (Dec/Jan) and title it "winter foods" and stop eating those foods as soon as new seasonal foods become available. For example when the small yellow mangoes become available replace something on your list like maybe Honey Crisp Apples with it and leave the apples out of the diet until next winter. Another example is to replace the banana with the watermelon. As new seasonal foods become available replace the foods on your winter list until you arn't eating any of them. In the fall as the summer foods become unavailable replace them with foods from your winter list. What this does is to keep the taste of my winter foods alive and NEW. I learned the hard way that if I don't do this I hit a wall so to speak where I look at whats available and want something else. I don't hit that wall any more because I have "NEW" foods to eat in the winter. I make an exception for my breakfast wheatgass juice and have it all year long. If you eat recipe meals this won't be as necessary for you as you can keep adding new recipes. Good luck.

debbietook Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Papayas have been beautiful for the last couple of
> months - peak of ripeness (soft, yellow)

Definitely! I had a pudding of papaya and banana and it
was awesome

Also, in Waitrose there have been excellent offers on fruit
(buy one get one free/half price etc).

Nom nom nom

Amarynth

I eat a papaya almost every day. My favourite fruit smoothie is consists of a couple of oranges blended with a nice ripe papaya. The two fruits balance each other in a smoothie so nicely.

Hi Amyranth...WOLFBERRIES (goji berries) from lucsherb.com are only $5.95/lb

Hi! Thank you Sunberry and Janabanana! I haven't tried the goji berries yet either. I wonder if they would be good with some Almond milk...I made some the other day and loved it. I had a mango yesterday with some banana for breakfast, a HUGE salad for lunch and dinner. The mango wasn't so ripe, but a few days on my counter and it was pretty good.

Debbie
It's interesting what is expensive to one and not another - I could definately eat FAR cheaper when I was eating cooked vegan food. For me £3 is a lot of money for 6 fruits and not what I can sustain financially. We are on a tight budget and I often feel guilty about spending far more on my food than the other two members of my family do combined. Yes I do have a Waitrose near by and I appreciate the good quality produce - I just find it terribly expensive.