Greetings everyone my name is Ryan. I live in Philadelphia, PA and while I had been recommended to go the living & raw food route about 5 years ago I tried it, gave up quickly and tried to justify my meat eating ways for years. Well I'm back and happy to be here. I'm overwhelmed with the amount of info online and figured this would be a good place to start. I have a few basic questions if you wouldn't mind helping me with:

1. What sites raw/living food sites do you find you visit on a regular basis? I'm a single parent and don't have a lot of time for making a lot of the time consuming dishes I've found so I'm curious to know in particular what sites seem to have the best info and recipes for folks who don't have a ton of free time.

2. Do you use sprouted bread/pasta in your diet? I have just been reading about alkaline foods vs. acidic foods and I'm really going to commit to trying to stick to alkaline foods since I tend to be "acidic" fairly easy. I'm assuming that toasting sprouted bread kills the enzymes thus making it acidic?

3. For things like spirulina, wheat grass, etc... does the dry form of it that I see mean that it's "dead"? I'm assuming it's not considering raw cacao beans are dehydrated. How much nutritional value do you loose by using dried instead of fresh wheat grass?

4. Does anyone have any resources (books, etc..) they can recommend to me to learn how to do this simply. I read raw foods for busy people the 1st time around and found that I didn't like most of the recipes and they were still time consuming.

Thanks for your help and I'll look forward to hearing from you!

Ryan

1. liferegenerator (Dan McDonald) on Youtube. raw veganism on LiveJournal is active. Russell James, Ani Phyo, and Philip McCluskey posts a lot on their Facebook accounts.

I make onion bread and flax crackers. Both require dehydration.

I don't use these. I prefer live organic leafy greens.

Just want Dan's videos (liferegenerator) on youtube. He posts 2 videos a day or more and it covers a lot of topics.

Blessings to you!

Hi, Ryan,

Welcome!

1) Have you checked the not the Recipes on this site that you get to from the left hand column on the home page (not to be confused with the "Recipes and Food Preparation" forum/threads). A site with a lot of recipes is www.goneraw.com. And www.allraw.com has recipes with good photos. Also, www.fromsadtoraw.com has recipes. You'll likely find that recipes are time-consuming and they can have questionable ingredients in terms of being raw. Also, they sometimes combine foods in ways that aren't good for digestion. So, instead of always following recipes, you may want to eat fruit mono-meals, green smoothies, or salads (and save the recipes for when you have time).

2) I make sprouts and have made dehydrated sprout bread, but don't eat any baked or toasted breads.

Maybe someone else has infor for #'s 3&4.

Good luck!!!


My favorite raw vegan

Raw Food Talk has a parents forum that I have found helpful
Raw Freedom Community is a great site, the recipes on there are unbelievable. Her blog is called the sunny raw kitchen. I have posted some of her dishes on here, she's got great combos for "pasta" sauce that the kids have liked (ish). The desserts are wowee!

If you care to use sprouted bread/pasta, I say go for it. You can offset any acidity with an extra helping of salad or other alcaline foods. You may lose your desire for those foods over time but for now, if you want to include them, I don't see that they are so incredibly damaging. I personally aim for high health, not perfection, I find it easier to attain the former

You can make angel hair pasta from zucchini using a spiralizing tool. They aren't too expensive and are great for kids and friends who want to try something raw but aren't sure they're going to like it.

Spirulina and wheatgrass are packed with nutrition, even dried. Fresh of course has more, plus enzymes etc, but it's not like dried is bad. On a relative scale it's still probably one of the most nutritious thing you're eating, it's concentrated galore! Better than vitamin tablets. Better than a sandwich. Pretty darn good.

Viktoria Boutenko's book 12 Steps To Raw was the latest one I read and it was incredible. So gentle and accessible, no guilt or fear or labelling, just nice positive encouragement and good basic food ideas. I liked it a lot. For uber tasty dishes I hit that sunny blog, everything I've tried from there has been ridiculously delicious.

My kids like the morning smoothie I make and I've tried it out on their friends with success as well. It's so easy, pack the blender with baby spinach (I have used regular leaf too), add some fruit (any combo of these: fresh or frozen berries, pineapple, apple, pear, grapes, etc) add juice or water and a banana (banana makes it really sweet for the kids). Blend and serve. Tastes better than it sounds, I promise