Posts Tagged ‘Plant Matter’

Plant Based Food Recipes

June 17th, 2010

Within the raw food discipline, there are many different paths to better eating. While you might initially equate a raw food regimen with a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle, there are plenty of ways to keep eating different types of meats while staying true to a raw diet.

However, these practices tend to be the minority while getting more than their fair share of the attention. In the mad rush to show outsiders that a raw food diet is not as alien and strange as they might think it is, many raw foodies will go overboard with the meat recipes, adding cold smoked salmon to just about every dish in the hopes of appealing to those who might be frightened of a raw, meatless diet.

But truth be told, there are many more delicious food choices within a raw food diet, and a majority of them involve no meat at all. These plant based food recipes rely only on what can be grown and eaten raw, and as simple as that might sound, it can offer amazingly complex flavors and textures. And no, eating plant based recipes does not mean that all you are eating are salads.

A great example of an exciting raw plant based meal is a take on vegetarian sushi. To begin the meal, you might like to start with a light beverage that can be enjoyed with the meal. Rather than opting for traditional sake, you might consider lightly carbonated mint-infusion water. While the bottled stuff at the store can be quite pricey, you can make your own at home using fresh mint, ice water and an inexpensive home seltzer kit.

Traditional Japanese sushi is made with vinegar and rice, but the raw plant varieties are more of a sashimi style of presentation. Here, there is no rice, but just thinly sliced pieces of fish – or in this case, vegetables. You can create a very delicate and intricate plate of plant sashimi by thinly slicing fruits and veggies such as avocado and eggplant. Instead of using traditional soy sauce, you can use the raw variety found in many alternative grocery and health food stores, and of course, you can add some thinly sliced ginger to the plate for flavor. If you love the sinus-clearing kick of wasabi, you can make your own by grinding up fresh wasabi root. Try to avoid the premade pastes, many of which are not wasabi at all, but a mixture of horseradish, mustard, flavors and coloring agents.

For dessert with this fancy meal, you can create your own green tea iced dessert. While mass marketed green teas have already been dried and heated, you can find raw green tea leaves online or in some specialty grocery stores. Another option is to use matcha, which is a finely ground green tea powder made from sun-dried tea leaves. Either way, you can mix your green tea with frozen bananas in a food processor to create a fine but creamy dessert that will match the elegance of your main dish.

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What is an Alkaline Diet?

December 22nd, 2009

We’re going back to basics on this one. Many of you have asked what makes an alkaline diet. So I thought I would give you some of the basics in this post.

The first thing you need to understand is what an alkaline food item is. These are foods that, once digested, leave behind an ash that has a basic pH rating of seven or higher. Rather than use this as cooking information, followers of the acid alkaline diet use this combustion as a comparison to how the body breaks down and uses food as a fuel source.

These foods leave behind minerals like calcium, copper, iron, magnesium and zinc when they are consumed by fire. Foods that leave this kind of residue include low-glycemic index fruits and vegetables, citrus fruits, tubers, roots and nuts. Switching your diet to solely these food items, it is believed, will help keep the body’s overall pH balance at a slightly alkaline level, which is thought to be a natural and healthy state. Foods to avoid on this plan include animal proteins, processed foods, unnatural sugars, and stimulants like caffeine.

One of the benefits of following a raw diet plan is that it is inherently alkaline in nature!

A diet rich in alkaline foods is also thought to reduce the body’s reliance on stored pH balancers such as the calcium in bones. Some studies have even shown that an alkaline-rich diet, or a regular use of supplements, can increase the amount of bone mass and muscle mass in older people, helping to offset conditions like osteoporosis in women and degenerative muscle wasting in the elderly. And while many say that more research is needed on the benefits of an alkaline diet, there have been studies done that show that the formation of kidney stones is largely prevented with an alkaline-rich diet.

Followers of an alkaline diet say that their food consumption is closer to what our ancestors would have originally eaten. They say that, before the onset of Western civilization, a typical human diet was unprocessed and uncooked plant matter. Grains were not edible until the discovery of tools like the mortar and pestle, and meats were an uncommon addition, depending on the hunting prowess of the tribe, rather than domestication of meat-bearing animals. Instead, people had to rely on the plants, fruits and vegetables that could be eaten without problematic preparations.

Proponents of an alkaline diet may do so to alleviate symptoms that they believe are due to larger amounts of acidic foods in the modern diet. Practitioners say that people suffering from frequent illnesses and headaches, or an overall lack of energy, and women who have ovarian and benign breast cysts might benefit from an alkaline diet, or at the very least, a reduction in the amounts of red meat and processed grains that a person consumes.

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