Raw Rabble

Almond, Banana and Honey Smoothie

Cameron, Erin and Rosie have whooping cough at the moment, which is a bit intense. It isn't very nice to see them coughing so much. Rosie started it and now the other two have caught it too. Joe seems to have escaped it. I'm not sure where we got it from. I've heard it is going around, but don't know of anyone specifically who has it.

There are often kids going around with coughs they've had for ages. I've heard that these can often be undiagnosed whooping cough. I've also read that if you take a child to the doctor with a nasty cough, and the child has been vaccinated against whooping cough, the doctor will not diagnose it anyway these days.  They call it something else, like asthma for instance. That way they can happily keep the whooping cough statistics low and confined to unvaxed kids. Apparently, when diagnosing it, one of the criteria for eliminating whooping cough is having been vaccinated against it. My hubby and my sister both had whooping cough as children, and both had been vaccinated. My kids have not been vaccinated, but many kids that have, still get whooping cough. My kids are confined to the house and garden pretty much at present. Partly because it is hard to take children out when they have to be accompanied by a vomit bowl, but how many other kids are out there happily passing it on in ignorance.

Okay, that's my gripe over with. The kids are improving thanks to lots of homoeopathic remedies and the help of my homoeopath friend Sarah. (Thanks Sarah) Martin and I are getting very little sleep,as the coughing is most intense at night. I'm so looking forward to a good night's sleeeeep.

Our local Shopping Mall (Meadowhall) has a juice bar now. They do wheatgrass shots and lots of juice and smoothies. There are lots of smoothies with dairy in them and it is obviously aimed at the general market, but I did spot that they do various superfood shots that you can add to your drink like barley grass, maca, goji berries etc.  I had a wheatgrass shot while I was passing. It was such a pleasant surprise to see this in the North of England! There were quite a few customers lining up for their drinks too. Hmmm, things are looking up.

Here's a smoothie recipe that Rosie made up after seeing one of the juice bar leaflets.

Almond, Banana and Honey Smoothie

1 cup almonds
3 cups water

3 bananas
2 dsp raw honey (or more if you like)
1 dsp bee pollen (Bee pollen is a good source of b12.)

Make almond milk by blending up the almonds and water. Strain through a nut milk bag.

Blend the almond milk together with the rest of the ingredients.

Enjoy!

Coaching with Kate

My children have been enjoying quite a bit of cooked food for a few weeks now. It seemed like the more they ate the more they were getting distracted from raw food and I was wondering what to do. Then I thought of Kate. Kate Magic Wood of Raw Living has three home educated raw boys. She has been raw for years and has brought her boys up on raw food. Her eldest was very raw resistant in the early days apparently. Well, Kate does coaching, so I thought I'd ask her all about raw kids and pick her brains about ways to manage raw food in children's diets. She had some wonderful insights. Not just about feeding the children, but about children in general.

Having spoken to Kate I have felt a lot of pressure has been taken off me. I don't feel guilty about it if the children eat a lot of cooked food now. My focus is on getting them to eat as much nutrient rich vegan food as possible, cooked or raw. I have also bought a few things that I can sprinkle on their food to add to it's nutritional content.

From a management point of view I am starting to bargain more with the kids. If they have some barley grass powder in their fruit smoothie they can have some rice at lunch time. Then I put nutritional yeast flakes on the rice, but they like nutritional yeast flakes, so I don't need to bargain about that. The main thing is that they are eating a lot of vegan food, cooked or raw. Eliminating the bad stuff is the main thing. If they feel like they are getting something of what they want, they are less likely to feel deprived and so there is less pressure on me to buy rubbish for them when I go shopping.

The other thing I learned from Kate is that if you have had a few pregnancies and have breastfed a lot, there is a good chance you may be DHA and vitamin D deficient, as these tend to be taken out of mum and given to the baby. As I've had four kids, there is a possibility the younger ones may also be deficient too, as my levels have become depleted. I've had a tendency to depression for a long time, which is apparently a symptom of this. Well I started taking two capsules of DHA a day, and within 2 days I started to feel completely different. I feel much more positive in myself. Apparently your brain is made of DHA (which is an essential fat). Maybe I've had a shrinking brain for years. No smart comments from my husband please.

We all Love Deserts (especially chocolate)

The last few weeks have seen the children tucking into their rice, quinoa and potatoes with gusto. They have been snacking on a variety of fruit. Also popular is anything with chocolate: chocolate smoothies, chocolate pudding, buckwheaties with chocolate milk (seed or nut milk of course.). They also like desserts. I did a nice one the other night. Banana and lucuma custard pie. Getting anything salady down the kids is a non starter at the moment though. I'm getting a lot of requests for crisps and bombay mix, plus we've had visitors bearing chocolate biscuits too recently. The result is that the children's diet is on the slide - downhill.

I feel I've got a couple of options. Either put my foot down and create a lot of bad feeling, which I think will get me nowhere and likely backfire, or relax for a while and try not to make an issue out of it. I want to get the children to see raw food as a treat, not something that has been imposed on them. They, like many other children I'm sure, have been conditioned in the past to see junk food as aspirational food. It tastes good to them. (Even though that "taste" has been artificially created in a lab.) So I guess they need to see raw food as aspirational instead. This means giving them healthy food they like the taste of. Lettuce is no match on the taste stakes compared to MSG laden junk.

It would be really nice to have a constant supply of cheery news and fill my blog with happy stuff but the raw food journey is always a bit up and down and that certainly applies here. It can be very frustrating.

Sometimes I feel my kids aren't eating that healthily at all (and I do give them supplements to try and make up for it). I'd love them to tuck into loads of greens, and occasionally they do, but it isn't that often. I try not to get too depressed about it but I'm that way inclined and so I take their reluctance a bit personally sometimes, which doesn't help. I can't seem to see the wood for the trees as it were. Taking a step back to assess the situation is hard, when you're surrounded by a constant flood of requests and little time for yourself. The responsibility of it all can feel quite overwhelming sometimes. To all those parents out there that have no idea of a healthy diet, I can't help thinking that ignorance is bliss!

We went to Bristol Vegan Fayre on Saturday. The children enjoyed some fresh juice and smoothies from the juice bar and Cameron tucked into a cabbage roll up we bought at one of the stalls (which surprised me a bit I must say). I've tried to reproduce the said cabbage roll up. I thought I did a pretty good job, but Cameron wouldn't touch it! Mummy's food seems to have a bad reputation. (Unless it's a dessert that is.)

Banana and Lucuma Custard Pie

Base:

1 cup nuts
1 cup raisins
1 dessert spoon raw chocolate powder
A few drops of water.

Topping:
2 bananas

Custard:
2 bananas
2 dessert spoons lucuma powder
1 Tablespoon spoon agave or honey
A few drops vanilla extract
2 Tablespoons water (or more) to mix.

Base:
Grind up nuts in a food processor then add chocolate powder.
Add raisins and process until thoroughly mixed.
Add a small amount of water until the mixture sticks together in a ball.
Push into the bottom of a pie dish.

Topping:
Slice the bananas thinly  and arrange over the base

Custard:
Blend ingredients together and pour over the banana topping.
Refrigerate for a couple of hours. The custard will "set".