We’re most of the way through the first week, and so far I’m truly enjoying the program. Here are just a few of the highlights for me:

• New journal exercises are helping to keep it fresh. The 21 and 28 day journal exercises are great, but when you do the programs back to back (to back), there can be quite a few repeats. So far the journalling has been a fresh new experience.
• Jinjee uses MacGourmet, and has shared the files with the program participants — which saves me a nice chunk of time over inputting the recipes myself from a PDF.
• A more active and dedicated community. It also seems larger to me, perhaps because this is the first run of the REP.

With regards to the food, I’ve been following a different raw program (with my mom, it’s fun for us to be eating the same food together, even if we live far apart), and I’ll head on over to the REP recipes once we wrap up this run of the other meal plan. There are some really tasty looking ones, so I’m excited to give those a go.

If anyone is interested in joining in, I think they’re accepting new participants through the end of January. You can find out more info about it here.

Finally, here are my before pictures from Monday (for the Garden Diet’s Raw Empowerment Program).

Since this is an ongoing program, how often do people want to see photo updates — monthly, quarterly, or some other interval?

I’ve decided to take the next step in the Garden Diet programs and go for their brand new Raw Empowerment program. I’m actually pretty excited about this — I love connecting with other people on the ‘raw path’, and learning more about raw food. It looks like there are some amazing new recipes, too!

I’m hoping that I’ll be able to have a more varied and sustainable way forward in my raw food journey, without having to rely on others’ meal plans indefinitely. Of course, I also hope to continue improving my athletic performance while on the program. I’ll be writing more about the REP in the near future (as well as posting my before pictures), but please feel free to comment if you have any burning questions!

After participating in the Garden Diet’s 21 Day Raw Cleanse and sending in my before and after pictures, I found myself in the running to win a pass for 2 to a raw retreat — awesome! You can vote for me (or whomever you feel is most deserving, I’m the third down) here, if you’d like.

By the way, if you’ve thought about doing the Garden Diet programs and going for the refund option, I can tell you that it’s legit. My program fees were entirely refunded after I followed the refund program instructions Jinjee sent me (primarily sending in my pictures with a testimonial and a link to my blog).

I had a feeling October was going to be a busy month, and I was right! Lots of roller derby stuff, a visit from my Mom (who lives in another country), and work. Feeling accomplished, though. :)

While my mom was visiting (for about a week), she decided to eat mostly raw with me — all of our meals at home were raw, and our two meals out were cooked vegan. It might not be a huge jump (she did raise me vegetarian, after all), but I was really happy to be able to share some amazing raw food with my mom. By the end of it, she had told me that she was inspired to eat raw vegan at home… awesome!

I wanted to share two recipes that I tried this week, one that was raw veganized, and one that I threw together. I love the festive mood that cranberries get me into.

Brussels Sprout Pecan Salad

Adapted from Alton Brown recipe, with dressing recipe adapted from Raw Loulou
Serves 6

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. fresh Brussels sprouts, rinsed and trimmed
• 1/2 cup pecans, coarsely chopped
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
• 1/2 cup cranberries, coarsely chopped
• 1 tablespoon raw sweetener of your choice
• 2-3 tablespoons oil (I use Vega’s EFA Blend)
• 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
• 1 teaspoon dijon mustard (optional)
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 small chunk ginger, peeled
• 2 tablespoons almond butter

Directions:

1. Slice the Brussels sprouts using the thinnest slicing disk of a food processor (if you do not have a food processor, you may slice thinly with a knife or a mandoline).
2. Massage salt into the Brussels sprouts. They won’t necessarily take on a ‘wilted’ texture the same way that kale or other greens will, but they do soften up a bit.
3. Blend the sweetener, oil, vinegar, mustard (optional), garlic, ginger, and almond butter until combined and creamy.
4. Combine all ingredients, toss and serve.

Harvest Holiday Juice
Serves 1

Ingredients

• 3 oranges, peeled
• 1/4 persimmon
• 1 small chunk of ginger
• 1/3 cup cranberries

Directions

Blend all ingredients in veggie juicer. This makes a nice creamy juice.

I hope you enjoy the recipes — even if you don’t make them, I hope they inspire you to try something new in the kitchen today.

I know, I still need to get updated before & after pictures (not to mention review) from the Garden Diet up — but I just had a delicious kale dish, and I had to share.

I came across this recipe, and I thought ‘l love kale… I love falafels… how can I make this work?’ The results were quite tasty. So tasty, that I didn’t get a chance to photograph it before it had all been eaten.

Ingredients

¾ head kale
½ teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoons Vega EFA oil (or substitute liquid oil of your choice)
¼ cup cashews, powdered in coffee grinder
6 cherry tomatoes, sliced
½ serving Falafels (I used the recipe from the Garden Diet, here’s a raw falafel recipe that doesn’t need a dehydrator if you aren’t on the GD program)
1 ½ tablespoons nutritional yeast

Directions

Tear the kale into small pieces, and massage with salt until the greens take on a more cooked texture.

Coat the kale with the oil. Add in the cashew powder and mix. Add in the tomato, nutritional yeast, and falafel (cut into pieces), and toss lightly before serving.

One of the tools that really seems to be helping with organizing my raw recipes (and meal planning, and rough nutritional estimates) is MacGourmet. It makes copying and pasting recipes from websites easy, and has optional plug-ins for meal planning (including shopping lists for selected date ranges) and nutritional info estimates (based on the USDA database). There’s also an optional cookbook plug-in, if you want to create hard copy cookbooks from your recipes.

As a companion, MacGourmet has an iPhone (and iPad) app available as well. MacGourmet Touch comes with 100 recipes (note: many of them are non raw/vegan/vegetarian), which you can overwrite or append using your own recipes from the desktop MacGourmet app. I find the iPhone app pretty helpful in the kitchen (though there’s often some finagling involved in syncing the recipes — my copy has one recipe that causes the sync to hang).

MacGourmet’s base price is $29.95, with the optional plug-ins ringing in at $9.95 each (or all three plug-ins for $24.95). The iPhone app is currently $2.99, the iPad version is now $4.95.

I hope this helps some of you!

Yup, I’m planning to do Vegan MoFo this year! I know I have a bit of catching up to do, but I’m really excited about sharing how I move from the Garden Diet meal plans to creating my own raw meal plans for the month.

Anyone else excited about the fall weather? There’s been a nice little explosion of local produce, with apples, pumpkins, and other winter squashes starting to make the rounds.

I also discovered a fantastic place for getting locally grown fruits and veggies: Delaware Local Food Exchange. They’re open three days a week in the back of a health food store, and aim to provide local produce at good prices. Lots of lovely local herbs here, too!

I also checked out The Well Marketplace for the first time, which was a nice little stop for a wider selection of fresh food. Not a bad organic section here.

I know, I know — what am I doing linking to a paleo food website on a raw vegan blog? Truth is, I’m in a split household: one of us is eating raw vegan, the other is eating based on the Primal Blueprint. Fortunately, there’s actually more overlap than you might imagine.

Steve at Caveman Bob confirms that both of the salad dressings and the spicy BBQ sauce are raw-vegan friendly. The sauces are made with great high quality ingredients, so they might be worth a look if you want the convenience of a bottled dressing.