Still alive post-raw cooking class! :)

Sorry everyone for the lapse of time without updates. I am alive and well and eating lots of good stuff (except for the occasional chocolate macaroon and the few sun-dried black olive binges). I was incredibly busy last week preparing for the raw-vegan cooking class. Practice runs, typing up mini-cookbooks to hand-out and generally just stressing over how this was going to go down.

I’m happy to report that my “uncooking” class went super well! It was so much fun! People loved my little raw creations and I got to talk a lot about the lifestyle in general. The funniest part of the workshop was when I pulled out the miso and said “now miso isn’t technically raw”… some of the participants went “Ooooooooo!” hahhaa. The raw-sushi was definitely a hit (especially the marinated shitake mushrooms) and the chocolate desserts went so fast… I didn’t even have time to take pictures! Even I was surprised at how delicious the chocolate mousse parfaits were!

I’ll be posting some of these recipes on “A Crunchy Conspiracy” shortly. In the meantime, here’s what I taught this weekend;

• Raw sushi madness
• Marinated Bok Choi and Shitake salad
• Green curry coconut noodles (from Raw Food Real World)
• Happy Date and Fig Squares (adapted from goneraw.com)
• Chocolate mousse parfaits
• Chocolate sushi rolls (didn’t have enough time to firm up, ended up being chocolate truffles)

I even got to talk about juice feasting! The participants were genuinely interested and curious about raw foods and juicing. It was really great! I got to sneak away with green curry leftovers which was awesome because I REALLY love this dish right now. I’ve had TONS of green curry this weekend; from the practice run and from teaching the workshop. Sarma’s recipes are to die for!

I missed blogging and I missed you guys! Hope you weren’t too concerned. As you can imagine, this was a lot of work to prepare for and I was pretty burnt over the following days. My kitchen is a bit of a mess still; I cleaned it all before starting the prep work on Sunday morning (before the class) and … now it’s a mess again. The prep work consisted of hacking open 8 coconuts to make coconut noodles (I saved one to demo during the class). I also made faux tuna for the sushi. That also went over very well; people were just eating it out of the bowl at the end! Hehehe.

On the emotional-detox front, things have been progressing very well. My dreams have reached a new level where I’m actually being explained what the iconography of my dreams signifies. The other night I was dreaming of dried flowers and suddenly this little girl came up to me and told me that dried flowers represented emotional detox. I’m sure that’s not the case for everyone but I thought that merited mentioning. It’s weird how my subconscious is becoming personified in my dreams and is cooperating with my conscious mind to divulge its secrets.

This are going pretty well so far. :) Sorry again for the delayed posting... Today I had:

8 dates (the fruit kind... not the cute boy kind)
half a watermelon

a few flax crackers
a few sundried black olives

one bowl of green curry coconut noodles

a few dried figs

my version of fattoush salad with creamy sweet garlic dressing

That's it! :)

- Ben