Move over oat groats, Spelt is here!

Food for the Day

1. Warm lemon water w/ raw honey

2. Berry Smoothie (berries + water) w/ spirulina, maca, & mesquite powders

3. Green Juice (celery, kale, collard greens, cucumber, ginger, kiwi)

4. 1/2 Apple

5. A mandarin

(I definitely feel back on track with my body after having just done this for a few days... I think by tomorrow I will have fully recovered from my white flour mishap)

Like most healthy foods have had to suffer since the rise of the unholy capitalist agro-food system, spelt is a grain that was once widely used throughout Europe and some parts of the Middle East that all but vanished by the 20th century. A hybrid crop with a mysterious and ancient history going back to the Bronze age, it wasn't introduced in the US until the late 1800s, where it only had a little while to thrive before it and all other wonderful forms of grains (kamut, amaranth, teff, etc.) were completely overshadowed by a booming wheat industry. (because wheat was just the 'easier' crop to go... I love the laziness of our species...)

Thanks to our growing consciousness for a return to healthy whole foods, spelt and its disenfranchised brothers and sisters have slowly been creeping back into our supermarkets, providing a healthier alternative to enriched white flour. Indeed, with a more nutty flavor, spelt can be a replacement for wheat, in everything from breaks, cakes, and now raw foods! Spelt has a very wide range of nutrients (much wider than your typical wheat), including vitamin b2, manganese, niacin, and thiamin (which just happens to be what the unnaturally 'enriched' part of most flours are... go figure!). For a little more detail, the spelt breakdown is about 68% carbs (about 9 of which are fibre), 17% protein (now that's high), and about 3% fat.

So where does the raw diet come in? In an effort to maximize the variety of foods we eat, I figured that if you can soak oat and buckwheat groats, why not spelt berries (or any other type of grain berries for that matter...)? Also, when I was a crazy vegan baker (which I guess I technically still am), spelt was my flour of choice, so I'm really psyched to be able to bring it back into my life.

My experiment worked beautifully! After soaking the spelt berries overnight (or maybe it was 24 hours), I rinsed them, and dehydrated them until they were dry (I think that took overnight too). I then ground them up into a flour with my lovely Vitamix dry blender (the fine-ness of the flour that came out was VERY impressive) and turned them into the best raw chocolate chip cookies ever!

Raw Spelt Cookies (yes, I still don't actually measure out my recipes)

Ground spelt berries

Ground cashews (less than the spelt)

Maple syrup

A very little bit of melted coconut butter

Cinnamon

Sea salt

Vanilla extract

Chocolate pieces/chips

Something else to do with raw spelt berries would be to keep some of them right after they have been soaked, rinse them, and grind them into a porridge. Mix them with raw candied nuts, dried fruit, cinnamon, maple syrup/agave, and salt for a nice morning meal just like you would with oat groats... mmm, now I'm hungry. And now you can incorporate spelt into your raw diet (or any diet you are on)!

Workout of the Day

1.5 hours of healing Bikram

(crazy Bikram story of the week: I had an old wound literally peel off like a sticker in the middle of class, revealing absolutely no scar or anything underneath... it's like I never even had it. It was awesome, and creepy, and resulted in some more of my usual spontaneous--but quiet--laughter to myself in the middle of class)