Eat Dance Live

... they're for veggies too! You may or may not have come across references to massaged kale, but there is a totally legitimate reason to do so! I know a lot of people are often put off by the idea of eating raw kale, and I'm not super into using it in green smoothies, but massaging it gives it the yummiest texture ever. In fact, I could probably eat massaged kale every day it's that good. My preferences aside, the whole point of massaging your kale is that because it's a tougher cruciferous green, it's more difficult to digest than something like lettuce so working salt, an acid (like lemon or ACV), and a little healthy oil into it can help prematurely break it down, making its nutritional benefits more absorbable by your body. There are tons of reasons to eat kale. It's high in beta carotene (more so than carrots!), vitamin K, C, and A, lutein, and is pretty high in calcium, manganese, iron, fiber, a bunch of B vitamins, and vitamin E. Also if you care

Is it super appropriate that it's the Chinese Moon Festival and I'm talking about Moon Cycles? So first off, happy Zhong Qiu Jie to any or all who are celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival! Anyhoo, I have a plan: thirty-some years from now I plan on bragging just as much about how easy going through menopause is, as I am bragging right now about how I breeze my way through my monthly cycle. While you may so not want to be hearing about this, I feel that I do have bragging rights. Like the people with the amazing before and after weight loss photos, I'd like to have pictures of how I used to feel around this time of the month. The before picture would be me all but dying on a couch, and the after shots would be me breezing through a Power Yoga class (which I did), or riding a horse (which I have in the past), or climbing Mount Everest (which I plan on doing)... Needless to say, I feel great! Like I've mentioned before , a number of factors have contributed to my female h

Ah, what to do when you get a baking itch after the stores are closed and your cupboards are devoid of your usual raw dessert ingredients? Why, use the "Everything but the Kitchen Sink" method of course! All you've got to do is find as much of the usual ingredients as you need for a recipe, and then, well, wing it! Use up leftovers, use up what's going to go bad in your fridge, the possibilities are endless! I wanted to make some high-raw cookies for my dessert monkey/ soulmate , so I started by grinding raw oat groats, threw in a dash of coconut butter, vanilla powder, salt, the last of our maple syrup supply, the ends of our brazil nuts, and a little water. Before I mixed though, I had to add toppings so I started with the last of a bag of raw pecan (chopped) and chocolate chips, and while that tasted good, it was nothing special. I wanted crunch, so I threw in bits from the latest version of my grawnola recipe , and that made it perfect! I dehydrated th

On January 1st of 2011, I'll be celebrating my third year as a full-fledged dedicated gym-goer. While I had always been active growing up, it was never something I really put any thought into nor did on a regular basis. Like most girls, I adopted more of a gym "lifestyle" in my first year of my undergrad, which usually consisted in some form of cardio when I wasn't screaming at my friends to "lemmesleep lemmesleep lemmesleep" when they came pounding on my door for gym time at 7am on weekdays... we were crazy yes. Still, while it was fun and kept me in shape (sorta), it wasn't anything regular. On January 1, 2007, I committed to delve in Andrew's hardcore gym world by getting really psyched up to give the Body for Life 12 week program a shot with him. While he'd done it before, I decided I wanted to take my health in my own hands, and doing it with a partner was probably the best way to go at it. Three years later, and with fitness highs and lows

One thing a lot of people tend to totally overlook is the fact that your taste buds really change with your diet. If you are used to eating processed foods with MSG in them, even if only on a semi-regular basis, odds are you need (and prefer) foods that are super salty, super sweet, or really super anything. Because your taste buds have kind of gone into overkill mode, you need to compensate by upping the intensity of the flavour in most of your foods. Your brain and taste buds have become used to a certain artificial chemical load in your food, designed to trick your tongue to think that what you are eating is tasty. I think that goes a long way to explain why most people think meals made with simple whole foods (even more so when raw) are bland, because to most people, they probably don't taste like much. I've noticed that the more raw I become, the less I need to reach for the salt, the sweetener, the spices, the Bragg's, or whatever product I used to need to get that e

One of the first people I ever heard talk about his experience with the raw food diet was a guy named Nature Love on a We Like it Raw podcast about a year ago. When asked about his diet, he said he mainly (and almost exclusively) ate cruciferous greens and only certain fruit types. He explained that he chose those foods not out of restriction, but because over time he had come to notice that his body didn't optimally digest most other foods at all. He noticed through small cues, whether a minor skin reaction to citrus, or faint digestive problems due to raw brassicas. At the time, being only a couple weeks into my raw journey, I couldn't help but find that he seemed to be an extremely picky eater. Look who's talking now... A year later, I find myself totally getting where he was coming from. Though I'm nowhere near that exclusive in my food choices, I know better now then to be too quick to judge. What most people don't realize is that the longer you are on

On most sunday mornings, you can find me in the kitchen stockpiling some of the more complicated raw household goodies I make for the weeks ahead. Funny thing is, I find that as I increasingly adopt a LFRV lifestyle, the less pleasure I take in making and eating these higher-sugar higher-fat gourmet foods. Andrew's not complaining though, that just means 99% of the fancy raw stuff I now make just goes into his belly :) Despite my feelings though, today was no different on the food front. This morning, I was inspired by Meredith and Felicity to try my hand at vegan cheesecake. I kind of followed the general idea of their recipes, but made the proportions of ingredients my own. I started with Meredith's recipe for fermented nut cheese (the priobiotic-based kind), then added about 1 tsp of coconut butter, some raw honey, salt, irish moss, and lots of lemon. The crust was a recent hemp-spelt cookie disaster that I didn't have the heart to throw away, but that I think

It has now gone far past the point of confession: everyone knows I am a foodie. But more often than not, I wonder what it must be like to live with someone like me, in other words, what it must be like to live with a foodie. I'm currently in the middle of reading " The Gastronomy of Marriage " by Michelle Maisto and it's a really great read. And yes, I am reading another foodie book, but I have good reason to do so! You see, when you're tired of bothering your friends, your roommates, your spouse, your family, and sometimes even the guy selling apples at his market stand with talk of food, you can simply pick up a foodie book, curl up on the couch, and feel like you aren't that crazy, that someone out there in the world relates to you. (This is also why I like to wind down at night by reading other people's food blogs). It's a kind of strange foodie escapism. I can related to Michelle Maisto in so many ways, especially with her increased o

In our fast-paced society, we're always on the go whether physically or emotionally. It doesn't help when you are the kind of person that always needs to be active and doing (and when you have the kind of mind that is always thinking and analyzing and bouncing up and down). When you hear that your friend is opening up a yin yoga practice, that sounds great but the style itself is not necessarily something that you deem to "for you." That's exactly why I decided to go cheer on the awesome Devin Johnstone on tonight by attending his opening session. Yin yoga is named as such because it follows the Taoist concept of yin. If you had to compare it to another yoga style, it's of a similar (but slower) pace than hatha yoga. It often holds poses for five minutes or longer. It is a perfect complement to more yang style activities (like ashtanga or power yoga, or like the cardio sessions I usually do). It targets connective tissue, ligaments, and wants you to just be.

The title of my post seems appropriate given that I started my day with a 3 pear smoothie (aka. blend three pears in a Vitamix), and had a peach and an apricot for lunch, but dinner was really were my mind was at when I came up with the title. Ever since I started making raw pasta, I've always felt the need to come up with some tremendous sauce to have with it, whether it's refining my raw marinara, making a new form of raw pesto, or flirting with the idea of raw alfredo. However it goes, I always look for something thick, saucy, and satisfying. However, I realized today that back in my cooked pasta days (and there were many of those), my go-to recipe was usually just pasta, olive oil, herbes de Provence , salt and pepper. If I wanted to make it fancy I would add balsamic vinegar, and my favourite toppings were some form of flash fried veggie-mix and/or smoke salmon. So all in all, nothing fancy per se. So today, I figured why go all fancy? Let's try the ol' olive oil,