Xammin' Rawdvice #1 - Pasta Alternatives

So I was asked today by a vegetarian woman in NYC who's mission it is to go 90-100% raw by 2010 for some emergency holiday help!

First thing I said was "Don't beat yourself up if you eat some cooked food. It just makes things worse. You'll go back to raw after eating some cooked food because you know it feels so much better anyway."

Then I told her "As long as you're not eating one of the bad 4: processed starch, refined sugars, dairy or animal proteins, and you're at least 75% raw you're doing better than 95% of the public."

Well, she confessed to me her weakness: Pasta. Oh yes, pasta, I've known you as a foe before as well. I told her about my story getting into health foods and how it all started with eliminating gluten from my diet. I told her how when I quit gluten for 3 weeks and ate a TINY (and I mean tiny) piece of bread to test it out that it hit my stomach, exploded and then coalesced into a ball 4x the size it was to begin with! Now if that happens with bread (wheat flour and other ingredients) what do you think would happen with pasta?! (highly concentrated wheat flour).

I said "I know how you feel when you eat pasta, you feel bloated like you can barely put your seatbelt on and you start to burp and fart and when you burp it feels like you're going to throw up!"

She's a vegetarian, remember, so I told her to associate pasta with meat. It's equally disgusting and almost as karmically bad when you think about what wheat farming is doing to the environment and the health of the world population. I said, "Whenever you see pasta in front of you, and you're getting that temptation, just close your eyes and say 'No thank you!' It's like any other addiction." It really helped her to associate it with meat.

Now, I don't normally advocate scaring people away from certain foods, but I'd much rather take the positive approach of turning people on to the good stuff. She said "Thank you!!!" and went on her merry way. But you know what I forgot? To give her some pasta alternatives!!! So here you are, Chica!

Instead of pasta, trying laying some zucchini or yellow squash, julienned into noodles in olive oil and spices/herbs like rosemary, oregano, fresh garlic etc. for about 30 minutes. Then dehydrate them for another hour. Heck, you can even skip the dehydration step if you want. How about some alfredo sauce for that squash fettucini? Get some cashews and sunflower seeds and grind 'em real good in a coffee grinder (or a dry blender if you don't have a coffee grinder). Throw it in the blender with about a tbsp. of olive oil, 2 tsp. salt, 2 cloves of garlic, some rosemary, oregano and enough water to make it smooth. Yum!

Squash fettucini not good enough? Get some kelp noodles from the store - delicious, nutritious sea veggies! Tomato sauce? Easy, get some carrots and tomatoes - that's your base. Blend it up and add anything else to that you want and Whamm-o you got yourself some yummy rawlicious pasta sauce. Try adding some sunflower seeds to thicken it. Or some parsley to give it some taste. Don't forget the olive oil and sea salt!

Much Loves everybody
This concludes Rawdvice #1 with Xam Devesh