"Comprawmising," and Fruity Kelp Noodle Recipe

We just got home, with Phil's nephew and his girlfriend with us. We're in the home stretch of Phil's daughter's wedding's preparations and also of my preparations for my MFA program residency. Sunshine, pouring rain, wind, and the red salmon are running, which means that there was more traffic on the road than I've ever seen before up here.

The Alaska cotton is blooming--it's a whole other kind of Dr Seuss plant!

 Today I want to talk about compromise. Again. Both in the 'raw' arena (hence the unashamed pun in the title) and in life in general. I've talked about this on this blog so many times before but it bears some repetition. After all, underlying harmonizations, finding balance, compromise, are major themes of this blog.

I'm grateful that I'm not rigid about being 100% raw. It recognizes the difficulty of living mostly on fresh produce in a part of the world where fresh produce is shipped in from far away and avoids setting me up for yet another impossible endeavor (yes, I do have an affinity for 'lost causes'). It also makes it a little easier to feed me when we're out on the road or staying with friends (both of which seem to happen pretty often in our life). Recalling my Conversation about ground rules for nutritional research and self-experimentation, I also remind myself that in these situations, it's smart to maintain a spirit of compromise  around my current fat-avoidance. The third piece for me today is that I'm generally a bit of a stickler for making everything from scratch. Especially with travel, and also with preparing food for people with very different preferences from mine, I'm recognizing that taking short cuts occasionally, if I'm canny about the quality of the products I select, it can be 'allowable.'

Sometimes, getting something that's not technically raw gets me more good quality nutrition for a lot less money. I recognize that this is a very shaky criterion of choice, but it does play a part. As an example, I can get a gallon of organic orange juice (not-from-concentrate but pasteurized) for less than $10 (if we're in Anchorage) or a little over $10 (with markup here in Homer). But organic oranges are almost unavailable and I couldn't even get regular oranges that would make that amount of orange juice for twice that much. I'd love to hear any words from anyone to explain why this pasteurized OJ is such a bad idea. I hadn't had juice for years, and I've been impressed with how good I feel with it. It fills me up and makes me happy. I used to think that juice is empty calories: it's true that juice has no fiber. But judging how my body feels after drinking it, it doesn't seem 'empty' at all.

Jars of salsa fresca have been a godsend for lunches on the road too, and the remaining 3/4 cup of salsa lent itself to a beautiful kelp noodle dressing when we got home today. In about ten minutes flat. We got home with a ton of unpacking and other chores, and of course I was fixing 'regular' food too.

 One of the fun things about buying lots of fruit nowadays, especially when we're so often traveling, is that I come home and have the opportunity to create a meal based on what has come ripe in our absence. I look everything over before we leave, so nothing is ever too far gone. I think that most people don't realize how shelf-stable fruit is: often, it keeps getting better.

There was a lovely ataulfo (aka champagne) mango that was gorgeously ripe. Also a pineapple that was about as ripe as they can get here without rotting.

Soak the kelp noodles in warm water for a few minutes, then drain.
Toss together with half a pineapple, sliced up, a sliced mango, a roma tomato and half an avocado.

The sauce was about a three-quarter-cup of salsa mixed with a teaspoon of onion powder, two tablespoons of maca, a quarter teaspoon each of smoked paprika and cayenne pepper, all dissolved in a quarter cup of water.

Garnished with chopped chives and cilantro from our garden...

...And served on a bed of freshly harvested lettuce (with a few mustard flowers).

I'm sure this would be good with other fruits too. Try sliced apples, goji berries, papaya, orange.

Light, delicious, very summery and a great texture combination with the toothsome noodles and the melting fruit. Oh, and of course, it would have been perfectly easy to make a sauce/salsa myself with sun-dried tomatoes, etc, but this was a super

Do you think I'm doing something wrong by drinking organic store-bought OJ? Do you feel ok about 'cheating' by using something premade in a recipe rather than doing it all from scratch?
Apologies for the rushed nature of this post: I want to share, and am in many places simultaneously.

Ways of Being Our Best - A Spectrum of Compromises and Some Cooked Food

I am very fortunate that I have always been a free agent in my mother's kitchen. Since I was a teenager or maybe younger, she's always been very gracious when I've swooped in and taken over, although I think I'm better at failing to make a mess nowadays!

In my last couple of posts, I've been talking about staying well-fed to avoid blood sugar catastrophes and emotional nightmares, which is apparently far from a no-brainer from me and can be very hard to do! Staying at my parents', it was pretty easy for the most part: but a couple of times it helped me to break my general rule of trying to eat very conservatively, very little different from my normal foods, while traveling. I probably ate slightly more cooked food, although not every day.

Generally, I'm so much more at ease not being strictly 100% raw: that state of restriction was actually somewhat pathological. It definitely fed my eating-disordered tendencies rather than my body, and I'm sure that all the stress about 'are these nuts raw?' 'what temperature were those raisins dried at?' was harmful to my body too. I don't worry about those minutiae anymore, because I don't think they constitute the big picture in health. Raisins, dates, pistachios in southern California are exposed to temperatures well above 115 degrees just sitting on the tree, let alone when things like raisins and prunes are dried on the ground in the sun, and tropical fruits ditto. Berries in northern climates withstand very cold temperatures and maintain life force. It's not a black and white thing. And as for cacao, I had noticed before, and definitely noticed again with my recent raw cacao taste tests, that non-raw cacao doesn't affect me as badly as does the raw kind. Both kinds definitely impact my adrenals in ways that I can feel directly, but the raw cacao does so more immediately and more intensely. Last week in Anchorage I ate some veggies simmered in a coconut curry when we were at a Thai restaurant with friends, and felt much better satiated than if I'd obstinately insisted on merely getting one of their salads minus all the dressing, tofu or meat.

So, it's all about compromises and figuring the best way to be my best!

Back in London, I did make all kinds of beautiful raw goodies - mentioned the cilantro (coriander) chutney and lemon-cauliflower that I made before, and a beautiful marinaded cauliflower/purple kale/shredded carrot/green apple salad with a spicy cashew dressing...

One night I also made a no-sugar raw pie, with almond-hazelnut-flax-stevia-coconut oil-lemon zest crust,  and a cashew-lemon-stevia filling, thickened with a little agar...

...and further thickened and sweetened by some coconut milk powder, just like I used for my kefir, that I found at the Indian shop near my parents' house. Even with only stevia and no xylitol, the pie was really delicious and was well-received.

I used the coconut milk powder in a cooked dish that I made that I was very proud of. It was a curried coconut dal with eggplants (aubergine) and later also zucchini (courgette). Both these vegetables were salted for thirty minutes and then rinsed well before cooking. I used a mixture of mung dal (split mung beans) and urd beans (which I'd never tried before: tiny beans with a great, nutty flavor and solid texture). Soaked both of these overnight. While they simmered on the back burner, I melted coconut oil, added mustard seeds, coriander seeds, a little cumin and cayenne, and sauteed the sliced eggplant and onion...

Blended up some coconut milk powder with warm water and some turmeric and ginger, and added it...

Added the beans, and also a couple of cardamom pods (you can see them in the photo): probably my very favorite spice...

 ...and let simmer for a while so that everything was soft and infused with flavor. The eggplants were so succulent and giving, the beans still had texture and so much flavor; the coconut/cardamom/spicy combination was just delectable.

Then, a couple nights later, I took it to the next level with the leftovers. I sauteed the zucchini and another half onion in a little more coconut oil with some more of the same spices, added more coconut milk, mixed it together with the leftover eggplant dal, and baked in the oven!

This was so delicious I couldn't believe it! The baking married the flavors even more, and browned the top for an extra treat.

My tummy was happy too: what a great way to make a compromise!

But I think that my compromises and general kitchen presence are accepted most of all because of my willingness to fix foods that I don't eat. The night that I made the above goodies, there was a desire for apple pie as the 'real' dessert, with a hankering for an apple pie with a custard topping. I told my mum that I didn't have time to make the pastry from scratch but that if she could provide that, I'd take on the rest of the pie. Fortunately, she had some pre-made short pastry in the freezer. I got to work marinating apple slices and chopped dates in lemon juice, brown sugar and spices, blind-baked the crust, baked with the apples until browned and made stovetop custard meanwhile... Put all together and warmed through before serving:

Not the most beautiful presentation ever, perhaps (and I'm not the best photographer either) but it was definitely a hit and well-enjoyed, and considering how last-minute it was and that I did it all by nose and instinct, I think it went quite well!

How far will you go in compromise?
Sending love...