Delightfully Raw Near Walla Walla - Part II

I'm back with more about our adventures near Walla Walla, although this time it will all be food talk! Yippee!

First off, I want to start with a photo that really belonged to my previous post, but hey, what can you do? These things happen. *shrugs* I was mentioning how our hosts live right in the heart of apple country. During one of our walks in the orchard across the street we found the odd apple still in the trees. Among them was probably the largest one we've ever seen! The pesticide coating was so thick (yuck!) that we had to rub it energetically to make it nice and shiny.

While we walked we noticed how some of the trees in each row were bearing teeny miniature apples that hadn't been picked at all. Brian explained that the main purpose of these is to act as pollinators.

Apples, big and small

In Matt & Dawnen's Sunny Kitchen
As I was saying before, Matthew and Dawnen have been experimenting with raw foods for a good while. Often times when we stay with folks, we're the ones who end up sharing a lot of our knowledge. This time it was my turn to be in the apprentice's position and learn a bunch of new tricks and techniques. In the coming weeks you can expect to read feature posts on how to grow micro-greens, make Coconut Yogurt and assemble Matt's famous Hot & Cold Salad.

We happened to be there for Dawnen's birthday, so we all got together for a little feast.

Me with the birthday girl

One of the challenges of living in a trailer is the lack of sufficient light. Like me Matt is a sucker for having his working space very well lit, so he's come up with the perfect solution: a head lamp. Actually once you get used to seeing so clearly you sort of get addicted; now Matt wears his lamp pretty much all of the time! he he

Closely watching Dawnen preparing a Dipping Sauce for veggie rolls. Notice that she's wearing a head lamp too; it's contagious I tell ya!

Whizzing up our raw soup du jour. And nope, that's not a head lamp near my forehead. ;-)

Smile!

For the main course we assembled our own veggie rolls with both rice paper and nori sheets.

Matt making sure everything is looking good.

At some point Brian got hold of Matt's super duper camera and took all sorts of shots throughout the evening.

Mr. Donnie...



... looking very much relaxed, as usual. ;-)

Feasting at Vedra & Merle's
We were invited for lunch a couple of weekends ago by Dawnen's mom and step-dad. They eat fairly healthy to begin with, since, as members of the 7th day Adventist Church, honoring the temple of our bodies is particularly emphasized. I certainly didn't expect to partake in such a raw feast, though! Vedra really went all out in whipping up a bunch of yummy stuff!

See for yourselves...

A nut based Chili

Cauliflower and Jicama Rice

 

Ranch Dressing

Cheeze Sauce

 

Dawnen and Matt contributed lots of goodies for salad, including freshly harvested micro greens as well as a curried quinoa dish.

We brought a blender container full of the ingredients for my Tomato & Herbs Soup which we just had to whiz up on their brand new Vitamix machine. (Very nice!)

Don's ginormous pile! It looked like a LOT of food (and it was!), but he didn't come anywhere close to beating Matt's 3 servings! lol  I'm still not quite sure how can so much food go into such a thin man? ;-)

More of Vedra's handiwork: 2 kinds of sweet nut balls.

Giving Thanks in Good Company
We walked over to Matt & Dawnen's trailer on Thanksgiving day to share a lovely meal. On the menu was a soup concoction of Don's, a large salad with Peppercorn Ranch Dressing, Neat Balls, mashed potatoes freshly harvested from their garden, and Miso Gravy.

Most of the salad ingredients also came from their garden. So vibrant in both colors and flavors!

The Neatballs recipe came from Gabriel Cousens' Rainbow Green, Live-Food Cuisine. I thought that they had a nice flavor from the herbs but they were a tad too salty for my taste.

Garden Neatballs
From Gabriel Cousens' Rainbow Green, Live-Food Cuisine
Recipe posted here

1 C almonds, soaked
1/2 C walnuts, soaked
1 C olive oil
1/4 C leeks
2 celery stalks
1 T sage
1 T marjoram
1 T thyme
2 t Celtic salt

Homogenize nuts with oil.

Finely chop and stir in leeks, celery, herbs and salt.

Roll into 1 1/2 inch balls and dehydrate for 2-3 hours at 140F.

Matt's Mods: He used only 1/2 cup olive oil, 1 cup of leeks and 5 celery sticks.


The recipe calls for serving these with Marinara Sauce but Dawnen opted for her own rendition of Gravy made with cashews, veggie broth and South River miso.

Afterwards we just hung out for a while. Almost as soon as Don and I got settled on the couch Mr. Bean hopped on so that he could snuggle between us. Awwwww! It seems that every time we come over he feels more and more comfortable in our presence. ;-)

Beanie was all chilled... until Dawnen got dessert out: raw vegan pear ice cream freshly made in their fancy ice cream maker. He was so thrilled at the prospect of this treat that the poor fellow tripped while coming down from the couch. It's not easy to maneuver around when you've lost the partial use of two of your legs! ;-(

Matt played around with our Sony a-57 camera for a while and captured this nice shot of Dawnen drinking her tea.

Meet the Matt-Man

During our stay Brian came up with the brilliant nickname of 'Matt-Man' for Matthew, partly inspired by the latter's quirky old Subaru which was instantly dubbed the 'Matt-mobile'. he he Anyhoo, one afternoon we all climbed into the Matt-mobile and went grocery shopping in Walla Walla. It turned out to be quite the funny expedition. Not sure what had gotten into him that day, but Matt-Man sure was being a goofy guy!

 Nice hat, Matt!

But the funniest bit was when he managed the considerable feat of getting (most of) himself and Mr. Bean into one of those kiddie buggies. Mr. Bean seemed to enjoy the ride, especially when Matt beeped the horn. ;-) The tough part, though, wasn't so much getting in as getting out of the thing afterwards! lol

One thing is for sure, Matt is a super interesting character! ;-) He knows heaps about all sorts of topics. Oh, the fascinating (and long!) conversations that Don and Matt had! I also spent a good deal of time hanging at their trailer, picking his brain and soaking up all kinds of helpful info.

Matt likes to amp things up; his motto? The more the better! When Matt does something, he likes to "go all the way, including the postage." For instance a few weeks ago he made such a huge amount of sauerkraut that I could barely lift up the bowl. It filled something like 9 two-quarts Mason jars. ;-)

Chocolat

One Sunday Dawnen and I took over her mom's kitchen and turned it into a raw chocolate factory. Woo hoo! We had several recipes on our to-make list, but it all went very smoothly. Even so, by the time we finished cleaning up our mess it was nearly 7 hours later. Eeek! Call it the 'Raw Choccie Marathon'! ;-)

We worked with two basic chocolate recipes: the one featured in Matthew Kenney's Raw Chocolate book as well as Pamela Vinten's Recipe #1 from her Amazing Guilt-Free Chocolate. We also experimented with different kinds of sweeteners - maple syrup, agave, honey and coconut nectar - although neither of us thought of taking notes of what was in what. Ooopsie! We also kinda lost track of which choc recipe we used for some of our goodies. Ah well, as it happened all the variations turned out marvelously well! ;-)

Both of us felt drawn to certain recipes from Matthew Kenney's book, so we each played with those individually. In the end we split all of our goodies anyways. Yay! I thought that the lighting wasn't the greatest for some of the pics I took that night, so I got more shots in daylight, hence the double pics.

Marzipan Stuffed Choccies

Mint and Candied Nibs

Hazelnut Almond Chocolate Bars

As a matter of convenience we used the dehydrator method for melting the cacao butter and paste, as recommended in Matthew's book. We did end up returning the chocolate mixture to the D while we were working on other recipes. I'm not 100% sure how that affected the tempering process but most of our choccies did turn out nice and shiny, except for a couple of recipes. I'm actually thinking that the molds might have been the culprits for these.

Walnut Maple Chocolates

We both really like Cafe Gratitude's Coconut Almond Joys which we've prepared on a number of occasions. And so we split up a batch between us. I think that the last time I made these I worked on a picnic table at a California campground under Kylo's intense scrutiny. How he used to love chocolate! Not to worry though, we never let him indulge in this compulsion. One time he ate several artisan organic chocolate bars that we'd made the mistake of leaving in the vehicle with him while we continued our shopping. When we returned he had wolfed them down, wrapping and all. He didn't even so much as burp. hehe

 

There were a little bit of left over coconut filling which Dawnen turned into these gorgeous treats.

My intention was to also tell you about a potluck that we recently attended with their local health group, but this post is already getting long. How about I save it for another time, eh?

The Sunny Raw Kitchen is On The Move

After being pretty much stationary for over 15 months, we are now officially back on the road in our mobile Sunny Raw Kitchen. Yippee! It took a while for us to get a sense of whether we were really meant to be traveling over the winter, but we finally did receive a few winks from The Mystery pointing in that direction. And so we prepared ourselves to hit the road again and finally, in the middle of October, left the cozy spot where we spent the summer.

Our first stop was only a short drive away to our friends' Ulla and Mike's place just outside of Nelson, British Columbia. I've already introduced you to them in this post, but in a nutshell, we met via common friends, Mosaica and Pontifex, who did some wwoofing for them last year. Ulla is a Colon Hydrotherapist and together we facilitated a three day Raw Radiance Retreat in September. Every time we stopped by to visit them the hours would just fly by, so we were all looking forward to this opportunity to spend more time together and further explore our many common interests.

Pulling our home behind us has many advantages (it's such a luxury to be able to have our own space with minimal effort - no endless sessions of packing and unpacking) but it also has its share of challenges. For instance we can't just stop whenever we want to as the truck and fifth wheel combined measure about 45 feet. It also makes turning on streets tricky and turning around down right intimidating. Not knowing whether we'd have enough room at the end of Mike and Ulla's street, we decided not to take any chances and reversed up all the way from the main road to their driveway. Don then had to back up about 1/4 mile along the latter to the house. It's a learning process for him -  it's so counter intuitive as you have to turn the wheels in the opposite direction than you want to go - but as they say 'practice makes perfect'.

Our RawVee nicely tucked away close to the apple trees.

We were blessed with a few gorgeous sunny Autumn days before a long rainy spell began in earnest. The view from the road above their home was stunning with the season's rich yellow and orange hues.

I shared several photos of their beautiful property here. To my surprise (and delight!) it was still yielding some veggies and fruits in spite of the cooler weather.

Bok Choi

Mike said that it's been a fantastic tomato season. We continued to harvest lots of them...

... including this ginormous variety; undoubtedly the biggest we'd ever seen!

I discovered lovely purple flowers hidden among the fallen leaves.

There are several types of grapes growing in their garden. Sooooo sweet and juicy! To me they're such a symbol of abundance!

Also many kinds of apples.

Mike finishing up harvesting one of the trees.

Bosc pears

Mike placed a radio at the foot of one of the trees to discourage any unwanted visitors, but we still had several deer stroll by.

But those big critters didn't scare Miss DaPuss one bit. She made herself right at home exploring the property, even the barn where a couple of wild cats have taken residence. We did hear a screech or two once, mind you. ;-)

Stretching comfortably near her new home.

In Ulla's Sunny Kitchen
Ulla has been reintroducing more raw foods into her diet ever since the Retreat but she felt like she needed some extra inspiration. We were particularly thrilled at the prospect of playing together in the kitchen, and boy, did we ever uncook up a storm! It had been a very long time since I had prepped so much food!

As I always like to remind people, I feel you reap much better long-term results by gradually incorporating a few raw recipes that you really enjoy into your regular diet rather than going 100% all at once. Eating a certain (usually unhealthy) way for decades, it's necessarily a long process to replace these old habit patterns. One thing that has become part of Ulla's new eating routine is to always have some fresh almond milk on hand. She has grown particularly fond of Chia Pudding in the morning, which her body really responds super well too.

I had to divide my time between the kitchen and our computer, as I continued to work on an exciting new project. Ready for the big news? After many years of sharing my raw adventures here on Blogger, I will soon be launching my very own website: Carmella's Sunny Raw Kitchen. *doing the happy dance* And so I've been working closely with our fabulous web designer Boti for the last several weeks. Since we never know how our internet access will be once we're on the road, I wanted to finish sending him all of the content (and gosh, is there ever lots!) There was the odd recipe that didn't yet have a pic for my new site's recipe section, so our time in Ulla's kitchen gave me a chance to fill in the photographic gaps.

Caesar Dressing

Dill-icious Dill Dressing

Sunflower Garlic Spread

Tarragon & Chive Cream

Tomato Dressing

We all got together to share the evening meals which consisted usually of some kind of raw soup, an entree and sometimes salad. It was all quite new to Mike but he was a great sport and tried everything.

One of our feasts: Tomato & Herbs Soup, Salad with my Dill-icious Dressing, Onion, Dill & Horseradish Cheeze with two kinds of dehydrated crackers.

Some of the main courses we enjoyed...

Russell James' awesome Cauliflower Cheese

Lasagna Magnifica

Jozzie's Fajitas

On the Sweet Side
Since I've been in a low nut intake phase for several months Don and I have been mostly staying away from desserts. Well, I guess that's not entirely true; we continue to enjoy chocolate as I find that it's the perfect sweet treat yet soooo much lighter than say, a piece of raw cake or pie. Excited to introduce Ulla to certain raw delights together we did whip up a few desserts. It certainly made Mr. Donnie very very happy!

Heavenly Berry Jubilee

Chocolate Chia Pudding

Given the tons of blackberries that they harvested this year, Ulla has made my Mango & Blackberry Cobbler several times. We had it once warm straight out of the D with a nice scoop of Vanilla Ice Cream. Divine!

During the summer I started experimenting with Pamela Vinten's Amazing Guilt Free Chocolate ebooks. Raw chocolate is one of those techniques that I feel I still have so much to learn about, and so I was thrilled to discover these books that offer so many wonderful and yummy ways to use raw cacao. Every single recipe I've tried thus far has turned out super well. I'll tell you more about this fab recipe book soon, but in the meantime here's something to get you drooling.

Nutty Chocolate Slab

Ulla has been playing with Pamela's recipes a lot. In fact her Chocolate Recipe #1 quickly became her basic chocolate candy formula. She comes up with all kinds of fun variations: peppermint, stuffed with different nuts, decorated with slivered almonds...

A beautiful chocolate platter that she prepared for a gathering.

Get Those Ds Going

We must have had something like 4 Dehydrator Days in two weeks. And that's with both of our Ds going! We mostly made different types of crackers and wraps as well as a few snacks to stock up their freezer and take on the road with us.

Zucchini Crackers

Raw Cheeze Itz

Rainbow Flax Crackers

Nacho Cheezey Kale Chips

Showing our handy work: Savory Nori Snacks & Raw Cheeze Itz

We also made Rawvolution's Burgers which I hadn't had in ages.

We served them with marinated crimini mushrooms and marinated fennel.

Organic Matters
A couple of months ago Ulla introduced me to a fantastic local wholesale group called Organic Matters. They offer a wide variety of high quality organic products for really great prices. The only downside is that you need to order at least $500 worth, but that's usually not an issue when you team up with friends' and neighbors.

All Cleaned Up
I was mentioning earlier how staying with Mike & Ulla made it a lot easier for us to do all sorts of things together that we'd been meaning to but rarely had the time. On the one hand I was able to pass on to Ulla a few technical tips on how to start a blog, use her new Sony a57 DSLR camera (like ours) and edit videos in iMovie.

It also allowed me to receive a series of 5 colonic irrigations. I'd of course heard about colonics but had never experienced them before. If, like me, you aren't already familiar with this technique here's a bit of info I found on Ulla's Devine Health site:

Since the colon affects all of the body’s organs either directly or indirectly, maintaining a clean and healthy colon promotes all other organs’ efficiency within the body.

Colon Hydrotherapy is a gentle washing of the large intestines with warm, filtered water to remove built-up toxins and wastes, improve overall bowel function and digestion, and allow for better nutrient absorption. It reduces bloating and intestinal gases, purifies the liver, and stimulates peristalsis (rhythmic muscle action of the gastrointestinal tract). Other benefits reported include the relief of head and backaches; rehabilitation of nerves, muscles, glands, circulatory and immune components of the digestive system; weight control; clearer and smoother skin; reduction of acne, skin rashes, arthritic symptoms; and an overall feeling of improved health and vitality.

 I received a colonic from Ulla every 2 or 3 days and was amazed at how different each session felt. While the first one was quite uncomfortable and didn't seem to yield much result in terms of waste removal, each successive one kept taking the cleansing process deeper and deeper. At times I could feel detox symptoms as some of the accumulated waste was being dislodged, but thankfully these passed quickly. By the third colonic I was able to be completely relaxed and felt so energized afterward. I suffered from chronic constipation for most of my life (before I got into raw) and there is little doubt that my colon has suffered some distortion as a result. It was exciting to see how I could take in more and more water as my colon was gradually resuming its natural shape.

Ulla at work (and nope, that's not me! lol)

If you'd like to learn more about colon hydrotherapy, I strongly recommend that you drop by Ulla's site, particularly her FAQ here.

We're already talking about visiting Mike and Ulla again on our way back in the Spring. She suggested that we do an even longer series of colonics then, which I'm looking forward to. Yay!

Methinks I'll stop here for now as this post is starting to get pretty long. I'll be back soon with a short recap of the raw events that we hosted while staying at Ulla and Mike's.

Stay tuned!