Raw Pecan Pie with no Pecans!

I wanted to make a cheesecake, but the recipe called for cashews for the filling and I dont have any. Instead I grabbed the nuts I had, and made this: 

The only thing it has in common with a cheesecake are the strawberries, but honestly, this was pretty freaking great. The crust is made up of crushed almonds (previously soaked) hazelnuts, and honey to make it sticky all put through the food processor or in my case a blender.
 The "filling" (Which is really just another layer of yummy nuts) is made with macadamia nuts, walnuts, expeller pressed coconut oil, honey, vanilla and a pinch of salt. It turns out really creamy and good. 
I decorated it with strawberries to make it look less like  a creamy mess.


Although there wasn't any pecans, the sweet nutty combo here made it  taste more similar to a pecan pie than a cheesecake.


For me, its hard to follow  recipes in the Raw Food world,  and have all the ingredients you need. Therefore I dont mind inventions as long as they turn out to something like this, cause otherwise its a pretty big waste of food. I'm looking forward to both inventions and reproduced creations. 


PS: Ya'll dont have to try this, I'm really only writting it down for me to remember. 

Maria

She. Is. Here! Yes, our best friend from the Dominican Republic, after 8 months of no physical contact we can finally sit across from each other and completely ignore one another, not!

Expect  pictures! 

Avocado Mango Yogurt

Last night I was gladly able to accompany my new friends Taylor Huston and Roselia Bañuelos to a RAW food feast. My intrigue  for raw  food  started several years ago when I made the choice to adapt to a healthier lifestyle. Not only has my perspective on life changed, but my mind and body have  been reborn in the course of time through this 'transition'. Both Taylor and Roselia spurred up in me again the want to create new things. So I did. Even though I only slept 4 hours last night I woke up with  a refreshed mind and made this: 

An avocado mango yogurt topped with sliced banana's and sprinkled with macadamia nuts. 

All I did was mash them up, add some vanilla and put the toppings on. The only thing I would add is a pinch of sea salt for the next time to liven the flavors up, but other than that, YUM!

PS: Like: Raw Foodies on Facebook.

Forks over Knives

2 days ago I watched a documentary called Forks over Knives, its one of many documentaries i've watched about health in America; like every other documentary it  only reinforces the truth although with a more scientific approach that the way we eat can potentially control and even reverse most chronic diseases affecting half of the world today.


The sad reality that bothers me completely is that my generation may be the first generation to live less than its parents.


Thomas Edison said "The doctor of the future will no longer treat the human frame with drugs, but rather will cure and prevent disease with nutrition". Its heartbreaking for me to think that we are letting ourselves go through the worst because of the negligence and ignorance that is being educated to us by our society instead of being encouraged to do what in our nature is right to do.


Our mechanisms of satiation are being fooled- Doug Lisle, Ph.D.


Fact: There is a range of receptors in our stomach that helps us gage  how much food we've eaten, these include stretch receptors to help meassure the shared volume of food in our stomach, we also have density receptors to help determine the chloric density (The "richness") of our food. Only 500 calories fills the stomach completely, triggering all our receptors to signal the brain that we are full, but 500 calories of unnaturally rich, or processed foods fills the stomach far less deceiving our receptors into telling our brain that we need more.


The problem is that if we make our foods completely artificial, which we do today, we wind up with the problem that people have to over- eat, just to be satisfied- Doug Lisle, Ph.D.


Fact: We are programmed to: Seek pleasure; avoid pain; and do it all with the greatest economy of energy. The world is designed to service your wants, encourage your comfort, and promote your excess.  This may sound like a life of comfort and ease, by we all know the consequences are broad and devastating. The world is designed to promote immediate satisfaction, not optimal health. Ritch foods naturally excite our senses because they tell us they will provide the highest amount of  a dietary reward with the least amount of effort; this helped our ancestors find the most calorie dense and whole foods availabe which contribute to our survival. In today's environment however; we can artifically increase calorie density well beyond what we can find in nature, these foods give us a hypernormal amound of pleasure leading us into a pleasure trap. The pleasure trap is an interaction between our natural instincts which are trying to tell us the right thing to do and some kind of artificial modern stimulation that is high jacking that process. The easiest way to describe this trap is to that of a drug addiction, the ways drugs work is  they high jack the existing pleasure circuits and when certain chemicals hit those areas, they cause feelings of excitement and euphoria. This reaction happens when we eat highly concentrated processed  foods. We have removed every essential part of a whole food and have created a food so highly  saturated in fats and sugars that it is becoming a low grade addiction. 


But ofcourse that is the stragedy, luring people to have to want more; numbing our instincts to making the right choice, obliviating the consequences that these choices will bring. What's worse is that the lower class citizens are boxed into having few or no choices on how they eat because this kind of food is what they can afford. 
A lot of us can't break free from the system because its all we have to support us, what's sad is that the only interest they have is not our best interest. 


To me its not a matter of support and acceptance by Society; its a matter of knowledge and education of this simple truth. 


There are many people taking on this movement providing us with vital information that can change the way we think and the way we live forever. 


List of Documentaries I've watched:


Food Matters



Food Inc.



Forks over knives



Simply Raw



There's a whole bunch of these everywhere, they  all have WOW facts in them that really shake you up and wake you up to reality;most of them you can watch online. Do it! 

The way to love: How to give ?

When you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing-Matthew 6:3


It is with charity as with happines and holiness. It is not possible for you to say that you are happy because the moment you become conscious of your happiness you cease to be happy. What you call the experience of happiness is not happiness at all but the excitement and thrill caused by some person or thing or event. True happiness is uncaused. You are happy for no reason at all. And truen happiness cannot be experienced. It is not within the realm of consciousness. It is unself-consciousness.


So it is with holiness. The moment you are aware of you holiness it goes sour and becomes self-righteousness. A good deed is never so good as when you have no consciousness that it is good- you are so much in love with the action that you are quite unself-conscious about your goodness and virtue. Your left hand has no idea that your right hand is doing something good or meritorious. You simply do it because it seems the natural, spontaneous thing to do. Soend some time in becoming aware of the fact that all the virtue that you can see in yourself is no virtue at all but something that you have cunningly cultivated and produced and forced on yourself. If it were real virtue you would have enjoyed it thoroughly and would feel so natural that it wouldn't occur to you to think of it as a virtue. So the first quality of holiness is its unself-consciousness.


The second quality is its effortlessness. Effort can change behavior, it cannot changen you. Think of this: Effort can put food into your mouth, it cannot produce an appetite; it can keep you in bed, it cannot produce sleep; it can make you reveal a secret to another but it cannot produce trust; it can force you to pay a compliment, it cannot produce genuine admiration; effort can perform acts of service, it is powerless to produce love or holiness. All you can achieve by your effort is repression, not genuine change and growth. Change is only brought about by awareness and understanding. Understand your unhappiness and it will disappear- what results is the state of happiness. Understand your pride and it will drop- what results will be humility. Understand your fears and they will melt- the resultant state is love. Understand your attachments and they will vanish- the consequence is freedom. Love and freedom and happiness are not thing that you can cultivate and produce. You cannot even know what they are. All you can do is observe their opposites and, through your observation, cause the opposites to die. 


There is a third quality of holiness: it cannot be desired. If you desire happiness you will be anxious lest you do not attain it. You will be constantly in a state of dissatisfaction; and dissatisfaction and anxiety kill the very happiness that they set out to gain. When you desire holiness for yourself you feed the very greed and ambition that make you so selfish and vain and unholy. 


Here is something you must understand: there are two sources for change within you. One is the cunningness of your ego that pushes you into making efforts to become something other than you re meant to be so that it can give itself a boost, so that it can glorify itself. The other is the wisdon of Nature. Thanks to this wisdom you become aware, you understand it. That is all you do, leaving the change- type, the manner, the speed, the time of change- to reality and to Nature. Your ego is a great technician. It cannot be creative. It goes in for methods and techniques and produces so-called holy people who are rigid, consistent, mechanical, lifeless as intolerant of others as they are of themselves- violen people the very opposite of holiness and love. The type of "spiritual" people who, conscious of their spirituality, then proceed to crucify the Messiah. 


Nature is not a technician. Nature is creative. You will e a creator, not a wily technician when there is abandonment in you- no greed, no ambition, no anxiety, no sense of striving, gaining, arriving, attaining. All there is, is a keen, alert, penetrating, vigilant awareness that causes the dissolution of all one's foolishness and selfishness, all one's attachments and fears. The changes that follow are not the result of your blueprints and efforts but the product of Nature that spurns your plans and will, thereby leaving no room for a sense of merit or achievement or even any consciousness on the part of your left hand of what Reality is doing by means of your right.


-Anthony De Mello