 Raw Food Staple Meals?
For those of you who are raw foodists (or at least raw friendly), what are your favorite raw food staple meals -- the meals you make most often because they (1) are fast and easy to make, (2) use common ingredients you're likely to have on hand, (3) provide sufficient calories for a complete meal, and (4) are satisfying and enjoyable for you?
Right now I'm still having issues just figuring out what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I have maybe 5 staple meals figured out, but I'd really like to get at least 15 of them.
The irony I'm experiencing is that it seems like eating raw should be the simplest diet of all, but in practice it can turn into the most complicated diet of all.
Being vegan since 1997, I'd already figured out my favorite vegan staple meals. Breakfast might be a bowl of oatmeal, cereal with rice milk, tofu scramble, etc. Lunch could be a sandwich and some carrot sticks. Dinner might be rice and steamed veggies, stir fry, or a veggie burger and salad. These were my staple meals because they're quick and easy to make, and they used common ingredients I'd usually have on hand.
On the vegan diet, my staple meals looked like their non-vegan counterparts. Tofu scramble looks like scrambled eggs. A bowl of cereal looks the same whether you use cow's milk or rice milk. A stack of vegan pancakes looks and tastes like regular pancakes. A veggie burger looks like a cow burger. A cheese-less pizza is still a pizza. It takes about the same amount of time to make the vegan versions as it does to make the non-vegan versions. So this is a fairly easy transition.
But when you go raw, the basic staple meals seem like they'd have to be very different. I can't use a raw burger for a staple meal because I have to dehydrate items 24 hours in advance and use 20 different ingredients to make it. It's too complicated to eat like that on a regular basis. It often seems that to make the raw equivalents of my old vegan staples, I'd have to spend 3-5x as much time in the kitchen. That isn't practical for me, so I'm not going to make those kinds of meals on a regular basis.
A lot of the info I've read on the raw diet is written from the perspective of being a raw gourmet chef. But just because I want to be a raw foodist doesn't mean I want to become a raw chef. I didn't have to become a vegan chef to feed myself as a vegan. I just needed to figure out how to make some simple meals that happened to be vegan. If I have to spend 60 minutes a day on food prep, that's nine 40-hour weeks per year -- no thanks! I don't want to major in the culinary arts just to eat raw. I'd sooner eat banana-spinach smoothies for every single meal.
I still haven't quite figured out what my raw staple meals should be. Maybe one of them is a green smoothie. Another might be a monomeal like a small watermelon or a bunch of bananas. Maybe a raw soup and a salad is another. I think I'd do much better on this diet if I could figure out more of these staple meals. Since I've only figured out about 5 of them so far, I keep eating those five meals over and over, and that isn't very balanced.
Since I don't want to turn my raw diet into a gourmet cooking operation, I often keep eating the same simple foods over and over, like having green smoothies 3x per day or eating watermelon for breakfast and dinner several days in a row. Otherwise it feels like too much work to figure out what to eat. I'm sure I've had a hundred banana-spinach smoothies already this year. They're easy to make, they taste good, and I always have bananas and spinach in my kitchen.
I want to get to the point where this diet is sustainable and practical -- in a way that doesn't create such a big cognitive burden figuring out what to eat. To me this is much more useful than learning about maca, spirulina, etc.
What are your favorite, simple raw meals that you keep coming back to again and again? |