Successes and Failures

The past week and a half has been pretty challenging in raw world for me. My birthday was Oct 18 and rather than trying to plan a raw birthday I opted to throw caution to the wind and enjoy whatever the day had in store for me, cooked food or not. Up until then, I'd been doing quite well with my raw food experiment and I was ready for a break.

As I witnessed with my husband, once you get a taste of eating cooked foods again it's hard to get back on track with raw. Especially now with the autumn weather cooling off, cold salads are no longer refreshing but rather chilling and I'm struggling to find "warm" foods that satisfy my palate and my body's desire to be warm.

That said, I've spent the past week and a half trying to find balance. What I've landed at is eating raw foods all day while I'm at work and allowing myself a cooked meal at dinner time. I also drink lots of hot tea and a daily coffee at work. This makes me feel sane.

So I'm scrambling to find raw breads and such to make my belly feel full while I'm at work. I have my trusty granola recipe which I eat almost daily but I needed some bread. I tried to make some Essene bread and despite the amazing looking photo below of what I made, it was an utter failure.
Raw Essene bread making appears to be an art of sorts. My understanding is that the outside should be crisp and crusty but the inside should be soft. The photos I saw online were of Essene loaves, so that's how I did mine. It looks amazing, but when I cracked it open the inside was an unpleasant, gooey gross inedible glop. If I ever try Essene bread again it will be flat like all of my other breads or I'll just bake it!
So now, for my success. I saw a tasty looking recipe on my fave site www.goneraw.com for Awesome Pizza Bread. The recipe called for a ridiculous amount of tomatoes - 16 lbs! So I had to make some pretty big changes and as you can see from the photo what I ended up with was so tasty I broke off a chunk to eat before I remembered to get a photo of it!

Pizza Bread

5 cups tomatoes, diced or processed in food processor
1 cup flax seeds, ground
1 cup pumpkin seeds, ground
1 cup almonds, ground
1/4 cup chia seeds, whole
1/4 cup olive oil
1 Tbsp oregano
1 Tbsp basil
1 tsp Herbamare

Process all ingredients in food processor to mix. Spread on Paraflexx sheets and dehydrate at 110 for 3-4 hours then flip and remove sheet and dehydrate additional 6-10 hours. Shorter time will keep it pliable for bread or go longer for a crispy cracker. This recipe made 3 trays.