i’ve been following Sophie at @rawandfree for a while now. she and her family have a diet of mostly raw food. when i started following her i was in awe of her ability to eat so many fruit and veggies. if i’m honest i’m kinda rubbish at it. i only eat certain fruits and have to force myself to eat salads, I could eat potatoes all day but they don’t agree with my weird stomach. Still eat them though lol.
however along with the kids cutting dairy and gluten from their diets, i’ve gone on the journey with them. realistically they probably got their issues from me. i get itchy when i eat dairy and have stomach issues with both dairy and gluten, the separate issues for each boys are combined into one.
i’m pretty shocking with my eating really, i often have an upset stomach in the morning, from anxiety so don’t eat breakfast. i leave it till later or if i’m super busy i don’t have anything at all. lunch is hit and miss. i might get something from a cafe if i’m in town, or have crackers or a smoothie, usually in a rush before running off to get the kids. dinner is probably the only meal i actually eat properly, because we are all together.
coming into this lockdown time Sophie from raw and free decided to put together a two week challenge. how she did it in such a short space of time i have no idea. her photography is beautiful and her menu plan has great variety. but the main thing is it’s all about getting more fruit and veggies into your diet, whether raw or cooked.
the challenge came at the right moment for me. i needed some ideas on how to get more health into my diet without it being complicated. you know me by now, if i have to go to an addition store it’s just not going to happen.
i printed out Sophie’s plan and immediately saw some ideas that worked for me and my weirdness. the smoothies, the salads, the small changes that made sense to me. the salads that i could alter to suit our diets.
but the big thing i need you to take from this is that you don’t need to strictly follow diets, or recipes even to make them right for you. take the ideas, and make them work for you, make them work for your likes and dislikes, your allergies or intolerance’s, just get that extra fruit and veggies in there. also open your mind to changes to what meals look like. in new zealand we traditionally eat cereal, or toast for breakfast. but there is no reason you couldn’t have an egg, avo and tomato salad instead.
so let me show you a couple of Sophie’s recipes and how i made them work for our family, living in a caravan with not a whole lot of appliances available in our small space, with our random allergies.
this one is “creamy spinach alfredo pasta” it’s gluten free pasta – i always use san remo gluten free – and has a mix of soaked cashews, spinach, milk, garlic, lemon, nutritional yeast and wholegrain mustard, tossed over it garnished with tomatoes and chives.
this recipe is a lovely fresh pasta dish, the kids all loved it. it called for a blender, which now that i think of it i could have used my nutra bullet, rather than struggling with my mini blender, we only had a little spinach left so i added some parsley, and Dustin is allergic to tomatoes so i left them out. just because a recipe has certain ingredients, there is no reason why you can’t change or take them out to suit your own needs. was it what Sophie had in mind, not quite, but it got food into the kids while giving them a great filling healthy meal.
the next one was “super green chunky avocado tabouli with potato wedges” another easy to put together delicious filling dinner, where you don’t even miss that there is no meat. although there’s no reason why you couldn’t add a bit of cherizo sausage to the roasting dish when cooking the potato’s. or add a steak on the side, if that gets your family eating.
with lockdown in full effect my stocks were low, and although i had prepared my menu before shopping i was short on some of the ingredients. as i couldn’t just race out to the shops i had to really think outside the square. the tabouli required spinach, herbs, red onion, garlic, tomato, avocado, cucumber, spring onion, lemon and salt and pepper. yip there’s quite a lot of stuff in there but nothing too complicated. and you are supposed to just bung it all in a food processor and you are done. ok so i don’t have a food processor in the caravan, knives work just as well, and you have time to do it when the potato’s are roasting.
so i didn’t have cucumber, or spinach, or red onion, and Dustin’s allergic to tomato’s so my version ended up really something different. i had basil and parsley in the garden, so avocados, green apples, basil and parsley and spring onion. with a dressing of oil, wholegrain mustard, lemon juice, salt and pepper. we added the tomato’s on the side so Dustin could eat the salad.
when you’re battling with allergies, be prepared to make some changes, be prepared to make it work for you, to the point where it almost doesn’t look like what it’s supposed to. but it can still be delicious and it can absolutely be healthy. go and check Sophie out for some more inspiration and let me know what you come up with to make the recipes work for you. raw and free
three boys kitchen 