Think easy

I know that sometimes the biggest hurdle to overcome in changing to a healthier diet is how to find the time to prepare fresh food.
Here are some tips that may make eating healthy food easy:
1. Eat simply. Eating delicious, raw prepared foods are great, but try thinking a little simpler. A nice big crispy apple with raw almond butter or pate, delicious figs for breakfast, or a green smoothie of 1 mango blended with ½ bunch of parsley. Eat simply for breakfast and lunch, and save prepared foods for dinner.





2. Buy your salad greens regularly so they remain fresh & enticing. A lot of markets even carry prewashed baby greens such as arugula, spinach and mixed greens. This makes it really easy to open a bag and throw a salad together if you are in a rush. Better still....visit your veggie garden just before a meal!
3. Shop at the local Farmers Markets. Farmers bring produce fresh picked and ripe most of the time so you can buy your food at its tastiest, ripest and freshest. The flavors are so great that you will enjoy these foods all by themselves, with nothing on them. Think big juicy heirloom tomatoes.
4. Make fast salad dressings with tasty oils. There is an amazing array of delicious, exotic oils that now fill the markets such as pumpkin seed, almond, sesame, macadamia, hemp and walnut oils all cold pressed, not forgetting Olive oil which is a favorite for many people. Just drizzle a tablespoon of oil, some lemon juice and a little Himalayan salt, then mix your greens well, top them with sprouts, sliced avocados, cucumbers, celery, red pepper,tomatoes and some sunflower or pumpkin seeds, and you've got a healthy, easy salad.
5. Mash an avocado with some raw sauerkraut and spread on a flax cracker. I love this dish! Just take 1 avocado, mash it with ½ cup of your favorite store bought or homemade sauerkraut and eat it like that or spread it on a cracker.
6. Use presoaked nuts/seeds. Ever find a great raw pie or pate' recipe and wish you didn't have to wait for the nuts to soak? Here are 2 solutions. 1. Keep a couple cups of your favorite nuts such as almonds always soaking. You can keep them in water in the refrigerator for up to 4 days. When you are ready to use them, rinse them to freshen them. 2. Soak up to a few packets of nuts overnight, rinse them well, then dehydrate them at 105° until crispy. (About 36 hours for almonds, 24 hours for walnuts or pecans and only 8 hours for pumpkin or sunflower seeds). Let them cool and store them in an airtight container. When you need them for almond milk, just plain snacking' or a recipe, they will be ready to use.
7. Pick one or two days a week to do your food production. Make the majority of your prepared foods on that day such as flax crackers, nut/seed pates, veggie burgers, almond mayo, pizza crusts, pesto, perhaps a frozen desert etc. which will keep for the rest of the week. Then on the other days, you have a foundation on which you can put your fresh fruits and veggies. Ideas: Make pasta sauce on your food production day, and on a non-production day, make a green salad and spiralized zucchini on which to put your sauces and dressings.
8. There are some great Raw Food Books readily available these days or otherwise try the internet for ideas. I like to save recipes I come across that I would like to try, there are squillions to choose from!
9. Make eating healthy & fun, not a chore. Your energy and mood will improve with each healthy meal, making life more fun and light. If you eat pizza, so what? I'm sure you had a perfectly good reason for eating it. Now, take a deep breath, send lots of love to the pizza in your tummy, and move on!