My Raw Food Saga, and Tara’s Awesome Energy Bites

I wanted to tie my day’s activities into this post, because I went on a great hike with a new hike buddy (see pic above) and his owner, ate homemade whole-wheat pizza and chocolate-covered pretzels, and topped my day off being all creative and quilting and then read 200 pages of my latest book club book, but couldn’t find a way to tie it all in. So…on with the non sequiturs and disjointed paragraphs!

Speaking of which… I used to be a raw foodist. I have GI issues and until the doctors finally figured it all out a couple of years ago, I had chronic stomachaches and related discomfort. You might think it was salad in the morning, salad all through the night! (sung to the tune of Fever!) But it was actually wayyyy more delicious. This was just before Rawlicious and company sprawled prolifically across Toronto, so I had to learn to cook (or not) a whole new way.

Raw food means just that, raw food, so there was no heating food above around 45 degrees. The theory is that cooking kills off healthy and necessary enzymes. I just wanted my stomach to stop hurting. And it did! Raw food means high fiber, high water content, and eating every few hours because it gets digested quickly.

After the first couple days of being hungry, it was easy. I should say, hungry-ish. I transitioned *cough* cold turkey *cough* to raw food during a stressful period in my life and I’m one of those people for whom high stress kills appetite dead. It’s hard to be hungry when your stomach is a cold hard lump of dread. Anyway, once that resolved, I guess my body was used to the lack of refined sugar and flour, so I didn’t really have any cravings that couldn’t be satisfied with dried medjool dates. Until I visited a friend in Nova Scotia, and my system got reintroduced to bread. Then I craved bread constantly.

But before that! The pounds dropped off like magic. And I had more energy and felt overall better. This coincided with a period of my life where I was hyper-fit, so you know, chicken, egg, correlation.

I stopped being a raw foodist after I spoke with a GI specialist and he was able to pinpoint exactly why not all the issues had resolved. These days, on a diet high in salad, fibre, micro-meals, and lactose-free probiotic yoghurt, my symptoms are mostly under control. Thank goodness! Because gastric distress and vaso-vagal reactions do not make for fun times.

But while I was a raw foodist, I was also a vegan. Except for a tsp of unpasteurized local honey every month or so. Which I know is not vegan. Still…close enough? All this is an intro to today’s VEGAN recipe! (See how I tie it all together? After only 7 paragraphs? Not that I’m verbose or anything.)

Tara, a talented, clean-cooking, glowing-skinned colleague, who spoils us all with her home-baked goods on a regular basis, has kindly given me permission to share this with you (she rocks!).

Tara’s Awesome Clean Energy Bites

• two bananas
• 1 c. oats
• 1/4 c. peanut butter (all-natural)
• 1/4 c. chocolate chips (or berries)

Mix all together and spoon onto a piece of parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees and cool. (The energy bites will still look a bit damp. That’s ok.) Eat. Revel in your health!

They are so yummy! You won’t believe that they’re super wholesome and nourishing because they taste so darn good! (Even to processed sugar and flour addicted taste-buds). I thought about using carob chips in here to up the wholesome factor and my vegan cred, but decided to go hog-wild and use real chocolate and blueberries. Tara says that substitutions work really well with this recipe, and suggested quinoa flakes instead of the oats, or adding dried fruits and fresh fruits such as raspberries. Mmm….

The DH is snacking on these as I type. WIN!

Next Post: Toaster Pancakes and why chunky milk can actually be A Good Thing.