Rambling to Rawdom

Recently I've become interested in eating more of a raw diet - no I'm not talking salad, although technically it's all more or less salad, I'm talking the REAL raw foods, nut butters, seeds etc. I have a variety of books on the subject of raw foods and juices. I've always had a bit of an interest in this kind of thing despite being hugely overweight, I know what I want to do - I just haven't quite got the impetus of my mind behind me. Anyway - I've started experimenting with raw foods and have been leaning quite heavily on this book.

It's lovely, has many beautiful recipes - backed up with gorgeous pictures - I would love to just dive into some of them and have a taste - but no - I have to prepare them and being on an extremely tight budget, I have to take it slowly and surely.
Two weeks ago I made the Warming Green Porridge, For a first taste, it was a good choice, colour was fantastic but not quite what I was expecting first thing in the morning.

Eating the porridge with Raspberries was really something beautiful - I tried the following day with banana and for me, it tasted like banana on sludge - but with Raspberries it works.
Having gained a bit of courage, I tallied forth and tried Banana and maple "bacon" . I needed to finely slice my Aubergine on a mandolin - unfortunately, mine broke, so I had to guess at half cm slices and gave up halfway through and went for rounds.

 Having sliced, dunked and dried the aubergine I placed it strategically on the plate with sliced banana and poured maple syrup over the top - it wasn't bad, not as nice as the porridge with raspberries but MUCH nicer than the porridge with banana - all I can say for it was it's VERY chewy, now that could have been down to my inability to cut 1/2cm slices - I don't know, it's not necessarily something I'd go to the effort of making again, but certainly, it wasn't too bad.

Third attempt was at the Muesli Bread, well, things went pretty pear-shaped with this one, mainly down to human error I guess - but it's all a learning curve - someone's gotta make the mistakes I guess.

 The bowl of soaked seeds and nuts is on the bottom left - the dates and seeds on the upper left are for tomorrow's efforts.

Patiently peeled and chopped the fruits and courgette and span it through my food processor - in two lots because I've only got a small processor and this is a lot of fruit and nut for my poor little processor to work through.

After mixing the two lots together I had the great task of mushing it all onto my dehydrator trays. The recipe says to put it on the Teflon sheets - well, I haven't got any so I put the mix on some parchment paper - BIG mistake, my mix stuck to the paper - so that was mistake 1. Note to self - INVEST IN SOME TEFLON SHEETS!

So, having spread the mixture out over two trays, and dehydrated it over night - I turn it over and discover mistake 1. I also realise that I should have perhaps left it in a thicker layer, perhaps only covering one tray. With the paper sticking to the mix and me struggling to turn it over, the mixture collapsed in several places.

I have an end product resembling more granola than bread - but I have managed to get some reasonably sized and shaped pieces - I don't think I'll spread almond butter on it - I haven't got as far as making any of that yet anyway - but I think I'll probably use it as a snack cracker and the little pieces I'll probably crumble over my greek yogurt in the morning with maybe some maple syrup.
It DOES taste delicious - it just looks a little disappointing - oh well, onward and upward.