RAW Living and Learning

Berry Tropical Smoothie I posted a few days ago that I am keeping my meals simple during the 40 days of our Lenten season. I am focusing my attention on the Lord and trying to increase my prayer time and also working on fasting, abstinence and almsgiving. This week, the third week of Lent, our family is working on "Good Thoughts". Filling our minds with The Truth, filling us with light; keeping any dark and ugly thoughts out. Powerful to say the least; difficult as well, considering our world is filled with so much darkness. We have to make an effort to be the light for others. Not always easy, but paramount.  And we continue to add to our Jesus Tree the symbols representing scripture readings we are focusing on. Look how our tree has blossomed! Here are some simple, clean raw foods that I have been eating lately. Let's start with some power packed green smoothies. My Berry Tropical Smoothie was a hit with the children!! And of course I loved it too. You can'...

We are still working on our "Good Words" this week as we tend to our individual weaknesses. Speaking of tending, I have been tending to my new little square foot garden and my potted herb garden all week, and everything is growing beautifully. It looks like things are growing overnight! I think my homemade compost is super charged or something. I have never seen plants grow so quickly.  I am afraid to admit though, that I have faltered on my "Good Words". It seems like everytime I set out to work on something openly, the evil one latches on and drags me down. No sooner did I get it set in my mind that I was going to work on good words, and low and behold, over critical comments came spewing out of my mouth! Yikes. This is going to be harder than I imagined--working on my short comings requires focus and mental clarity or else I become so easily distracted from the task at hand. This leads perfectly into my focus for today. Friday for me is a day for fasting and...

While eating a raw food diet, usually no dairy products are consumed. I do not consume dairy products and neither does one of our youngest. He has been struggling with GI issues for 11 months and we have been trying to slowly eliminate foods, attempting to pinpoint the culprit. I have read so much information on people healing when they eliminate dairy from their diet. Well, five days ago we totally eliminated all sources of dairy in his diet and he already is showing improvement!! This has been a looooong 11 months on all of us. I won't get into the details but changing 6-7 diapers a day will give you a clue as to what I mean. I try to keep dairy out of the rest of the families diet as well. But they still choose to consume some products that contain it. I won't feed it to them, so at least I know it can slowly be eliminated from their diet as well.  I have been doing some research on making kefir. I have learned on the Internet and also from Ani Phy...