Days Sixteen and into Seventeen: Knowing when to "Shut it down"

Not all raw cooking experimentation goes well. Bunny Berry over at RawFu did a great vlog about it called "When Raw Food Goes Wrong." Yesterday was just such a day for me.

I wanted some bread suitable for savory sandwiches. I decided to try Matt Amsden's Famous Onion Bread again (from his book Rawvolution). I'd tried the recipe once before, but found that it was way too oniony and salty for my taste. This time I decided to cut the prescribed 3 onions down to one, include a red bell pepper, and reduce the nama shoyu to half, substituting water for the rest. The resulting mixture still looked way too oniony, so I decided to also double the flax. It occurred to me that this might make it too dry, so I also doubled the oil but forgot that the flax was only half the dry mixture (the rest was sunflower seed meal). The end result was still too oniony and salty and was an oily mess to boot. I decided, as Tina Fey and Peter Dinklage say on 30 Rock, to "Shut it down" -- ie, I threw the whole batch out.

It pains me to throw out food, but the oniony smell filling the house after I dehydrating was really overwhelming. I've also learned that forcing myself to eat (un)cooking experiments gone wrong will just turn me off the whole regimen. I think this is part of what happened the last time I unsuccessfully tried to transition to raw: part of it was that I got the stomach flu, which made me not want to look at anything I'd been eating, but part of it may also have been that batch of beet patties I'd made staring me down from the refrigerator. Better to write off the mistake and move on.

I'm craving cheese, so I'm experimenting, inspired by this blog post at the Sunny Raw Kitchen. It's still in the culturing phase. Hopefully this experiment will taste better than the bread I'd hoped to eat it on.

Here's what I've been eating:

Day Sixteen

• 12:30 pm: almonds
  
• 2:30 pm: 1/2 Larabar, apple pie flavor
  
• 4:30 pm: Larabar, apple pie flavor
  
• 5 pm: Blueberries, baby carrots, sugar snap peas (I was at a friends house and she put out a fruit and veggie tray)
  
• 8 pm: Raw vegan Mac and Cheese from Everyday Raw
  
• 10 pm: Taste of godawful onion bread

Day Seventeen:

• 9 am: Green Smoothie (6 oz bag of organic spinach, banana, tangerine, juice of one homegrown lemon, wheat grass, spirulina)