Here's a great post by Emily on the Disease Proof blog, about the "lifestyle" of a nutritarian vs the lifestyle of disease.

I'm trying a new schedule that allows me to do my food prep in the morning.  I think this will let me be more creative and actually do some real cooking on weekdays.  I just didn't have the energy when I was prepping all my meals at 9 pm the night before.   Today I decided to enjoy my fruit separately from my salads and to cook my veggies.  Here's what I came up with:

Breakfast:  1 lb strawberries.  yum!

Lunch and Dinner:
I cooked up in the pressure cooker:  broccoli, onions, red cabbage, and mushrooms; and 1 tsp each of dried oregano and basil (didn't have any fresh herbs on hand).  Added 2 cans of (homemade) tomatoes, 1 cup of beans, 1 oz of seed mixture, and 3 Tbsp spicy pecan vinegar.   This fit into two 4-cup containers.  Then I filled two 8 cup containers with a chopped head of lettuce and about 4 oz of chopped spinach.  Poured the veggies on top of the greens when I was ready to eat.  Yum!

Dessert:
1 lb of fresh cherries.  fantastic!

Wow.  This food is so much better than anything I ever ate in the "Standard American Diet."

I'm in Palmdale California resting up before my all-night flight on SOFIA.  Take-off will be 7:40 pm, landing 5:45 am.   Here's what I ate yesterday:

After tonight's flight I'll rush off to LAX and hope to get there in time to catch my flight to Wisconsin.  Funnily enough, we will fly over Wisconsin tonight on Sofia.  So hopefully I'll go there twice in one day.  I'll be pointing the telescope to a massive star forming region and collecting infrared photons and turning them into images that will hopefully tell us about the nature of the source--how the outflows are shaping the envelope cavity for one thing.  And by combining these data with those at other wavelengths, we'll understand better the evolutionary stage of this source and add to our knowledge of the processes that form very massive stars.

For tomorrow I have carrots, sugar snap peas, and an apple to get me home.  Then I'll probably buy some luscious berries and local spinach for dinner, oh yeah, and maybe some brazil nuts!  I'm hoping that eating carrots on the way to LAX will keep me awake.  I will try to drive very carefully!

How do you like that mixture of food and astronomy?  ha.

This trip is easy so far as a nutritarian.  I didn't check baggage, so this is all the eating utensils I brought:

I didn't snap a picture.  This was just fun to do and tasted good.

I got requests to post some more pictures so here they are.  This is what I made tonight for tomorrow's final day of vacation.  This is my favorite as it is topped with strawberries, blueberries and blackberries.

These are 8 oz containers!

  

 When done, I clean up everything including the floor so it is spotless.  We nutritarians don't want to get a bad reputation.



Here are some of the other vinegars I tried.  One of them I don't like as well but I'm not sure which one.

For a few weeks in the spring we get ramps appearing in our co-op.  They grow in the wild.  Here's a description of them from wikipedia.  The onion part tastes kind of like scallion, and the green leafy part has a distinctive, strong peppery taste.  I put them on my salad today.  I really like them.  Caution:  don't use too much as they can overpower all the other things in your salad.

I got requests to post some more pictures so here they are.  This is what I made tonight for tomorrow's final day of vacation.  This is my favorite as it is topped with strawberries, blueberries and blackberries.
These are 8 cup containers!
  

 When done, I clean up everything including the floor so it is spotless.  We nutritarians don't want to get a bad reputation.

Here are some of the other vinegars I tried.  One of them I don't like as well but I'm not sure which one.

I've been getting a fair number of questions about the Grand Canyon Salads.  Thanks for your interest!  Here are some of my answers, as well as questions for you:

1)  Should I cook the mushrooms?  Yes, to kill some of the toxins.  1 minute in the microwave is sufficient.  And it tastes better!   Though when I'm traveling and don't always have a microwave, I've eaten them raw.  I'm hoping my nutritarian immune system can handle it.
2)  What size container do you use?  8 cup.  I've accidentally said 8 oz here and there, sorry about mis-speaking.  8 cup.  big.
3)  Do you eat all three in one day?  (are you crazy?)  Yes.  (yes).  :)   I go for simplicity and ease and don't seem to mind repetition.   For me the variation is day-to-day with the ingredients (the veggies and fruit), and the repetition is 3 meals in one day.   I'm gone from 8 am until 9 pm every day.  I prepare my food the night before and take it with me during the day.  You should do what works for you!  If you want to have this at lunch only, just make a smaller batch to fit one bowl for lunch.  Then have what something else for breakfast and dinner.
4)  How long will these keep?  24 hours.  I could probably push it to 36 hours if I skip a meal and still have one left the next day for breakfast.  But I don't think I'd do that on a regular basis.
5)  Do you cook the veggies?  I've done it both ways, cooked and raw.  Both ways are good.
6)  What do you do in between your salads?  Is that all you eat?  I usually have a few hundred extra calories to play with.  I fill it with favorite veggies in season.  Right now my favorites are usually carrots, sweet potato, sweet corn, and/or sugar snap peas.

I have questions for you all:  I'm surprised at the interest in these salads.  I was just going after an easy way to prepare food that tastes good and satisfies Dr. Fuhrman's 6-week plan.  Is this what appeals to you too?  Or do you just think the salads are good?

Let me know if you have any more questions or answers!

Yesterday I knew the fridge would be almost empty today if I didn't go grocery shopping but I also knew there was just enough for a big brunch before going out for several hours and skipping lunch.  I'll go grocery shopping on the way home.  So here's what I made.

I heard this concept today from a nutritarian.  She said our palette is all the wonderful produce and we make great creations from this.  I love this idea.  People often say they would be deprived eating this way as there is so much we don't get to eat.  True but most people eat pretty much the same thing:  meat, dairy, fat, oil, white flour, and lots of sugar and salt and pepper.   Especially the salt and sugar deadens your taste buds.  Have you noticed lots of "foodies" like really hot and spicy food?  That's because they need the stimulation.  Once you regain your sensitivity after giving up salt and sugar, you taste the sweetness in spinach and broccoli stems and cooked cauliflower, and the different flavors of lettuce.  It's pretty amazing.  And we work with nature's raw ingredients to produce our art, not processed food.  It's a great place to be.

I heard a nice quote today:  "There are many things you can't do in life for reasons beyond your control; so get busy doing the things you CAN do."  Applying that to eating, yes, there are many foods we can't eat, especially in modern American society.  So get busy preparing the delicious healthy food that awaits you!

After 2 weeks on the road, I was in the mood for some cooked vegetables, but I was on the same kind of schedule, preparing food at night for the next day (on weekdays, I'm gone from 8 am until 9 pm usually).  My go-to meals right now are the Grand Canyon Salads, also known as, 6-Week Plan in a bowl (Dr. Fuhrman's recommendations for a healthy diet, p. 216 of Eat to Live, 2nd edition, p. 179 in the 1st edition).

I'm still on vacation and have been having fun experimenting with  my Grand Canyon salads.  I've been varying the layers.  I think I like the broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and cabbage on the bottom so they can marinate in the vinegar.  I've been varying the veggies, sometimes using  asparagus and bok choy, but usually my mainstay is those four I mentioned.    Then pour a Tbsp of vinegar on top of that, then add the beans, lettuce, spinach, maybe arugula, some cilantro is good.  Another Tbs of vinegar.  Then mushrooms, seed mixture.  Then fruit on top.   And sometimes beans on top.  I like to eat the fruit last so then I have to dig around to the bottom to get the veggies.  If I had a plate, I should just turn the salad upside down on the plate and it would be sorted how I want for eating.

I've been getting to Whole Foods every other day to stock up, so my produce has been outstanding.  Today's salads were sooo good.  They had strawberries, blueberries and banana for fruit.  How yummy.  Tomorrow's has apple and orange.  That's how I'm varying it usually because I like to eat the berries within a day of buying them.  I didn't buy enough food yesterday so I'm going to bed a little hungry tonight, especially after biking a lot today.  I wish I had a bag of carrots to munch on.  I'll hit a Whole Foods tomorrow and will buy lots of carrots and sugar snap peas, my favorite treats.  Oh, I found this great and cheap vinegar at Whole Foods:  Napa Valley naturals black cherry balsamic vinegar.  It was only $3.99.  It's great!

okay, time for bed.

I was going to call these salads "6WP in a bowl" because they include everything Dr. Fuhrman recommends in his 6-week plan (from his book Eat to Live).   But they started turning into what I felt were masterpieces, because of my layered approach, and it reminds me of the geologic layers of the Grand Canyon, which I happen to be visiting this week.   So I call them Grand Canyon Salads.   I start by putting fruit in the bottom.  I bought 6 days worth of food at the Whole Foods in Albuquerque so I got fruit with staying power:  oranges, apples, and bananas.   So one orange, one apple, and 1 banana gets cut up and put into 3 large bowls (breakfast, lunch and dinner, yes I am boring).   I top that with a can of no-salt beans.  Then spinach, arugula, lettuce, and kale.  Then 1 Tbsp of fruit-infused vinegar in each bowl.  Then scallions, mushrooms, seed mixture, red cabbage, then 1 Tbsp of fruit-infused balsamic vinegar, then broccoli and cauliflower.  Then smash down and put the lids on.  Oh, on the first day I had a tomato and used strawberries and banana for the fruit.    Here's what one looks like: