RAW - Carrot & Sunflower Seed Burger

Well, I never thought I would actually get around to doing it, but lo and behold I've finally made one of the fancier (and more time consuming) raw vegan dishes for my lunchbox. It seems like I've been working on this one for a week now. Of course, it's not hard work or anything. It's mostly just a lot of time waiting for things to soak, and to sprout, and to dehydrate, etc. Half of this dish is actually from a recipe and half of it is made up. After I've finally gotten into it and started making some of this stuff, I can see where it would be easy to just make recipes up and wing it based on what ingredients you might happen to have on hand. At any rate, this raw vegan lunch is actually pretty tasty. I don't think I could live on this 100% of the time, but it makes for a nice change of pace, and you can definitely tell that it's healthy for you when you eat it. And yeah, it may look kinda' small, I guess all raw food kinda' looks small now that I think about it, but believe me, it is dense and rich, not as in sweet, but just meaning that it would be difficult to eat more than one of these raw veggie burgers.

The raw Carrot & Sunflower Seed Burger started out with me making the raw "bread" that serves as the buns for the "burger". I made them from a recipe in Alissa Cohen's book, "Living on Live Foods". The main ingredients are sprouted buckwheat and soaked flax seeds. There are quite a few spices added in there too which make it taste really good. Basically, you just mix all of that stuff up in a food processor and then spread it out into sheets and dehydrate them. You can mound it up into big hamburger bun shapes if you want to, but I just did mine in thin sheets and then, when they were about halfway done dehydrating, I took the sheets out and used a glass to cut out small circles that I knew would be able to fit into the lunchbox. I stopped the dehydrating when they were about the texture of bread. You could easily let them continue on and dry down further until they got crunchy and then use them as Live Crackers. I'll probably try that soon, because I do like the taste of this stuff. You'll probably see me use them as mini pizza crusts too at some point. Basically, this stuff made from sprouted buckwheat & flax could serve as any kind of bread, or cracker, or wrapper for a raw vegan food dish.

The "burger" part is just kinda' made up based on one of my favorite cooked veggie burger recipes, which in turn is a clone of the Sunshine Burger, which is one of my favorite storebought veggie burgers. SHEESH! I just soaked some sunflower seeds for a few hours, then put them in the food processor with some carrots, onion, garlic and basil and then just processed the whole thing until it turned into a dough like consistency that I could mold into patties. I just dehydrated them for a few hours and they were done. To make the complete burger I just took a couple of pieces of the "bread" and put a patty between them along with some raw spinach and tomato. Like I said, this does taste good, but it is kinda' hard to eat too much of it because it tastes so nutrient dense. I don't know if I'll ever bother making these again, because it does take a while to do, but I'm glad I tried them just so I could see what something like this tasted like. I like it.

To go along with my "burger" I've got a salad (a.k.a. some Spinach), and in keeping with the raw vegan theme, my salad dressing is just a small container of some cold-pressed Olive Oil and a big lemon wedge that I can squeeze on the salad. For dessert, I just cup up a few fresh Strawberries.

So there you have it, my very first attempt at some of the fancier raw vegan cuisine. I was pleased with how they came out, but like I said, I'm not sure I like devoting that much prep time to such small food, even though it's not hard work. I'm sure I'll try some more raw cuisine, but I see now that I am definitely not cut out for being a 100% raw vegan at this point.

Today's lunch is definitely healthy though, and low calorie, so it will hopefully help me lose some more weight this week. It's finally starting to warm up again around here, so I can finally get back into the groove of walking every day. With that cold snap that we had last week, my walking schedule was seriously interrupted. In fact, I was surprised that I even lost any weight last week, but I did. Of course, the cold is really no excuse considering that I have a treadmill at home (hangs head in shame). Anyway, I AM walking today and the rest of this week.

So thanks for checking out the blog today. See everybody on Thursday!