Kate O'Neill and then some

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Reformed mathlete turned analytics geek. Vegan (mainly raw) foodie, cat lover, occasional gardener, songwriter, smartass. Founder and CEO of [meta]marketer, a marketing optimization agency in Nashville.

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raw food

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Bookmarking this for a Pride party sometime

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via pinterest.com

Found on Pinterest. So totally stealing this idea.

Filed under  //  raw food  
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Quick advice on going raw, repurposed from an email to a friend

A friend of mine emailed me to say that she's thinking about going raw for a bit and wondered if I had any advice. I'm sure I have way more than I could write up in an email, but I thought of a few tips off the top of my head and thought I'd share them here too, in case anyone else is looking for this sort of guidance. 


  • Start where you are. You really don't need a whole bunch of expensive equipment. If you have a food processor, you can make hummus and other dips and spreads. If you have even a cheap blender, you can do smoothies. It's a little tougher to do green smoothies, but you can use baby spinach or other tender greens and a cheap blender should be able to tear through that fine. A dehydrator is fantastic but not strictly necessary, especially in the summer when you have so much seasonal produce to make into salads and smoothies and just eat by itself. 
     
  • Focus on what you really enjoy. Cherries are in season right now and when I munch on those in the evening I couldn't possibly imagine wanting to eat processed snacks. 
     
  • Find a few easy recipes that you love. Mine is a "roasted" red pepper hummus recipe modified from one in Matthew Kenney's Everyday Raw. I make a big batch of that every weekend and I eat hummus with carrot sticks almost every day. It's my standby.
     
  • Be prepared with a raw snack wherever you go. It's easy to get hungry and give in to the temptation of what's available when you don't have a better alternative. But if you carry a raw bar or two (Larabar or Raw Revolution, for example), or some dried fruit or trail mix, you'll always have an ideal option to tide you over until you can have something optimally nutritious. 

In short, it's about doing what makes you feel healthiest, and the only way to get there is to pay close attention to your body. Since going raw, I've been more aware of nuanced signals my body makes about what's going well and what isn't than I ever was before. Fine-tuning is easy, and I can usually feel the effects of slight adjustments within hours or a day or two. Bonus? I haven't been sick in three months, whereas for quite a while, I was sick at least a day or two about every other week. 

I'd never claim that going raw is for everyone, but I do think everyone can benefit from eating more raw food. For me, just about 100% works best. The relative amount that works best for you is up to you to determine. Good luck! 

Filed under  //  health   raw food  
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Brunch, sort of.

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I guess this is the raw(-ish) equivalent of breakfast cereal for lunch: a bowl full of chopped fruit (Pink Lady apples, Tuscan cantaloupe, black plums, and banana), coconut milk, shredded dried coconut, and buckwheaties (soaked, sprouted, & dehydrated buckwheat groats). Light, mild, and incredibly refreshing.

Filed under  //  raw food   veg*nism  
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Raw vegan deep dish pizza

I'm not gonna lie: I'm pretty stoked about this pizza. I got inspired when Karsten and I went to Karyn's Raw Cafe in Chicago and afterwards picked up a slice of raw vegan deep dish pizza (for $12.99 - remember, that's for a slice!) from Karyn's Fresh Corner, the adjoining shop. The pizza was jaw-droppingly amazing, and impressed each of the family members who later tasted it. I knew I had to recreate the experience at home. 

I found a crust that looked promising in a raw foods book I happened across in a thrift store (yes! can you believe I randomly found a raw recipe book in a Nashville thrift store?) and special-ordered soft wheat berries from Amazon to sprout. After a few days of soaking barley and sprouting wheat, I was ready to pour and dehydrate the crust. The dough as it went into the pan had a springy quality not unlike flour-based bread dough, so I was encouraged that this might just be the thing. Anyway, the crust dehydrated for something like 24 hours and then it's been hanging out in the fridge waiting for me to have time to make the rest of the ingredients. 

Today, despite an injured back (too much gardening yesterday), I got into the kitchen and soaked, marinated, chopped, blended, and adjusted the veggies, the cheese (macadamia ricotta from Matthew Kenney's Everyday Raw), and the sauce (also from Everyday Raw), and the finished pizza is in the dehydrator now warming up for dinner. 

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The crust going into the dehydrator

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marinated veggies 

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macadamia "cheese"

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tomato sauce

Update: We just finished dinner. It was GREAT. I would add more veggies next time, and make a bigger amount of the crust so it can be thicker, and make more of the cheese, but when your notes for next time are "more, more, more," it's a sign you're already pretty close to the mark. This is going on my "stuff to serve guests" list for sure.

Filed under  //  raw food   veg*nism  
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Raw 'cooking'

I had quite a few non-raw meals this weekend: veggie & hummus bagel sandwiches at Star Bagel on Saturday morning, and brunch with six awesome women at The Wild Cow on Sunday morning. Both meals were well worth splurging on. 

But I also did a bit of raw "cooking," and everything I made this weekend came out great! I made raw pizza on Friday night, based on a recipe I saved in Evernote but which appears to have since been removed from the blog that posted it. It's basically ground flaxseed, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, garlic, black sesame seeds, salt, and water. I also added a bunch of Italian seasoning because it seemed kind of blah without it. That turned out pretty good - certainly a good base to tweak for future improvising. 

Then there was the black olive pesto (more like a cross between pesto and tapenade - yum) and the red pepper hummus with lime, both from Everyday Raw by Matthew Kenney - easily the most consistent of my raw cookbooks in terms of pleasing Karsten (who's been, shall we say, less than impressed with most of the raw dishes I've been making) and other non-raw eaters, although with many daunting steps that say things like "dehydrate for 36 hours." Not even kidding. Menu planning is a must if you want crowd-pleasing raw food. 

And then on the opposite end of the prep time spectrum, there was the raw chili, found by dumb luck on a search for, you guessed it, 'raw chili'. (I was getting hungry from reading all the mentions on Twitter of eating or making chili while watching the Superbowl. I kind of didn't expect to actually find raw chili recipes, let alone quite a few of them.) It only took about 15 minutes to make, and then about an hour in the dehydrator just to warm it up, but if you don't mind chilly chili, you can eat it cold. It's stupid good for being so dead easy. 

Anyone want to come over for lunch? We're having leftovers. :)

Filed under  //  raw food  
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Guilt-free goodness

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This afternoon's snack is 2 bananas, cacao powder, maca powder, goji berries, and agave nectar blended up with some cacao nibs tossed in at the end for crunch. Seriously, this is one dee-licious smoothie.

Filed under  //  raw food   veg*nism  
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