The Raw Chef

Growing Wheatgrass: An Extension on Your Homework

Just a quick note to say that I'm now going to be away for part of next week so won't be at home to attend to my wheatgrass.  Which means that I'm going to give you an extension and delay the start by a week!  Actually, it normall wouldn't be a problem to grow it while I'm away but seeing as I'm planning to photograph it and put it on my blog, it poses a bit more of a challenge.

So.....next Monday then, wheatgrass growing shall commence!

Rule 44a: If It Glows In The Dark, Don't Eat It

I've just watched an episode of 'Just for Laughs', a hidden camera show, which I wouldn't usually do, but it was on after the football, honest!

Anyway, one of their jokes was to have a girl in a shopping mall giving out hot dogs for the purpose of trying a new range of sauces.  Each person was given a hot dog and squirted on their own sauces from those massive pump-action sauce bottles that were coloured red, brown and yellow, as they usually are for tomato ketchup, brown sauce and mustard.

The joke was that each of the new sauces were coloured with a luminous green, blue and purple colouring.  They were horrific, they didn't even look like edible substances.  Even the people who were trying the hot dogs turned their noses up at them.

Despite all that, they still ate them!  Unbelievable!  They had no idea what the sauces were made of, there was just a feeling of, "well, it must be OK to eat otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to be giving them away in public."  I'm sure the colouring was 'food grade', but it appears Morgan Spurlock was right when he said that people will eat anything!

I don't know whether this says more about our desire for anything free, or about our complete inability to discern when it comes to putting food into our mouths.

Grow Your Own Wheatgrass

How do you fancy growing the freshest and strongest wheatgrass like the picture on the left?  That's my wheatgrass from last year and it was so simple to grow that's it's really worth all the (very little) effort.  I was having a fantastic dinner with friends on Saturday night and during conversation realised that not everyone knows how simple it is to grow wheatgrass, especially now we're in the perfect time of year for growing outdoors.

So what I thought I'd do is get everyone to grow some together in 'real-time'.  I'll be growing wheatgrass and posting my instructions and photos for you to follow along, it'll be like a little on-line class :-)  Told you I was turning into a computer nerd!  Am I setting myself up for disaster if my grass doesn't grow?  I'll be exposed!  I'll tell you now, if it doesn't grown I'll be buying some from Aconbury Sprouts and photographing it as my own!!!  Only joking of course...someone has already asked me if that is really a picture of my own wheatgrass!  Oh ye of little faith.  Of course it's mine, and I shall prove it!

Anyway, we'll be starting next Monday which gives you plenty of time to get the few bits and pieces we'll be needing.

Read on to see a list of your 'class' materials...

Hours Spent On The Internet That I'll Never Get Back!

So a few things to update today as I've been getting very 'geeky' and playing around with my blog design and haven't actually posted anything recently!  Doesn't time just fly past when you're on the internet?  More on that in a second though.

First of all, let's get back to last weekend and Chad Sarno's Level 1 training weekend.  What a fantastic weekend with a great group of people.  The event was held just outside Brighton in a lovely little village in Lewes.  It was a very intimate training of just 10 people which meant we certainly got value!  The weather was great and we ate our food in the sunshine, a truly fantastic pleasure that doesn't come about very often in the UK.  I got so much from the training, as did everyone else.  There were a couple of people completely new to raw there and one lady that I met was so excited at what she had discovered, that's what it's all about for me, seeing the new people getting excited about the possibilities.

I'm turning into a computer nerd...

Changing How The World Sees British Cuisine

Bad Food Britain: Why we're addicted to rubbish

The statistics are shocking. In a nutshell, Britain eats about 50% of all the junk eaten in Europe. The average Briton, for example, swallows 7.2 kilogrammes of savoury snacks (crisp-type products) a year, while the typical Italian manages just one kilogramme. British children now consume 25 times more confectionery and 30 times more soft drinks than they did in 1950. Our taste for over-packaged, added-value, factory food bearing an uncanny resemblance to airline meals has also spiralled out of control. By 2003, we ate more ready meals than the rest of Europe put together.

That's an excerpt from an article in Scotland's Sunday Herald revealing some shocking statistics about the way we eat in the UK.  The article then goes on to explain how we in the UK are viewed as far as our culinary attitudes go.  It's a great read and I had no idea these issues were such a problem!  You never know when your own breath smells but everyone else does and it comes as a shock when someone tells you!

Given that we are seen to be a nation of people with such, "bad food" habits, what could be the future?  As the article explains...