How to eat the rainbow everyday

Erik and I are off to a good start in our 4th wedding anniversary week celebration!

How to Eat the Rainbow Everyday {part 1}

Monday night, as a part of the 2011 Urban Farms & Garden Tour events, we went to a raw food class at one of our favorite KC restaurants (that I talk about all the time), FUD. We covered so much I’m going to break this recap into two separate posts … so here goes the first one!

The theme of the class was “How to Eat the Rainbow Everyday”, taught by owner & chef of FUD, Heidi Belle.

It focused on incorporating every color of the rainbow into meals through raw foods, as each color delivers amino acids and phytonutrients for different parts of the body.

Our evening started out with a delicious cold brewed green tea, and then we got to business!

The premise was to make a tasty, complete raw meal you need the following categories of raw fruits, seeds, nuts & vegetables:

1. Fats -- avocados, nuts, seeds and raw oils like virgin olive oil, virgin coconut oil, flax oil and hemp oil.
2. Acids -- lemons, oranges, tomatoes, bell peppers, sour cherries, sour berries, raw vinegars, fermented foods
3. Sweets -- bananas, dates, goji berries, raisins, grapes, mangoes, apples, pineapples, oranges
4. Savory -- all vegetables and sprouts
5. Salty -- natural unheated mineral/sea salt, celery, Swiss chard, dulse flakes (sea weed)
6. Aromatic -- herbs and spices

The class covered the following tips in making delicious raw foods:

• When keeping these six categories in mind when shopping, it will be much easier to prepare a fast “rainbow” snack.
• To make a completely satisfying meal, use the “savory” category (all vegetables and sprouts) as your foundation to build upon.
• Prepare a dressing with all the categories in mind for a more delicious and nutritious meal.
  • Sample dressing would be to blend together: garlic cloves, peeled lemon, natural mineral salt, peeled orange, virgin olive oil, cashew and water
• Chop enough produce in advance so that you can easily make a quick snack
• Grow “aromatic” herbs in pots in your home for easy, inexpensive flavor enhancing and beneficial medicinal qualities. If you don’t have your own herbs, buy from local farmers to help promote a healthy community.
• Use sweet fruits for breakfast or as an accent to a savory meal.
• Buy the best salt on the market. A bad salt means hardening of the soft tissues in the circulatory system.

And for dinner, we got to build our own “rainbow”:

More info on where the ingredients to this delicious “rainbow” came from, how we made it, what else we ate, and a lot more pictures!

Stay tuned for Part II!