SOUP – A POPULAR, BUT MOST OFTEN OVERLOOKED RAW FOOD DISH

Outside of blending a smoothie, or juicing with a juicer, making soup is one of the easiest meals to prepare. If you are a person looking to improve your health this is a sure method. Within minutes (usually less than 15!) you can create a highly nutritious, low calorie dish that can cool you in the hot summer months and warm you when the temperatures drop.

Soup is so versatile – it can be thin (as in a Consommé or stock) to thick, like a gumbo; consumed cold or warm – heated to a warm temperature or ‘heated’ with warming spices (such as chili, red pepper, etc). Keep your soup smooth or serve it ‘chunky’ style. Soup can be served as a snack, a course, or the entre’ itself. Dress up your soup dish with garnishes (e.g. croutons, bread, crackers, veggies, or greens) or not. Soup is a great ‘take out’ meal as well, just pour it into a cup or a thermos and you’re ‘good to go’.

If you’re looking for a way to drop the calories, lose excess weight, and gain bounds of energy while still consuming a nutritiously dense meal, SOUP is your answer. Soup is classified as a ‘liquid’ food or ‘blended’ meal and is typically made with a variety of veggies. Easy to digest, soups can easily supply you with nutrients you may be missing. By not heating soup over 118 degrees, all the nutrients and enzymes remain intact. You get more ‘bang for your buck’ with every nutritious sip of soup! Also because of its high water content, soups prevent dehydration which is not only aging but can cause low energy among other things (e.g. dizziness, feeling hungry, blood sugar disorders, cramping, etc)

Soup is a GREAT way to keep you from ‘over-eating’, something we are all guilty of. Consuming soup before a meal will give you a full feeling due to its high water and fiber content and nutritional concentration (assuming the soup is vegetarian/vegan). Starting your biggest meal of the day with a cup of soup is a ‘sure fire’ way of lowering your calories while boosting your immune system. It also ‘fires up’ the digestive enzymes in your mouth allowing for easier digestion of the food to follow.

On the raw food diet, preparing soup is extremely easy. There are several ways to make it. You can blend all the ingredients in a high powered blender at once, or you can blend the ‘stock’ until warm then pour over veggies in a bowl; or you can prepare the ‘stock’ (using warm to hot water is the fastest and easiest way) then ‘top’ with garnish or veggies. Adding sprouted beans, peas, lentils, and grains makes for a more condensed, thicker soup.

Even being a raw food consumer, warming soup is easy. If you warm your soup in a pan on the stove keep a careful eye on it to see the soup doesn’t heat over 118 degrees – a thermometer is a handy tool or you can check the temperature with your clean finger to see it is not getting too hot. You can also warm your bowl of soup in the dehydrator 1-2 hours at 135 degrees (the safest method), or in a high speed blender. Yes, the Vita-Mix blender and those other high speed blenders can ‘boil’ water if left on for a length of time. I personally find it faster and easier to warm the soup on the stove while maintaining a watchful eye on the temperature, use a double boiler if you’re not confident you can remove the pot when the soup starts to warm.

If heating a soup that has an avocado in it, bring the soup up to the temperature you desire and then blend in the avocado last. Remember to make preparing warm soup easier, bring your veggies to room temperature helps simplify preparation and warming time.

Warming spices and seasonings will give you a ‘warm’ feeling when the temperature outside drops. Hot peppers, Cayenne pepper, ginger, wasabi, horseradish, black and white pepper, coriander, and turmeric are all considered warm, energy enhancing spices and/or seasonings that make great additions to your soup dish.

So lets not forget the power of SOUP and just how easy and versatile this dish is! Experience just how energizing, healing and delicious soup is.

Bon A Petite
Beth Wilke, Raw Food Chef

I’m craving warm apples, apple cobbler, apple pie, caramel apples, apples….apples…..apples!

This morning I jumped out of bed, only to jump back in again when I realized just how chilly it was! Burrrrr! How quickly the temperatures start to drop in October! A glimpse out the window only added to my feeling of ‘being cold’ as a cluster of dark clouds dotted the grey sky. There was no getting around it though, I had to get up. I was going to conquer the world today, or at least, my part of the world.

If you’re like me, you wake and bless the Almighty for being alive and feeling alive with new energy pushing you out of bed. If you’ve been eating the raw food diet, you discover you don’t require as much sleep as you did when you were eating the standard American diet. With fewer toxins to clean from your system and with a more efficient system your body enjoys a higher level of energy and well-being!

I’m fully awake now, but still feeling the chill of the fall season and crave a warm breakfast! Most people think that when you eat raw that you can’t eat anything heated, they’re quite surprised to discover they’re wrong. A food is still considered ‘raw’ if it isn’t heated above 118 degrees Fahrenheit; all the nutrients and enzymes remain intact. Eating heated foods is highly desirable when the temperatures drop!

I’m craving warm apples, apple cobbler, apple pie, caramel apples, apples….apples…..apples! Apples are in season now and everywhere I look their bright colors beckon and memories of childhood favorite apple dishes surface. Did you know that there are over 7500 varieties of cooking and dessert apples? They range from very tart (crab apple) to deliciously sweet! You can eat them out of hand, prepared in a raw dish or a heated one. If you’re like me, you want lots of options particularly when you’re transitioning to a high raw food diet. As a Recipe Club Member I share my favorite apple recipes with you – recipes I know will satisfy and delight you for both how tasty they are and with how easy they are to prepare.

Learn more about this wonderful healthy fruit on my website: www.sensationalrawfooddiet.com.

The sun is peaking through the clouds now, and I’m off to get breakfast. I wonder, “Why would anyone wish to eat a boxed cereal with milk when there are warm sweet apples beaconing?”

Have a terrific day!

Bon A Petite
Beth Wilke

DIABETES CHANGED MY LIFE – HOW IT CAN CHANGE YOURS ON THE RAW FOOD DIET

Diabetes, a condition where the body can not make use of insulin correctly, is one of the fastest growing diseases in America……..and it is deadly. Diabetes is the number one cause of kidney failure.

The first time I entered a kidney dialysis unit with my husband, an ‘uncontrolled’ diabetic, I was shocked by the number of people in the waiting room and in the numerous beds and chairs tightly packed in the unit, each one hooked up to a dialysis machine. There were elderly people, children, teens, and people of almost every ethnicity I knew. I was appalled at the ‘sign of the times,’ and I shook my head in disbelief, aghast that the “the numbers are increasing!”

Statistics indicate the number of people (between the ages of 30 and 39) with diabetes is increasing at an alarming rate, as high as 70% over the recent 10 years! Currently over 20 million people in the United Sates alone have diabetes. Are you diabetic? Have you been checked? Many diabetics don’t even know they’re diabetic – yet. Diabetes often has no symptoms or warning signs, but the symptoms include: feeling tired, feeling irritable, urinating more than normal, being very thirsty and/or hungry, unexplained weight loss, and/or blurred vision.

My husband like so many other diabetic patients believed a ‘miracle drug’ or ‘miracle procedure’ would be developed that would cure his condition; he paid little attention to dietary guidelines or the need for physical exercise. Then neuropathy (a condition where the blood no longer circulates to the extremities or other organs, including the stomach) set in and his pain level in his hands and feet worsened with each passing year. Before his passing, he often held his hands up away from his body to protect them from being hit, any pressure on his fingers was excruciating. He could no longer eat most foods because his stomach no longer functioned properly and the muscles to move his food lay dormant – the toxins were killing him. His kidneys didn’t work. His will to live ended when he no longer could pet his dogs, hold his wife, or hold cards in his favorite game of Sequence. His vision was blurred to the point that reading was impossible and watching TV was his only outlet.

You ask me, ”How did diabetes change MY life?” I took care of this man I love and watched his decline and suffering. I urged him to try the aggressive raw food diet as explained in the SIMPLY RAW: REVERSING DIABETES IN 30 DAYS video, a ‘proven’ method of reversing diabetes. Though he started eating more raw food his love for eating animal products, fast food, and all time favorite junk/processed food continued. He doggedly believed a ‘cure’ would come soon. It didn’t, not the cure he was looking for. It is not in a pill, it is not a surgical procedure.

The miracle my husband was looking for was right there in front of him, it was in the raw foods. The healing power of whole fresh foods in their natural state has been proven to cure or control most diseases, and Dr. Gabrielle has proven it can reverse diabetes. For those people seeking to be free of this disease, this is the ONLY proven program that works. Yes it requires discipline, yes it requires changes……………yes change is uncomfortable………….but not nearly as uncomfortable as neuropathy I assure you.

No, I didn’t suffer from diabetes, I suffered through it………….through my husband. He’s now dead and yes, my life is changed. After 32 years of sharing my life with this man, a part of me died that day too. I think of all the families of all those people in the dialysis unit and shed tears for every one of them, and those who have yet to be diagnosed.

I urge you to view the video, no other program has proven to reverse diabetes. Dr. Gabriel has proven the raw food diet program can.

If you keep doing the same thing but expect different results, you’re fooling yourself. There are no ‘miracle’ breakthroughs in the medical community. You have to take the initiative – the raw food diet works. Please don’t become a statistic.

- Beth Wilke, Raw Food Chef