(The first installment of a bi-weekly green, fair-trade gathering. @Venus Hotel in El Albir, Alfas del Pí, Alicante, Spain. March 14, 2010; 11am-8pm.)

I have the dehydrator running for the first time. I’m making flax crackers from a recipe I found on the Give It To Me Raw community.  I also whipped up a few atom bombs, according to the orginal recipe from many moon ago in my London days, and am having a go at dehydrating four of them.  It makes a fan sound, but otherwise is a pretty innocuous machine.

The Green Star juicer is proving to be a fab partner in the kitchen.  Amazing yield and fantastic juices.  I whipped up a little celery-carrot-purple carrot-pear-parsley-garlic green juice the other morning and man did it kick ass!  I walked around the whole day with garlic on the tongue, but I sure felt energized, even though I’d been up half the night with the baby.

The Blendtec Total I’ve also been using but am not totally convinced yet.  It is great for smoothies, and I made a fantastic almond mylk today.  But I agree with the critics of the Blendtec that the pre-programmed control panel is a bit of a pig to intuit.  I think I’d have preferred and nice twisty little knob.  And, the Blendtec doesn’t come with a tamper, like the Vita-Prep.  This means the dreaded situation where your ingredients are pasted to the edges of the jar while the blades fruitlessly whirl through air arises with frequency.  Or, at least, with what I’ve tried to do with it.  Maybe I am trying to make my blender be a food processor? Above-mentioned flax crackers were certainly not a happy glob in the ol’ blender.  Nor was the coconut I tried to cream the other day, but that might be because it actually turned out to be bad.  I dunno.  I am going to keep trying and see where the Blendtec leads me.

The cool thing is the my dude is getting quite into the whole raw thing. He’s making smoothies in the morning, salads at lunchtime, reading Shazzie’s books and generally quite enthused about the left-of-centre ideas that I keep springing on him.  Yay!

Now, I realise that this situation is of my own making:when I met my partner -Italian, remember – I fell under the spell that I could also indulge in pasta and bread and cheese without paying the price.  I mean, our diet remained high in vegetables and other grains, so it’s ok, right? Wrong.  The noxious effects of eating wheat are insidious:  someone like me, with strong digestion and no history of candida will not immediately feel ill. But after a year or two, everything comes to the surface.  While I was in Italy, I gained an enormous amount of weight.  I was terribly tired and emotionally fragile.  Perhaps some of this is due to new motherhood, but I don’t think that as a species we would have survived long if every new mother became physically weak and emotionally fragile.  I think that this change in me was due to my diet:  the lovely, killer plates of pasta served up by la nonna.

Naturally, my daughter was exposed to this fare and her little chip has been programmed from within the womb and then during breastfeeding to having the products of wheat (in)digestion in the bloodstream.  In short, I have unwittingly produced a food addict because of my lack of attention at such a crucial stage in her development.

Accepting this fact is difficult for me.  I feel like I have finally found my feet again, since going high-raw.  I feel light and full of energy, emotionally calm and much, much happier.  Although I admit to irritation this week due to above cold and due to trying to change my daughter’s eating habits.  She asks for juice and I say water.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Cry.  she asks for bread and I give her quinoa.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Cry.  `It’s tough.  And so I decided yesterday morning that whatever my dietary beliefs, I am acheiving nothing if they produce conflict in my home.  I adore my child and without spoiling her and giving in to her every whim, I have decided not to let it get to me.  After all, we cannot change the situation, we can only change our reaction to it.  Having taken delivery of my raw chocolate fromn Shazzie, and awating my blender (hurrah ‘express’ delivery in Spain),  I will begin to whip up nutritious, delicious treats for my girl that beat any barra gallega (a kind of ciabatta-like white bread) hands down. Om shanti peace in the home.