Day 15/ Zucchini Pasta with Puttanesca Sauce and Not Meat Balls

Yet another winning dish from Raw Food Made Easy For 1 or 2 People. Now I see why this book has 130 five-star reviews on Amazon.com.

Before I started this cleanse (Join The Lifeit Detox 28 Days Raw Food Cleanse), one of my favorite dishes was Whole Wheat Pasta with Turkey Meat Sauce. So I was eager to try this dish.

Well, it both looked and tasted familiar. It tasted a LOT like the spaghetti that I was used to. I could have warmed the dish up slightly in the oven and that would have made it taste even more like regular spaghetti, but instead I ate it at room temperature. It is also as filling as it looks.

Yesterday I purchased another book from Harry's Farmer's Market called 12 Steps to Raw Foods: How to End Your Dependency on Cooked Food. Before I buy anything, I always check to see the reviews on Amazon.com. This book also has very good reviews.

This book is not so much a cookbook as it is a kind of guide to raw food eating. So far I've only read the first 3 chapters, but I have already learned that nearly every nutrient that the human body needs (including protein) can be found in green leafy vegetables. Unfortunately, most people, including raw vegans, don't eat enough green leafy vegetables because either they don't like the taste, or they can't digest them well.

So the author came up with a way to make Green Smoothies where you combine fresh fruit, a handful or two of green leafy vegetables, and water in a smoothie. She found that when she started drinking these Green Smoothies, she saw even more improvements in her health, even though at that time she had already been a raw vegan for a number of years.

The ebook that comes with the Lifeit Detox Cleanse also incorporates Green Smoothies, but initially I had been making my smoothies without the vegetables. At the time I thought that if I added spirulina and the smoothie LOOKED green, that all was good! Now that I know the importance of adding green leafy vegetables to my smoothies, I have started doing that. It really does make eating salad greens a lot more palatable and easier to digest.