Joel Rendall

How hard is it to be a raw vegan in Colombia? Not very. Here is a collage of different fruit vendors I saw around town in Cartagena. They were selling avocado (aguacate), watermelon (sandia), mango (mango), cantelope (melón), among others.

There were even a few fruits that I didn’t recognize. And with my “poco español,” I couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell me they were!

This morning’s breakfast included a delicious mango. Just as I was about to throw out the mango pit, I glanced over at a bottle of sparkling water / seltzer / club soda (whatever you want to call the stuff).

I put the pit in a glass, then poured the club soda on it. I put it in the fridge with a plate on top (since the bottle was a room temperature).

A few minutes later, I was drinking Mango Pop! It was better than I recall actual soda tasting, and your teeth don’t hate you for it, either.

You can reuse the same mango pit for several glasses. I intend to experiment with different fruit scraps to create different flavours.

Here is what I had for lunch today – A salad with spinach, sprouts, strawberries, and an improvised salad dressing.

Salad dressing:

- Strawberries

- Balsamic Vinegar, Olive Oil

- Carrot

- Garlic

- Italian Spices

Okay, I guess with a couple of those ingredients, it’s more like 99% raw. Sue me

It looks like I need to work on my raw vegan soup technique. I’ve been getting too cocky with all of my improvised recipes. And it is very hard to mess up a fruit smoothie, so that further increased my confidence.

To make raw soup, the friction from the high-powered blender heats up the mixture so it can be eaten warm, without cooking it and murdering all the enzymes and nutrition in the process.

The blender did it’s job, but unfortunately, I wasn’t nearly as reliable. It’s hard to find good help these days…

First of all, you’ll notice the goop spattered across the wall. That’s from opening the lid too quickly.

But the biggest problem was that the final product didn’t taste great. I’m lying – it was gag-worthy. No amount of dried parsley can save this disaster.

In case you want the recipe: I added random vegetables from the fridge, garlic, spices, and water. I also added too much jalapeno, so while I thought I was adding a clever zing, I ended up further reducing the edibility of the already questionable soup.

But my penny-pinching instincts tells me to eat it anyway. And I even have leftovers for tomorrow – yay.

As a reward for injecting mass amounts of this theoretically healthy concoction, I washed it down with some fresh applesauce made from a couple red delicious apples, raw cashews, and cinnamon. Yum. It was almost worth it. Almost.

So the lesson I learned today was…  learn to make better soup, or stop trying.

I heard somewhere that dehydrating eggplant is a good idea. I had it at Live, a raw restaurant in Toronto, and it was presented as a raw “bacon” strip on top of a raw burger. I decided to try cutting it as circles, rather than strips. I marinated the slices for about an hour in olive oil, sea salt, garlic and some spices.

Then I put it in the dehydrator. It came out with a texture that reminded me of pizza crust. Hmmmm…

I topped it with a diced tomato and some onion (above).

Then I made a spicy jalapeno sauce with a bunch of other vegis and random spices, and drizzled it over the pizzas, and the asparagus. (below)

Apologies for the poor quality of the photos. Apparently I still don’t have the camera flash figured out.

This was so delicious. I think this is one of the best things I have eaten for the last couple months, and it was a fun mess to eat.

So there you go – raw mini pizzas. Time for me to get a cookbook deal!

ps. Look again at the photo on the right. An old trick I learned while working at a restaurant, is that if you want to make something look more appetizing, especially when the plate is a mess, springle parsely flakes on it, and it will look 10x better.