Summer Detoxifying Cleanse

by Nomi Shannon

originally published in Alive Magazine, Canada's foremost health magazine in 2001

With summer in full swing markets and gardens are brimming with luscious ripe fruits and vegetables. If you have ever thought about embarking on a cleansing program, now would be the time to do it! What exactly is a cleanse, you ask? Simply put,

Here are the exact and specific saladacco instructions

Written by Nomi Shannon, The Raw Gourmet www.rawgourmet.com

The instructions that come with the product are confusing, misleading and in part incorrect; it is not recommended that you use them.

Used correctly what you will wind up with is long strands, about as thick as angel-hair pasta or what ever veggie you are using. Just add your favorite sauce, like a raw marinara tho the variations are endless and you have a truly wonderful meal and so simple!!!!

There are two blades, a flat one that is screwed in, and one that is a set of
"teeth" that is connected to a "gear" on the side of the white middle section. The "teeth" can be moved UP to make pasta, or DOWN to make curly slices by moving the gear. Be sure that the teeth are ALL THE WAY UP for making pasta. Also it is important to check from time to time to be sure that your hand or finger hasn't accidentally moved the gear while you are using the saladacco, this is common and results in slices rather than pasta.

Your vegetable, let's say it is a zucchini (courgette) must be fairly straight. Be sure to choose straight rather than crooked ones at the store. Also VERY IMPORTANT when you cut the vegetable it needs to be cut straight not at an angle. The vegetable is placed in the saladacco upright, that is vertical, not horizontal. You can not lay your vegetable down on its side and get good results. So if it is a zucchini, you are placing one of the cut ends centered directly on to the raised point in the center of the middle white piece. Your vegetable must be three inches high or less to fit.

Once you have centered the vegetable on the raised white dot, simply put the clear cover on and allow the white disc to just lower by itself, nothing special should be done here, just put the clear cover on. Then turn the clear cover gently either left or right it doesn't matter, til it STOPS. WARNING: NEVER "LOCK" THE TOP ON. This will break the machine and it will not perform correctly if you "lock" it.

If you are right handed hold the clear top with your left so that the saladacco will stay in place. With your right hand, you will be turning the handle clockwise. IMPORTANT: WHILE YOU ARE TURNING THE HANDLE YOU ALSO NEED TO PRESS DOWNWARD WITH THE HAND THAT IS TURNING THE HANDLE. This may not seem like a natural thing to do, but this is what you need to do for the saladacco to perform properly. With a zucchini, you will be pressing down fairly firmly but not very firmly, pressing down enables the vegetable to engage with the teeth.

When you are using a harder vegetable like a beet or carrot or sweet potato, you need to apply much more pressure than you do with the zucchini.

This sounds far more complicated than it really is because I have broken each tiny step down. Practice with a potato or a zucchini before using it on the very hard vegetables. Some vegetables such as parsnip actually can be too old and dry to work well in a saladacco. A fresh parsnip works well, but sometimes late in the season the old woody ones don't work well. Likewise a very large zucchini with a huge soft center filled with seeds won't work well either as the soft center won't turn into pasta it will just turn into mush.

Now that you know how to use this wonderfully useful gadget…Knock yourself out: try it with carrot, beet, sweet potato, parsnip, turnip, rutabaga, celery root (celeriac), or my personal favorite the zucchini (courgette). The saladacco does not work for soft items like tomatoes or most apples, it will work with firm daikon radish, but not with most jicama, it is too watery. Some people claim they use it for onion, I have never quite figured out how that would work out-not for pasta like strips anyway.

Apple Season

One of the best times of the year, when apples are truly juicy and
delicious.
Did you know that by June you could be eating apples that are a
year or more old?
Sad, but true, they are kept in cold-storage for months and months
so they can be sold all year.

In New England it is apple-cider time. Hopefully there are still
some apple orchards left that fresh- press the apple, peel and all
for some wonderful home made apple cider. In recent time past,
there has been a problem with fresh-pressed cider. A young child
became ill from e-coli from the cider. Since then just about everything
in the stores has been pasteurized, it is nearly impossible to find
unpasteurized juice products. So the caveat here is: Perhaps it would
be best to avoid feeding field- made fresh pressed apple cider for
the very young and the very old or the very ill.
If you make it at home you can avoid problems by doing the
following:

The Raw Gourmet September, 2001 Newsletter, Part I

Depression

Today's topic is one I consider
of paramount importance, and one I know a great deal
about: Depression. I know from a personal,
familial, educational (work on a Master's Degree
in Social Work), and professional point of view a
very great deal about depression. I plan to write about
it in much more detail within the next several years.

The major portion of this two-part newsletter is an article
that I found some months ago. I hope that you find it helpful
and informative. It contains extremely useful information about
the natural alternatives available for depression, including
exact dosages, and cautions. The article alone is about 8 pages
long, so to keep it from being unmanageable for you to read,
today I am including Specials For You-plus a testimonial from a
woman named Jennifer that I have corresponded with about her own
personal depression story and its relation to raw food. She sent
the following very well written article. If you wish to respond
directly to Jennifer, send it to me and I will forward it to her.

Note: There are many readers who are opposed to supplements. Please
do not write me about this article. The reality is that depression is
a chemical imbalance and these supplements can be literal lifesavers.
As you will see from Jennifer's testimony, diet is all-important. Please
don't forget that!





Now I would like to tell you about the K-Tec blender.

The leader in commercial blenders, K-Tec HP3 Champ is now
available for home use. Computer controlled blend cycles make
perfect smoothies and soups with one-touch operation. No old
fashioned knobs, switches, or dials to wear out. Solid state
electronics and sleek touchpad ensure long life and dependable
performance. No other blender offers the power, ease of operation,
and state of the art engineering. Half-gallon capacity. GE Lexan
jar is lightweight and easy to clean. Powerful 3 peak horsepower
motor makes any blending chore a breeze. 8 year warrantee, lifetime
warrantee on the coupling, blade and keypad.

The K-tec HP3 Champ blender has replaced the Vita-Mix at Disney,
Starbucks and Jamba juice! You can observe the blender in action
at any of the above. At Starbucks, they have 2 K-Tec blenders,
one is for non-dairy. Both are encased in a lucite 'cage' to
keep the noise volume down. Your blender will not have this cage.
But other wise it is the same machine.(Also the commercial use
base is black, home use base is white.) I prefer this machine by
far over the Vita-Mix. It is more powerful (3 horsepower vs 2),
much easier to use (keypad, pre-programmed levels, no cumbersome hard
to handle lid, and no 'plunger'is necessary.) The blender comes pre-programmed.
It has instructions for changing the programs as there are 30 possible
programs. However I find the machine works wonderfully the way it arrives
from the factory, as many of my raw food peers do. It includes a book that
describes the keypad settings but otherwise is not very good from the
Raw Food point of view.

Where I used to grate or cut up carrots or frozen bananas before putting
them into a blender, I now just break them in half and toss them in. There
is no need to worry about wet containers or dry containers,
this machine does both in the same container.

If you already own a Vita-mix, it isn't necessary to run out and buy
a K-Tec HP3. But if you want a heavy duty, high powered blender, then
this is definitely the machine that I recommend.


Think Christmas. Think amazing speed in the kitchen with soups, smoothies,
and anything else you can think up using such a powerful machine. OK,
enough hype-----here's the price: Please call 888-316-4611 or 928-284-3201 for price.
Available in the US and Canada only.





Testimonial from Jennifer:

How do you Feel? What did you Eat?

Whenever I catch myself feeling down, tired, angry, upset,
frustrated, or irritable, I can look back and see that I
actually ate poison within the last 4-24 hours. Poison?
Yes: refined sugar, refined starch, additives,
colors, "preservatives", pasteurized, cooked, or chemical poisons.

My name is Jennifer, and I'm not a doctor or nutritionist,
yet over the last five years I have become my own doctor,
nutritionist, and patient. I am someone who was blessed to
receive knowledge about the importance of a simple, raw food diet.
I now know that what we eat has a direct
affect on how we feel. It is basic physics, basic chemistry, and an
understanding of the simple law of cause and effect.

I was diagnosed with clinical depression at age 16,
but I know I was sad, nervous and insecure long before that.
To the outside world I was friendly but shy, very pretty,
honor roll, and involved in some after school activities.
Behind any locked door (bedroom, bathroom, closet, you name it)
I broke down into tears 1-4 times a day, mentally berated myself
for every little mistake I made, was fearful of every morsel I put
in my mouth, and eventually thought about suicide. Yes, there
were things going on at home, yes there was stress, and yes there
was the "Standard American Diet" (SAD - coincidence?). But I knew
MANY others who had far more difficulties in their lives who seemed
to cope much better than I.