a few notes on green smoothies and "pasta"

Yesterday I mentioned that I added seaweed to my green smoothie... yeah, not a good idea. I have some dehydrated seaweed that you put into water to rehydrate .. it's delicious and I love it, but not mixed into a sweet drink! I threw the dehydrated pieces in the smoothie and they plumped up, but the blender couldn't pulverize the seaweed completely so while drinking my smoothie I'd every so often encounter this salty, chewy piece of seaweed! LOL. Well, lesson learned. Seaweed = good for savory food, not sweet!

Now the zucchini pasta... yum! It's been literally months, maybe years, since I've made this dish and it's so simple and easy... but somewhere along the way I forgot how GOOD it is too! I slice the zucchini into about 1 inch pieces then run it through my "saladacco spiral slicer" and it makes the zucchini into thin "noodles". Here's a Youtube video I found that demonstrates this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTfTKJdjjUc

I then made a homemade tomato sauce with just some roma tomatoes, salt, italian seasonings, and a tiny bit of red pepper flakes. It's not like the tomato sauce you are used to from a jar.. it's more juicy and runny and not as thick but it's delicious when added to the dish. Then I just sliced up some kalamata olives that I had bought at the store (not raw) and had made earlier a cashew "sprinkle cheese" by grinding up raw cashews in my food processor with a tiny bit of lemon juice and salt. It really takes on the consistency of a sprinkle parm cheese.

I've got all the ingredients in the fridge and when I want some all I have to do is throw it together in a bowl.. the noodles, put some sauce on top, some olives, and some cheese and voila! You've got a raw zucchini spagetti! It's really delicious actually with lots of different flavors in there and tastes so fresh and clean and won't weigh you down.

Here's what I used:
1 zucchini (maybe what? 50 cents? 75 cents?)
2 roma tomatoes (maybe 1.00 or 1.50)
0.25 lbs of raw cashews ($1.75)
probably 0.25 lbs of olives (can't remember the price but I'm sure it was under two bucks)
and the rest of the spices, salt, etc I had at home already.

so what is that? about 5 dollars? and it's a TON of stuff once prepared.. It's actually enough for me to have two big servings. I have leftovers in the fridge right now and when I make my second serving tonight I'll take a picture and come back and add it to the bottom of this post.

I'm so excited that I'm getting back into raw food!