Father's Day Lunch and Day 2: High Raw / Gluten-Free

For Father's Day this past Sunday I went to Anita's Kitchen, located in Ferndale, with my dad!  Anita's has to be my favorite Lebanese restaurant.  The food is so flavorful and fresh and I love their use of spices!  I know this last part sounds weird but it's true!  Their cracked lentil soup, for example, is delicious, but it doesn't taste like any other cracked lentil soup I've had.  There's one particular spice in it that even my highly sensitive taste buds cannot discern!  That's what makes Anita's so special!

It was, to say the least, a miserable, dreary day.

Anywhoooooo, I started my meal with a "Berries Over Beirut" juice.  The "juice," which was somewhat smoothie-like in nature, had strawberries, blueberries and raspberries and boy oh boy, was it delicious!  Usually when raspberries are in a beverage they tend to overpower the other flavors but this juice did no such thing!  Instead, STRAWBERRY was the dominant flavor...YUM!

For my entree, I ordered the Falafil Platter (note the awesomely Anita spelling of "falafel").  The platter came with four falafil patties, which I requested baked, a mound of not-too-oily, garlic-y Basmati rice, über fresh tabbouleh, homemade (naturally) hummus and the best--literally THE BEST--tahini sauce, and I don't even like tahini.

Oh!  And our entrees came with delightfully thin, soft pita bread...of which I proceeded to eat two.  Whole ones.

In conclusion, this meal was phenomenal.  As I was eating, I was thinking, I am not hungry. At. All. But this food is too damn good.  So I continued to gobble, gobble, gobble up my food until all that remained was maybe three tablespoons' worth of tabbouleh, a couple grains of rice, a little puddle of lentil soup in my cup and some remaining shreds of pita bread.

I felt so uncomfortable afterwards but it was worth it.  I think.  I don't know that I would eat everything next time--basically my whole cup of soup, my giant juice/smoothie and my plate of food, save a few parsley leaves--but I would definitely order the same thing.  I might just tune in to the common sense part of my brain and take, perhaps, half, home for leftovers.

Pre-food coma.  I don't think I'd want to look at a picture of my post-food coma.

The food coma I experienced afterwards was the trigger for my weeklong experiment going gluten-free (low) and high raw.  I consumed SO much bread and prepared food, in general, that it felt like a pod of whales had taken up residence in my stomach.

This leads me to my progress update going high raw (or, rather, upping my veggies and superfoods intake) and gluten-free/low diet.  My skin looks just as horrible today but my energy is great and I feel wonderful, physically and mentally.  Hesitatingly, I upload my "raw" face, day two.

For lunch I wrapped up marinated portobello mushrooms, avocado, white nectarines, arugala, Dijon mustard and thyme in two rainbow chard leaves.

 That's a simple cucumber salad on the side--just a little rice vinegar, salt and pepper, soaked for an hour or so.

The fixings of this wrap are, hands down, my new favorite combination.  You have your sweet, salty, oily, tangy, bitter and smooth to satisfy all taste sensations!  I'm not sure if all of these are opposites, or if they are terms that can even be used to describe food, but there are a lot of them and that's gotta count for something!