NT has been worrying we haven't been taking in much calcium on this diet. I realize raw foods makes it harder to get that, and iron. So we tried making a kale-carrot-apple juice, since kale is one of the best veggies for both calcium and iron. It was...well, we were prepared for it to taste like a wheat-grass shot, a flavor AS and I like but NT doesn't. But it also was thick and not very smooth, so the texture was unappealing. I think in a juicer it would be very tasty, but in a blender it was just too grainy.

Lunch was much better. We made an almond butter out of raw almonds and peanut oil. I'd always heard you had to soak nuts and seeds before eating raw, but then someone on a forum said to just use them, so we did! So far no ill effects. We got waaay too many almonds and looking at the receipt later it was $16! But then we saw a jar of raw almond butter and it was $23, so I consider we still got off easy. Anyway, we'll make sure we use every single one of those almonds.

Anyway, for lunch we had a Thai salad: lettuce, corn, cucumber, carrots, kohlrabi, cilantro and red bell pepper for the salad, with a dressing of almond butter (thinned with water), soy sauce, maple syrup, fresh lemon juice, fresh ginger, sesame oil (we only had toasted, but oh well), garlic and jalapeno. It was great! We agreed we'd have it again, though we'd probably use natural peanut butter instead, and maybe add some peanuts and cubed baked tofu to it.

Dinner was fajitas, and though it was probably only about 600 calories, we felt stuffed. AS had salmon in hers but NT and I just had zucchini, onion, green bell pepper and mushroom. We found some very healthy tortillas at our co-op, and we had some leftover wild rice/basmati pilaf in the freezer that we each had a bit of. Then lettuce, two diced avocados and a homemade salsa to top it all off. AS managed to stay away from the cheese even though she'd planned to have some!

I'd thrown some banana and pineapple, torn into pieces, into the freezer earlier in the day. I stuck those in the blender with some ice cubes and we had a nice frozen treat. The fruit wasn't frozen rock-solid so it had more of a soft-serve texture. Mmm...

This morning I'd dropped another half-pound. AS got three different readings, that she'd lost 1/2 pound, lost 2 pounds and stayed the same. We decided to go with the middle one and say she lost half a pound. We need a good scales, ours is rubbish. But we read somewhere that most commercial scales are about the same and none are really accurate. Anyone heard any different?

Here's what you've all been wondering, probably: Is the diet frugal? Welll...it's hard for us to say; we have a very generous "grocery/household" budget of $900 per month. We divide into $450 for the 1st to the 15th, $450 for the 16th through the end of the month. Since we won't need anything else till the 16th, I was able to see if one week of raw had blown our budget. We went $33 over. Mitigating factors: We have a CSA share so we get a box of veggies every Saturday, but we also had to make some household purchases such as an iron and a new water filter, not to mention those $16 almonds. So I'd say it's a break-even proposition for us. It's about our budget, but then we give ourselves a lot of money for food and household supplies.