Summer Raw Food Recipes: Fun Food Ideas for Summer

Ah, the heat of summer. To enjoy the hot summer, there's nothing that beats the heat like having some nice cold raw food. Fortunately there's a variety of choices that you have.

You could start with that old standby, the veggie plate. Just get yourself some raw broccoli, raw cauliflower, raw carrots, and some raw celery. Put it all on a platter along with some ranch salad dressing and you've got yourself a treat that you can eat by yourself or if you decide to throw a party you can invite your friends and put out a veggie plate.

Or if you're not in a veggie mood, you could put together a fruit plate that includes lots of things such as strawberries, blueberries, bananas, orange slices, grapes, and some dip and anything else you decide that you want on your fruit plate.

If you're wanting something other than plain veggies or fruit and if you're wanting to spice things up a bit, you could make a cold soup such as gazpacho soup. A nice recipe for gazpacho would be to put all of the following in a bowl and then blend it all until the mixture has a smooth consistency -- 10 medium ripe tomatoes, ½ cucumber, ½ red bell pepper, 2 cloves of garlic, 2 to 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and perhaps 1/8 teaspoon cayenne if you want to spice it up. That's the basic mixture. Blend it all together and put it into a bowl and put it in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. When you get the gazpacho out of the refrigerator, just before you're ready to serve it, to garnish it you could do various things like get some chopped green onion, or chopped parsley, or diced cucumbers or if you're a minimalist perhaps you would want just a little bit of olive oil. Or if there's some other garnish you want, by all means go for it.

Of course, if you're wanting to do something fun and different and out of the ordinary, you could make zucchini chips. It helps if you have a food dehydrator but if you have one, this is a great snack idea. First you get some zucchini and slice it into ¼ inch sized chips. Then you dry the chips in the dehydrator (it is recommended that you dry the chips at 105 degrees). Then you just take the chips out and eat them as they are or if you need more flavor you could get some guacamole and dip the chips in that. Those are just a few ideas for summer raw food fun. Enjoy the summer!

Cooks.com Vegetable Plate
http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,161,150166-243199,00.html

Cooks.com Fruit Plate with Dip
http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,191,146186-252192,00.html

Living and Raw Foods: Sweet and Crunchy Zucchini Chips
http://www.living-foods.com/recipes/chips.html

Raw Glow (Gaspacho recipe)
http://www.rawglow.com/recipe9.htm