Oh, dear Reader. It has been an age since I last wrote to you. There have been some exceptionally interesting changes to my life of late. I’m sure I’ll fill you in on these, piece by piece, but one thing I can mention is that I have been fortunate to add some extra zing to my days by indulging in a spot of country hopping.

At the beginning of the year, I made a promise to myself to spend more time with family and friends, and since we all are spread out a bit over Europe, it has meant that –what a shame- I have had to combine this with a spot of travelling.

I gave some tips when travelling in the raw in a previous post, and I am still totally into seeking out juice bars whenever I arrive or depart from an airport or train station.

I write this from Copenhagen airport in a deliciously funky juice bar called Joe & the Juice. I am totally digging the vibe here. Upbeat dance music, good choice of juices (including some nice and green ingredients like spinach and celery) and rather club-like furniture. Oh, and of course there is the titchy-tiny bonus of an all male…sorry, all young hot male…crew behind the bar.

They have a juice called ‘Sex me up’, and on my first visit here a few days ago, I so longed to ask the young man behind the bar for such an order, but alas I didn’t feel that the ingredients – passion fruit, apple, ginger – would be what my body needed since I was actually a bit hungry and wanted something more filling. The good news was that they had a smoothie with avocado, which I knew would do the trick. Not too sweet and nice and satisfying. The downside was that it had the rather un-sexy name of “Fiber active”. Damn! I may as well have asked for a litre of prune juice and an enema kit.

I was, however, able to redeem myself on this visit by telling the youthful blonde who served me that I would really love some “young blood”. And so I am sipping this rather delicious and cleansing cocktail of celery, lemon, apple and ginger as I write this. As I mentioned, I prefer more green in my juice. Too much sweet fruit will make my blood-sugar levels crash and leave me without the zingy energy that I love so much.

The great thing with topping up on juices when travelling is that they really hydrate you without making you all heavy and sluggish before your journey. Such a better alternative to booze or coffee. Especially if you are getting a bit of eye candy while you suck on Joe’s juice!

If you are not lucky enough to find some decent eye candy, sorry, I mean juice, while travelling then do make sure you carry some groovy snacks in your bag to keep your energy up while scooting around the country/world. Here are some ideas.

• Apples
• Celery sticks
• Cucumber (These days, I literally just travel around with a whole cucumber in my bag. I have given up being dainty and cutting it into sticks. I find it much quicker to throw the whole thing in my bag and munch on it as and when. I find that if you don’t cut it into pieces, the cucumber stays fresher if you don’t eat it straight away; besides, cutting it would require a knife, which you may not always have on you, seeing as though you are not MacGyver!
• Nuts (raw and unsalted if possible. You don’t want the salt the dehydrate you)
• Seeds eg hemp seeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds
• Raw energy bars
• Raw chocolate bars
• Raw crackers

To stay really refreshed I try and eat more green things like the cucumber and celery with apple rather than going crazy on sweet fruit, dried fruit and sweet raw bars, which again can mess with your blood sugar.

I also usually carry a dodging looking bag of spirulina, barley grass and maca to stir into juice if I am really feeling that I need some green. Though I did refrain from that this time. Well, rather I forgot, since I was a tad distracted by the view…I mean yummy juice …

You can find Joe & the Juice bars in Denmark and London

www.joejuice.com

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If I was to list my challenges with eating raw then staying raw (or high raw) when eating out would definitely feature as my second greatest challenge.

To be honest, I didn’t used to eat out very often, so when I did, it didn’t feel like such a big deal if I wasn’t as raw as I would like to have been. When you’re used to making every single meal of the week, just getting a yummy vegan meal that you didn’t have to make is good enough.

But life changes, and I am now spending more time in the city than I did before, which means more lunches out. I am very fortunate because it’s pretty easy to find good cooked vegan food near my office, but since launching rawfoodstockholm.com this summer, I have really enjoyed the challenge of finding nice raw food in Stockholm. Others have shared tips on where to find raw food, and I have a constant eye open for places to eat.

The funny thing is that I originally created rawfoodstockholm.com to help others eat raw in Stockholm by sharing my favorite places, but I think I have probably got more use from it than anyone! Well, they do say that the thing that you try and help others with is the thing you most need help with yourself!

This information has come in really handy when I have been out for lunch with colleagues, but sometimes you just don’t have the option of choosing where to eat. One time we went to a restaurant, which was a very nice place but very traditional, so not only was there nothing vegan on the menu, there wasn’t even a salad in sight. In the past I would have felt really awful about not having anything to choose from, but boosted by my personal challenge to eat more raw when eating out I asked the kitchen to create a lovely big salad for me.

It wasn’t as straight forward as a simple order, and I had to go and speak to the chef, but I was soon served a lovely salad with seasonal vegetables, a simple dressing and fresh herbs and I was very satisfied, both with the food and with daring to ask for what I wanted! In fact, it was easier to ask for a plate of raw veggies than trying to ask for a vegan dish (“no, I don’t eat fish…”).

For another working lunch, I phoned in advance and ordered a salad of raw veggies with avocado and a little lemon juice, olive oil and sea salt. I got just what I ordered (plus some yummy sprouts) and it was delicious. And I felt great afterwards. With that kind of food in you, you certainly don’t need or want a coffee to keep you awake for the rest of the afternoon!

One place I will be adding to the rawfoodstockholm.com is Wagamama. When I lived in London, I went to Wagamama all the time, so when Christoffer saw they were opening next door to Central Station in Stockholm, I was very excited. I knew that you could get yummy Japanese noodles there, some of which are veggie or vegan, but I didn’t know that it would be a fairly decent raw score! It’s not a raw restaurant by any means, but you can choose from a little selection of freshly pressed fruit and veg juice, and order either a simple small salad or larger one with avocado. If you are not 100% raw then you can also enjoy some nutritious miso soup, and there are also steamed edame beans to nibble on. It’s a great place to go with friends as there is something for everyone and they have restaurants all over the world. www.wagamama.com

I really love it when I start to knock down barriers that have previously hindered me from succeeding with things that are important to me.

So, my next challenge? Getting over my number 1 obstacle. And what is that? Getting back into raw after Christmas or summer when I haven’t been able to, or not chosen to, eat high raw. I’ll let you know how that works out…in the meantime, please feel free to share your tips for overcoming these challenges.

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I have been living in/near Stockholm for over two years now. In this time I have been getting to know the places where you can find raw food. Each time I discover a place, I want to share it with others. If I find a shop near a cinema where you can grab yourself some raw treats and juice to have instead of pop corn and soda then I want others to know about it! If I eat a really good salad somewhere, then it should jolly well be made public! If I walk into a super market and see raw agave, raw coconut oil and raw treats, then surely you would want to know where it is, right?!

So I had this idea. Why not create a site where we can share our favorite raw spots in and around Stockholm? And so Raw Food Stockholm was born. It is my pleasure to launch this site today and share with you the places I have found so far. I really hope others can contribute to it too so that other people can be sure to find raw food when living in, or visiting, Stockholm!

www.rawfoodstockholm.com

Enjoy, dear Reader, and please do pass the link on to others!

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I have just returned from a perfectly dreamy week in the UK. Of course the weather didn’t exactly suit the summary wardrobe I had packed (when I left Sweden the temperature had been reaching the 30s (celsius) (over 86 F) for over a week), but then again the UK is not somewhere you go to to get a sun tan!

What made it so dreamy was my family and the things we did. From just spending a whole day drinking tea and chatting with one of my sisters, to celebrating her birthday with the whole family, to lounging in a health club, going on a yummy shopping spree (a rare event for me to buy clothes and not food!), and a lovely trip to the welsh hills and coast, all mixed in with laughs, hugs and lots of love.

When I stayed with my older sister, we started the day with a fantastic breakfast. First I would make a smoothie using the strawberries from my sister’s garden, and she would make a pot of Pau D’arco tea (great for preventing and fighting infections, excellent when traveling I find) and her gorgeous chocolate ‘power bars’.

Now, we had a bit of a light-hearted disagreement about these power bars. We both agreed that they are out-of- the-universe tasty and satisfying, but I felt that ‘power bars’ sound far too functional and not yummy enough. ‘Superpower bars’ would probably be more apt…because they are chock full of nuts, and raw cacao and nibs, and gojis and dried fruit, and coconut; and not only do they give you a great energy boost and keep you going until lunch time, but they also give you a cheeky little buzz.

And so we would spend the mornings first slurping our banana and strawberry smoothie, that for some reason tasted like a yummy bubble gum, or candy floss (could be thanks to the home-grown organic strawberries), and then chit-chat all morning over our tea and ’superpower bars’. And then to spend the rest of the day ‘doing lunch’ or shopping or soaking in a jacuzzi… well, I smiled constantly for a week!

So, I would love to share with you, not only this nice ritual, but also the recipe for the smoothie. I will see if I can extract the recipe for the ‘(super)power bars’ from my gorgeous sister. In the meantime you will just have to use your imagination with the help of this photo!

Candy Floss Smoothie
Serves 2

• 2 bananas
• about 1 C (500 ml) of frozen strawberries
• water
• a pinch of vanilla powder or 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

I haven’t had a strawberry and banana smoothie that was as dreamy as this before, so I think it is due to some key things, so follow these instructions carefully!

First, you need to select the perfect banana. It needs to have a few brown flecks on the skin, to make this a yummy and rich smoothie. (I made this with a not so ripe banana one day, and it really wasn’t as amazing!) Peel these, break in to chunks and pop in your blender. Now add enough water to reach the 1 cup (500 ml) mark on the blender jug. Add the strawbs and vanilla and blend until smooth and creamy.(I started by pulsing for a bit to get things going and this seemed to make it nice and frothy) Pour into a pretty glass and share with someone you love!

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Feel free to share this article with others. Please just remember to include the following credit: © 2010 Johanna Best www.miss-best.com

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Oh do forgive me, dear reader, for not posting a blog last week. I have just returned from my sister’s beautiful vegan wedding in the UK and had meant to use the long outward journey to write a blog for last Friday, but alas, it did not materialize! Because I don’t do much traveling these days I was so enjoying the time to just reflect, watch the changing scenery, and wonder what the clouds beneath me would taste like if I were to suck them up through a pink curly straw, that I forgot to put pen to paper.

Although I produced no blog post on that journey, I did have a nice food journey that I wanted to share with you. I managed to arrive at my dear sister’s after a 13 hour journey feeling tired but not at all icky or fatigued, as I have done before when I have snacked on sandwiches, crisps (chips), sweets and chocolate bars along the way.

For the journey I had prepared a salad for the plane which I enjoyed with some raw crackers and an avocado, and I brought with me a super-food laced green smoothie to enjoy before I went through security and would therefore be confiscated of any ‘dangerous’ drinks that could be used to terrorize my fellow passengers (though I do wish that someone had confiscated the greasy and smelly portion of fish & chips that my fellow passenger was scoffing on the train from the airport!!)

At the coach station in Stockholm (City Terminalen) I spied a juice bar and treated myself to a fresh carrot and orange juice with extra ginger to ward off any cold my fellow passengers may be carrying. It turns out that one fellow coach passenger was proudly shouting down his mobile that he had just been to hospital to test for swine flu which left me wondering why on earth people think that it’s some kind of status thing to be sick!? Well, perhaps swine flu gets you more sympathy than a little sniffle!

When I landed at Stansted I had some time to enjoy before my train departed and was very happy to find another juice bar where I refreshed myself with a wheatgrass juice shot and then a large beetroot, carrot, apple and extra ginger juice. The combination was balancing and hydrating and left me all zingy for the next leg of my journey, which was long, not particularly noteworthy and on which I truly enjoyed a large slab of raw chocolate cake that I had spiked with goodies like camu camu to keep the immune boosted.

And as a bonus – and this is a big achievement for Miss Best – I managed to have all this brightly coloured food and drink without spilling any of it down my new white coat!

On my journey home I didn’t pack anything to eat. I was thinking of foraging for a vegan sandwich at the train station but although I did find one it didn’t really take my fancy, and since I had a little time to spare I was able to venture into a food shop to look for something more interesting. I came away with 2 prepared fruit salads, a bag of washed salad and 3 mini pots of houmous .

I was jolly grateful for this light fresh food (apart from the houmous that made me feel a bit blurgh) especially since I had been enjoying plenty of vegan wedding cupcakes, and other cooked goodies during my stay.

The highlight though was a raw chocolate bar I had found in a health food store in Ross-on-Wye which totally rocked and was a nice treat for such a long journey. MULU silk is so smooth and silky and chunky and is definitely one of the best raw chocolate bars I have tried! MULU is made with unsprayed raw ingredients and is free from refined sugar, dairy and soya. Visit the MULU site here >>

I was jolly impressed with myself as usually when I go back ‘home’ to the UK I can’t help but fill up on all the ‘yummy’ foods they don’t have in Sweden. Those foods tend to be junky and I usually end up eating copious amounts of crisps (chips) and things but it just didn’t appeal to me this time. Maybe it was because I gave myself the green light and ate freely from the amazing vegan buffet at the wedding (plus the following 2 days of left-overs). I feel that – within reason – by not telling myself I mustn’t eat something I am more likely to get back to high raw after a little indulgence. It seems that my inner self has nothing to rebel against then! Besides after munching on vegan quiches and pasta salad for a few days, my body was grateful to get back to my usual Miss Best food!

Here is a quick list of the foods I enjoyed to boost my raw intake during my holiday:

Raw crackers – great when traveling and also to eat at your host’s instead of bread
Buckwheaties – sprouted and dehydrated buckwheat to have at breakfast with fruit, nuts, seeds and nut milk or non-dairy milk.
Green powder – I mixed up some spirulina, barleygrass powder, maca, purple corn and camu camu to either stir into smoothies or just water/juice if there were no smoothie opportunities.
Raw chocolate or raw chocolate cake – great to treat yourself and keep you off the sugar filled versions along your travels.
I also made a point of ordering a salad for a starter when we ate out. That way I layered myself with raw goodies before sampling the exciting cooked vegan dishes I was presented with.
I also kept my peepers peeled for fresh veggie juices at juice bars, or veggie cafes. Yay, liquid salad!

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When I spent 3 1/2 months in Costa Rica in 2007, I wrote some journal entries. Here is a snippet from one of them:

Tuesday 9th October, 2007

This morning we went for a walk before breakfast. Our morning constitutional obviously caught the usually pretty town by surprise. She had not had time to apply the lip gloss, worn daily for the benefit of the tourists. Nor had she yet donned her shiny crown, instead we caught her in a mauve flannel dressing gown, leopard skin mules with a fag nestling in the corner of her mouth.

It seems that at 7am, Puerto Viejo is at a junction. Coming are the hard workers off to their jobs. School children bustle into the school yard, and a single fruit stall is setting up for the day. Heading off in the other direction are the nocturnal beasties. But at 7 am there are a few stragglers. An American Crackhead sits outside a restaurant, an orange scarf tied around is ankle, covering presumably a wound, rather than a reminder of some spiritual exercise. He asks us if we are looking for a good time as we walk past. We buy some fruit for breakfast, then have to walk past him again. He is obviously too fucked to remember that we have just walked past, but somewhere in his head, the part that has not yet been completed extinguished by his self loathing habit, recognizes us from somewhere. ‘Are you the guys from last night?’, he slurs, showing off a far from beautiful set of teeth, with what appears to be paper stuck to one of them. ‘Yeah, you are!’ he shouts after us. We deny the charges. ‘Yeah, you are. C’mon I’m not stupid!’

The group of stragglers also includes a flock of black vultures, who usually circle over head during the day, powerfully, and with status. They are breakfasting in a ditch of stagnant black water. As black as the birds themselves. The whole scene looking like something from an animated film, portraying the most evil of evil places. I half expect one of those scary horses from Lord of the Rings to thunder past.

The town has also not yet hidden away her pack of stray dogs. She usually keeps one or two of the finer looking ones to mooch around the beach. A beautiful white spaniel cross with brown patches and an elegant fluffy tail trots about town. We have seen before that she is a patient dog, allowing another tiny dog (belonging to one of the stall holders) to play relentlessly with her tail and pretty ears. We can see that one of the other dogs is half blind. It’s heartbreaking. The pretty one follows us for a bit, and I am concerned for its safety when trucks tear past us, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are driving through a village.

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