Tropical Fruit Salad

Maybe five or six (or seven) years ago my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, and I learned about the raw food diet. I was willing to try it out, and did so for approximately five days, if I remember correctly. A few years later, which was really only about three years ago, we were reminded of the raw food lifestyle by way of an article on CNN.com. After some back and forth, we decided that we'd try raw for a month. After our wedding. After our honeymoon, which was nine day cruise to the Caribbean. As you may be aware, cruises typically add on at least 25 or 30 pounds just because of the huge variety of food (I exaggerate - a bit), so of course, we couldn't start to be healthy just yet.

So anyway, we got married, went on our honeymoon, then came back and started the "30-day challenge". We kept an online food diary, mainly shared with family. I had evangelized the raw food diet to my mother when she was in town for our wedding, and she was dead set against even trying it. Then she secretly tried it as we were trying it.

She's still raw. 100%. Some people think she's a little crazy for doing it, and some people say that they could never do it. But the reality is that she's lost a lot of weight, and she's been able to lower the amount of prescription pills that she has been taking for years. I think that for her this started out as determination, but now it's her way of life.

Anyway, so I decided that this Mother's Day I would eat a raw breakfast in honor of my mother, the persevering raw foodist.

Tropical Fruit Salad

• 1/2 papaya, skinned, gutted and chopped
• 1 mango, skinned and chopped
• 1 young coconut, drained

Chop up all of your ingredients, mix together, then decide if you're going to eat them in the coconut or in a bowl.

I'm not even going to go into how you open a young coconut, because there are many examples of this on the internet. Including my mom's own website.

Young coconut is very different than mature coconut. Both are good, but the young version is one of nature's delicacies. The flesh is very tender and creamy:

All I have to say is save that coconut milk because it is divine. And if you don't like it, then blend it up in a smoothie.

Obviously I'm nowhere near raw at the moment (I think I lasted about 29 days or thereabouts), considering the many vegan cheesecakes we've been consuming lately. But, if anything, what the raw food lifestyle has given me is veganism. We decided - hey, if we can't stick to raw, we can probably stick to vegan, and we've been vegan ever since. 99.9% of the time. Or thereabouts. :)