Salad-mania

I started on this raw diet last Thursday - inspired by the other worldly glow celebs like J.LO have, and also one of my close friends told me of his friend who ate only raw foods and inspite of being a smoker, has a radiance about her. i definately wanted that.
The only trouble - i know squat about food preparations, never been out buying any veggies. so far my mother cooks my food, and lunch i have at the office canteen. now i have to do everything myself.
anyways, inspired that day i bought Rs 20 worth of veggies (spinach, cucumber, carrot, capsicum and cabbage) from the local bhaajiwalla. made a crude salad the next morning - just grated all the veggies and added orange wedges for some sort of taste. No dressing or vinegrette.
The next day while eating, i noticed one thing - it takes so damn long to chew all those veggies. Rice and dal which i normally used to use, i just used to lazily swallow. Another thing- you do not eat as much as you though you would. So firstly you get very healthy, and second, you do not (or rather cannot) eat too much of the green stuff.
Over the weekend, i made tomato soup. Grinded 3 tomatoes in the mixie, transferred all the goop to a small vessel on the stove and let it simmer for about 5 minutes. In another pan, i added a bit of ginger garlic paste and let it cook for a while. then added wedges of cabbage and capsicum. Let it simmer for a minute on very high flame. then add water in the pan. This is one way of cooking - almost getting a sizzler effect to the veggies - without a drop of oil. wonderful! then added those hot veggies to the soup. Voila, a hearty warm soup is ready. By me! who would have thought :)
am a bit torn whether i want to just eat raw, or just healthy food. according to raw diets, even heating a veggie or soup over 50 degrees is not allowed. do you then just chow down green leaves for the rest of the life? so far i have resorted to only boiling veggies that cant be eaten on their own raw (eg potatoes). So will have to check what i really want.
Yesterday i went to the supermarket and got a whole load of 'exotic' veggies - cherry tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, broccoli, purple cabbage, etc. also bought honey and a store bought pack of Thousand Islands Dressing.
today morning i made a delicious salad comprising of:
7 button mushrooms (boiled for 1 minute.. though next time i am definately eating them raw. Boiling even for 1 min made them very soggy)
a few lettuce leaves torn by hand
7 cherry tomatoes
1/2 boiled potato
1/2 cumumber
1/4 white cabbage - roughly grated large
1/4 purple cabbage - roughly grated large1 boiled egg chopped up roughly
slivers of 1/2 orange
tossed all of that together and took it to work today along with a teaspoon of the dressing. Tasted quite nice, if i may say so myself. except that Dirk said that store bought dressings are loaded with oil. anyways i ate just one spoon of it. even if the whole spoon was just oil, i guess i am OK since i have been eating fat free all day long. some amount of oil is good i suppose.