Category: Cookbooks

Here’s something I’ve been wanting for a long time: a raw food cookbook which gives me not raw food recipes by recipe type, but by main ingredient. And Julie Stafford’s Juicing for Health: Over 200 Recipes for Fruit & Vegetable Juices, Soups, Smoothies & Sorbets does exactly that, and more.

Got a couple of extra pears to use up? Look up “pear” in Stafford’s Juicing for Health and instantly have nine recipes for using up those pears, along with the full nutritional information for that lovely little fruit (did you know that there are 8mg of calcium in 100grams of pear?)

Same for vegetables. Got a bumper crop of tomatoes? Stafford gives you a half dozen recipes to quickly use them up (and take advantage of their 1.1grams of protein, 13mg of calcium and 244mg of potassium per 100grams).

There is also a separate section of soup and sorbet recipes, but the real value in this book (more…)

Raw Food/Real World: 100 Recipes to Get the Glow is so far my favourite raw food book of all time.

In fact, it is the only raw food book that I have found so far that actually is like a real, traditional cookbook, in that it has recipes that involve more than just combining various raw fruits, vegetables and seeds.

Raw Food/Real World makes extensive use of the dehydrator, for example, so that many of the recipes while technically raw, are perhaps more properly called “uncooked”. Which mean that you get all of the benefits of eating food which still retains all of its nutrients and enzymes as they have not been killed by being cooked, but you also get the benefit of .. you know .. real recipes which transform the raw ingredients into a tasty dish.

Raw Food/Real World: 100 Recipes to Get the Glow is written by Matthew Kenney and Sarma Melngailis, and beyond being a cookbook, it’s a love story. Woven throughout the book is the story of how Matthew and Kenney met and eventually fell in love; and how they both came to fall in love, quite accidentally, with raw food and its amazing benefits.

Both Kenney and Melngailis are graduates of culinary academies, and Kenney had owned a string of quite successful restaurants, when he interviewed Melngailis one day to help him with a project.

Their collaboration blossomed, and they began dating.

One day a friend invited them out to dinner and, both being accomplished food professionals, they were looking forward to a gastronomic treat. As Melngailis tells it in the book, she was actually quite put out to find that their friend was taking them to a – gasp – raw food restaurant, and she was quite prepared to have a perfectly horrible (more…)