Raw Food/Real World: 100 Recipes to Get the Glow

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 evening.

Much to both of their surprise, they ended up loving the food that they had that evening and, as they tell it, it opened their eyes to an entire new way of thinking about food – and to a new cuisine.

The culmination of their journey into raw food as a way of food preparation was the opening of their own raw food restaurant, and the publication of this book, Raw Food/Real World: 100 Recipes to Get the Glow.

“The Glow” is how they describe the transformation in your body, mind, and spirit which takes place when you start replacing processed foods with raw food.

In other words, replacing the crap you’ve been shoveling into your body with good healthful food which your body and brain can really use.

But beyond everything else, Raw Food/Real World is a beautiful cookbook with fantastic recipes which, as the title implies, are real dishes created for people living in the real world. We love their raw corn tortillas for example.

Even if you find some of the recipes too time-consuming to prepare, the broad range of recipes gives you a solid base to start making interesting and tasty dishes of your own which will be far more healthful than anything you might make from your current cookbook collection.

Fortunately, Amazon lets you peek inside Raw Food/Real World at the link below (click on the picture) so you can see for yourself what a fantastic book it is: