Choosing Raw: Making Raw Foods Part of the Way You Eat

If you have chosen a vegan diet, a step further is raw vegan. Gena Hamshaw’s Choosing Raw is a good choice for this type of diet. Healthy, no doubt, but don’t expect quite the same flavor as in typical vegan having cooked foods; heat brings out the flavors. Yet Hamshaw produced a cookbook with hundred-and-twenty five recipes that, with judicious combination of ingredients, yield as much flavor as possible. Heat, nevertheless, is a must for some foods, such as flax seeds or buckwheat for which you have the choice of oven heat or the gentle, slow heat of a dehydrator, or for legumes that are inedible raw. The recipes are simple; all you need to do is chop, dice and combine. Having a food processor, blender and dehydrator is essential. The author encourages you to substitute and tweak the recipes. She has a full ninety-page introduction to help you get into this type of diet, including a twenty-one day menu planning, followed by a lesson of the essentials. You can choose from three different recipe levels (basic, more dressed up and advanced/exotic). Since the text runs continuously, layout is not the best for our convenience. The cross-referenced index is excellent.