Easy Raw Food Recipes

Oct 15

A few weeks ago, I attended a Raw Cooking Class at the Oneness Café at Coogee. As a self-confessed ‘meat-lover’, I had no clue about vegan diet and raw cooking. Until the class, my idea of raw cooking consisted of sashimi and tartare steak!I was truly surprised about the variety of foods you can prepare using just raw ingredients, and the food was absolutely delicious! So I thought I'd share with you some of the key things I learned, including some healthy recipes.First up, you really need a good blender. A cheap blender won't blend nuts, broccoli or carrots without dying young. In the class they used a Thermomix blender, which is probably the most powerful (and hence the most expensive) blender on the Australian market. It was pretty amazing though, it took her just few seconds to blend avocado and nuts into a smooth mouse-like consistency.Secondly, a lot of what we made contained high calorie-dense ingredients so just keep in mind that a lot of these foods, while healthy, should still be eaten in moderation and shouldn't replace your normal meals.Having said that, a raw cacao or carrot cake contains important vitamins and nutrients, and when you consider they're also free of chemicals, flour, dairy and added sugar it's pretty obvious that they're much healthier than traditional cakes, meaning we can in fact have our cake and eat it too... ;)The recipes I loved the most were:

Green Smoothie

Blend kale, oranges, passion fruit, banana, cup of water.
Simple as that. Tastes delicious!

Mushroom and Walnut Dip

Blend a handful of mushrooms, a handful of walnuts and one spring onion.
Add pepper, salt and soy sauce.

Zucchini Pesto Pasta

Peel zucchini and shave them to thin ‘noodles’ (need a special tool for it)
Pesto sauce: blend olive oil, crunched brazil nuts, lots of basil leaves, sundried tomatoes, salt, garlic

Raw Carrot Cake

Blend 2 carrots, nuts, 1 tbsp coconut oil and coconut, add salt, cinnamon and honey or agave syrup
Press into a cake form and leave to cool in a fridge for few hours

Lime and Passion Fruit Mousse

Blend 2 passion fruits, 1 avocado, 1 cup of lime juice, ½ cup of agave syrup, 2 tbsp of coconut oil, 1 vanilla bean, ½ tbsp of salt, dehydrated organic mandarin skin.

The presenter was Liz Gilbert-Grant and you can check Lize’s recipes on www.inloveskitchen.com.au. Also, the Oneness Café on Coogee Bay Road at Coogee promised to introduce some of the best raw meals to their regular menu.As a personal trainer I usually start at 6am which means I often don’t have time to eat a proper meal until 10-11am. We all know that skipping breakfast is unhealthy, but the thought of eggs at 5:30am is too much for me!The class inspired me to try having a green smoothie early in the morning and then a proper breaky later on. I managed to get my hands on a Hot&Cold Cuisinart blender from Ebay for just $100!!! The key thing I wanted to do was to come up with low- calorie/sugar recipes, so. I hope you enjoy some of my inventions!

V’s Morning Smoothie

Approximately 200kcal

1 cup kale
1 cup spinach
½ cup frozen blueberries
½ cup frozen raspberries
½ cup coconut water
½ cup water
2 tsp agave syrup
1 tsp chia seeds
Flavorless BCAA’s powder

Vee-Berry