Living Raw Food »

Sarma Melngailis is the cocreator and owner of Pure Food and Wine and founder of the online boutiques One Lucky Duck and Shiny Happy Pets, through which she is expanding her reach with all things raw and organic. The coauthor (with Matthew Kenney) of Raw Food/Real World, she lives in New York City with her two cats.

Picking up where the bestselling Raw Food/Real World left off, Sarma Melngailis invites us inside her glamorous restaurant, Pure Food and Wine, with dozens more recipes for fresh and vibrant juices, shakes, soups, simple dishes, main courses, desserts, and cocktails.

• Whip up an antioxidant-rich Goji Tropic Shake or a sweet, cleansing Cilantro-Pineapple Shake for delicious nutrition on the go
• Cool down with a Cucumber-Mint Gazpacho Soup and an Heirloom Tomato, Fennel, and Avocado Pressed Salad with Caper Dressing, Pistachio, and Mint
• Find out what makes the Chanterelle and Kalamata Olive Ravioli the restaurant's most beloved entrÉe
• Celebrate with a raw Thanksgiving dinner, complete with "dark meat" portobello, "white meat" large oyster mushrooms, stuffing, mashed celeriac, cranberries, and brussels sprouts
• Satisfy your sweet tooth with a Classic Sundae and Caramel Bars

No juicer? No dehydrator? No problem! Sarma shows that raw food preparation doesn't have to be daunting, and she helps you work your way from the fastest, simplest, freshest recipes to immensely satisfying main dishes that you'll have a hard time believing are raw. A definitive list of ingredients, tools, techniques, and sources make raw food a snap, while information-packed sidebars introduce the world's most powerful super­foods, from kombucha tea to chia seeds. And Sarma is refreshingly honest and real as she describes her personal breakthroughs—and struggles—living on raw foods.

Whether you're snacking on the run, having a quiet dinner at home, or throwing a festive cocktail party, eating raw food makes you feel alive. Filled with sensuous, sexy, and energizing food, this book is sure to enrich your life, whether you're a carnivorous epicure or a raw-foods junkie.

Publishers Weekly

This follow-up to Raw Food/ Real World offers 100 new recipes inspired by the New York City restaurant Pure Food and Wine, where Melngailis is a partner and executive chef. The restaurant is swanky and the book is irreverent (there's even a photo of the author smoking)-it's hardly a paean to an obsessively ascetic raw lifestyle. But the recipes are legit: at once sophisticated and rigorously raw, they range from quick and easy milks, juices and items from Pure Food and Wine's "family meal" (that's the staff meal, in non-restaurant speak) to intriguing dishes off the restaurant menu. Baby fennel and truffle-cream tarts; beet ravioli with pine nuts and goat cheese; pumpkin gnocchi with walnut cream sauce, spiced pumpkin seeds and crispy sage; and vanilla panna cotta with tarragon-peach sauce all have gourmet appeal well beyond those already committed to the raw food movement. And nonpreachy primers on ingredients and techniques used in raw preparations make the book accessible and usable for a wider audience than might typically go for a raw foods cookbook-if cookbook is even the right term for a volume of vegan recipes in which nothing is heated over 118 degrees Fahrenheit. (July)

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