A Raw Foods (only) Lifestyle

For a very refreshing change, I spent this past weekend on a course that promotes a lifestyle of eating only raw foods.

Peter and Beryn Daniel, the couple who run a company called Soaring Free Superfoods, hosted the course at Rustenburg Girls High School. They are trained Raw Food Chefs and authors of South Africa's first gourmet raw food recipe book, RAWlicious (comically referred to by the press as "the uncook book").

To be completely honest, had my mother not paid for the course, this is not something I would ordinarily decide to spend my weekend on. I am a chef after all, and the thought of doing a course on how not to cook, over a weekend, didn’t really grab me. Knowledge is power they say, so off I went to learn how not to cook…

I took away a lot more than I thought I would, including a raging cold brought on by my poor body obviously going into major shock from the lack of any saturated fats, diary, meat, and of course alcohol. I learnt how to make diary free cream cheese (made from macadamia nuts, water and probiotics), which was surprisingly delicious.

Another recipe that really stood out was the Gourmet Raw Pizza. Now if you had have told me that you can make a pizza without any flour, cheese or an oven, I would have sent you on your bicycle back to the funny farm. But as this course was about “eating as close to nature as possible”, without cooking anything and thereby loosing all (or most) of the nutrients in your ingredients, I was proven wrong. Beryn made a pizza using hulled buckwheat, flaxseeds, courgettes, tomatoes and cold pressed organic extra virgin olive oil, all combined in a food processor (an essential tool in a rawfoodists kitchen) to form a paste. This paste is then smeared onto a dehydrator sheet and left to dehydrate overnight, in a…. dehydrator, another essential piece of equipment for a rawfoodist. The tomato sauce and toppings are pretty much self-explanatory and can be changed according to your vegan preferences. The “cheese” topping was made with cashew nuts, water and nutri yeast! Once the “cheese” is added, the pizza is then put back in the dehydrator to “melt” the cheese. Just when I thought I had heard it all!

Although I can’t promise (in fact I wont promise), that I could live this sort of lifestyle forever, purely because I cook for a living, I highly recommend this course. It really shines some light onto how some foods are produced (such as margarine actually being plastic – true story) and what the body ACTUALLY needs to sustain itself as apposed to what we are lead to believe that it needs.

For more info, go have a squiz at their website: www.superfoods.co.za