Rawsome recipes

My parents-in-law kindly sent us some money for Christmas, and the Man chose a gift to buy with it so that at least one of us would be surprised. He chose a recipe book: The Complete Book of Raw Food, which boasts over 400 recipes from the world's top raw food chefs.

I hadn't realised there were specialist raw food chefs. Anyway, what a great idea! Healthy food, and bound to be quick to prepare since you don't have to cook anything...

Oh, no no no no no no.

Granted, there are plenty of recipes for smoothies and the like that just require you to chuck a load of fruit and/or veg (and garlic!) into a (very expensive) blender. But there are also pages of recipes that start like this:

Advanced prep: 2 to 3 days for sprouting and soaking, + 24 to 36 hours for dehydrating.

That's for 'Grawnola', a version of breakfast cereal. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't think I'm prepared to wait four and half days for breakfast. Not to mention the bizarreness of having to spend 3 days hydrating the ingredients and another day and a half drying them out again.

Then there's 'Thai Wild Rice with Spring Vegetables', which starts with you having to soak half a pound of rice for 4 days. For crying out loud! Cook the damn rice - it'll only take 20 minutes!

However, I think once we've got our heads round this different approach to food preparation we're sure to find some real delights in the book. What our absurdly fussy children will make of raw cauliflower soup and sun-dried tomato pesto nut loaf remains to be seen (though I'll take a wild stabbing guess...).