Here’s my review of Rod Rotondi’s new recipe book Raw Food for Real People, as originally published in issue 14 of the Funky Raw magazine. (The magazine also includes an extract from the book.)

Five years ago, Rod opened his first raw food restaurant, Leaf Organics, and has since opened several more raw restaurants. With that experience, he is well qualified to write this book in which you can learn how to prepare your own restaurant quality raw dishes. The book begins with Rod’s journey to raw food, which includes his experiences of living in Jerusalem and Sinai. Combined with the fact that Rod is from an Italian American background, this adds quite a variety of influences to his recipes.

Then there are sections on transitioning to a raw diet, guest sections from Brian Clement, Robert Young and Gabriel Cousens plus Rod teaches us how to use knives, how to open coconuts and how to grow sprouts, including a detailed sprouting chart.

Then come the recipes. From pizza to lasagne, hummus to falafel, the sections include crackers and bread, breakfast, appetizers, soups, entrées (what we call mains in the UK) and deserts. Every recipes is described clearly plus variations and ideas for experimenting are given. Finally, there is a section on feeding children a raw diet.

Just reading some of the recipes and looking at the colour photos makes my mouth water, I’m very much looking forward to trying some of them out.

185 pages, printed on 100% post consumer waste recycled paper. ISBN: 978-1-57731-673-2

You can buy this book now at Amazon.