Living Raw Food

June 1, 2009
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.

June 15, 2009
Pure Food and Wine is Melngailis's sophisticated vegan raw food restaurant in Manhattan's Gramercy Park neighborhood. Her first book, "Raw Food/Real World", coauthored with then-partner Matthew Kenney, introduces readers to a raw food diet, with recipes from the newly opened restaurant; here are more recipes and tips (along with more than enough photographs of Melngailis in various poses). Buy for demand.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2009
Manhattans Pure Food and Wine eatery has introduced many to the world of raw foods. Acknowledging as a first principle that only humans have innovated natures intention by cooking their food, this branch of vegetarianism eschews cooked foods of all sorts. As Melngailis points out, few people exclusively follow the raw-food regimen, herself included. But for those who want to know more about raw foods, Melngailis offers this comprehensive guide. Raw foods doesnt mean eating relish trays all day long. Many raw foods are transformed from their native state by passing them through a blender or by dehydrating them. Thus, mushrooms become calamari to be dipped in tartar sauce made from soaked and pulverized macadamia nuts. Some recipes call for exotic ingredients such as argan oil, a product of Morocco. Cooks who arent interested in raw foods per se may discover both new ingredients and techniques here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)