Eh. Someone suggested cashew cheese for my hubby who can’t eat have dairy. So I was eager to try out the recipes in this book:

I had tried a few of Charlie Trotter’s recipes before (from different cookbooks, not this one) and fairly liked them. However the Cashew Cheese recipe in this book won’t work for us — first of all I don’t have (yet) a Champion juicer, and second, it calls for Rejuvelac, which is basically a byproduct of wheat. 🙁 I was so hopeful. Several of the recipes in the book call for this. Even the chocolate fudge which looks so promising calls for nama shoyu, which also contains wheat. I’m almost ready to cry. I was so hoping I could make this for hubby for his birthday and our 17th(!) anniversary (yesterday). So tonight we’re having homemade strawberry sorbet instead, with a bit of Ah!Laska, IF we end up staying home. I had been planning an intimate dinner for two downstairs, with a simple green salad, steak and lobster fondue, roast potatoes/rice pilaf, and the sorbet… while the kids watch a movie…. but then we agreed that they’d be coming down every 10 minutes because of this and that…. so we may be going out to dinner instead. Raw food experimentation will have to wait.

Oh, and I don’t know what the authors’ definition of raw is, but I thought that NOTHING was subjected to heat. I was wrong; a lot of food is dehydrated at 105 degrees F and some recipes call for using hot water, etc. Nothing wrong with that, just that it wasn’t what I expected. And reading through the book I find that this is very specialized cuisine, e.g., calls for things like a high speed blender and dehydrator, etc. So unless we were to commit to this kind of eating lifestyle, I’m not sure I can justify the expense for more appliances to clutter my already crowded counter-space. Those things have been on my wish list, but not priority, so it may be years before I go back to this book.