Victoria Boutenko - Raw Family Signature Dishes: A Step-by-Step Guide to Essential Live-Food Recipes

Other books by Victoria Boutenko

12 Steps to Raw Food

Green for Life

Raw Family (with the Boutenko family)

Copyright 2009 by Victoria Boutenko. Photographs copyright 2009 by Robert Petetit. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

Cover and interior photos by Robert Petetit
Cover design by Linda Ronan

Raw Family Signature Dishes: A Step-by-Step Guide to Essential Live-Food Recipes is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Boutenko, Victoria.
Raw family signature dishes : a step-by-step guide to essential live-food recipes / Victoria Boutenko.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58394-585-8
1. Raw food dietRecipes. 2. Vegetarian cookery. I. Title.
RM237.5.B693 2009
641.563dc22
2008053430

v3.1

We dedicate this book to all those who
dare to explore new possibilities

For the last fifteen years Victoria Boutenko and her amazing Raw Family have been on a mission: to make live-food cuisine easy and accessible to as many people as possible. Traveling from city to city in their packed van, they have held countless seminars, classes, and chef trainings. Their events are notoriously affordable, yet at each one they feed people prodigious amounts of simple yet delicious food.

During this time, I have had the honor of sharing the kitchen at many gatherings with this remarkable Raw Family, the Boutenkos. In every one of those kitchens, the presence of Victoria, Igor, Sergei, or Valya has made the food taste betterdue not just to their immense live-food culinary skills, but also to the love and sincerity that they put into everything they do. Over the same period I have also witnessed Victoria somehow find time to publish groundbreaking book after book.

In Raw Family Signature Dishes, Victoria presents a selection of cornerstone recipes in the most comprehensive manner I have ever seen in a recipe book of any kind. Not only does Victoria lay out the equipment and ingredients needed to prepare each dish, but she also provides nutritional information and anecdotes about the recipe or key ingredients. Her introductions, which often take the form of an amusing or enlightening story, provide context for why each recipe forms part of a core set of live-food recipes for any aspiring raw chefs repertoire. The detailed step-by-step instruction clearly lays out each step with close-up color photos illuminating the process along the way. The result is a foolproof recipe book that will make live-food cuisine even more accessible to greater numbers of people around the world. While the recipes are precise, Victoria encourages readers to adapt her recipes to their own tastes and lifestyles, and offers variations for many of the recipes.

With Raw Family Signature Dishes Victoria has once again made a sincere offering of love for people and planet! She has taken her familys mission to the next level. Raw Family Signature Dishes makes time-tested healthy and delicious live-food absolutely simple and easy to make.

Bruce Horowitz
Author of The Sun Kitchen Un-Cookbook
www.thesunkitchen.com

Dear Reader,

I am excited to present this book to you. During fifteen years of living the raw food lifestyle my family and I have tried thousands of raw food recipes. The recipes we selected for this book were chosen because we consider them to be the core recipes for a raw food diet. Each has been retested and refined throughout the years.

We have published several raw food recipe books and conducted hundreds of food preparation demonstrations over the years. Many of our students have a strong desire to prepare raw food cuisine themselves and to introduce delicious raw meals to as many of their friends and family as possible. However, our readers have often told us that their own raw food dishes dont always turn out delicious even when they follow the recipes accurately.

So to make our recipes more accessible, we have illustrated these select dishes with photographs showing each step of preparation. It is our intention that any man, woman, or young adult, with or without cooking skills, will be able to prepare a tasty and nutritious raw meal and serve it in gourmet style.

We have included both simple and complex recipes here. While some of them are comparable to five-star restaurant servings, others are simple and practical. For example, we have included sprouting salad because this simple dish has served us many times in our lives, especially while traveling. Let me tell you a story that happened recently. We received an e-mail from an officer in the Middle East. He said that before he was deployed he had enjoyed a raw food diet, especially green smoothies. Now this young man found himself eating predominantly canned foods without any greens in sight. Our hearts went out to him. So we went to the local health-food store and purchased a small variety of sprouting seeds and mailed them with instructions to this young man. Within two weeks we received a raving letter from his entire troop that they had discovered a local source of sprouting seeds, which were now a staple of their diet.

My family and I invite you to try all of these dishes. Even though we provide you with exact instructions, we encourage you to experiment with the recipes and create your own variations.

In Health, Victoria Boutenko

Recipes