Raw at its finest

Last night I attended an excellent raw vegan cooking demo with Toronto’s finest raw chef, Doug McNish. I’m still learning about the raw food lifestyle, and this workshop was the perfect introduction.

Doug has a captivating personality and knows raw ingredients and nutritional facts like the back of his heavily-tattooed hand. He taught us that raw vegan cuisine can be simple yet satisfying, and has enormous health benefits, and I’m totally inspired to get in the kitchen and uncook!

Doug showed us how to make a delicious gingered sunflower seed pate to roll in raw sushi.

He also made an avocado lemon dressing to marinate and massage into a killer hempy greek kale salad.

We got a small portion of each of his recipes to try. Yum! This kale salad was delicious and I’m definitely going to make this at home.

Doug showed us the magic of a spiralizer (using a carrot) and made zucchini noodles with a simple tomato basil marinara sauce.

I loved this dish! I’m now tempted to go out and buy a spiralizer. The marinara sauce was just like the cooked version, only better. The herbs and spices in raw dishes really stand out.

For dessert, he demonstrated how to put together two easy-to-make yet decadent treats: blueberry peach cobbler and lime avocado truffles.

The flavours in this cobbler were just like the baked version! The juicy, in-season berries made it that much better.

This turned out to be a fantastic event. Doug took questions from the audience throughout the evening, and the lovely Lisa, a Toronto Vegetarian Associaton volunteer and host of the evening, put us through a grueling set of raw food questions to win amazing prices like give certificates and cookbooks. I didn’t win anything, but maybe next time!