Ani’s Raw Food Asia : Easy East-West Fusion Recipes by Ani Phyo. Published by Da Capo Life Long Books, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7382-1457-3. 306 pages.
The concept of eating raw food inspired by Asian cuisines comes very close to the cuisines of Asian countries themselves: Korean kimchis and namuls, Thai green papaya salad, coconut milk, Hoisin sauce and curry pastes to name a few. Consider ingredients from tropical areas that are the basis of dishes from Southeast Asia, like infusing vegetables and fruits in coconut milk. Well-known condiments like shoyu (a soy sauce made without wheat), garlic and ginger, and vegetables like eggplants, green onions, and fruits like pineapples and coconuts have historically laced our plates with fantastic flavors and now can be combined raw in your kitchen to healthy and delicious effect.
Ani’s Raw Food Asia encompasses the exciting world of Asian flavors with recipes that originate in Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Philippines, Hawai’ian and Indonesian cultures. To begin with the book is quite attractive with photographs, graphic elements, and color and background textures contributing to the sensual feel. Each section, and there are ten including Menus, begins with a 2-page photograph taken in an Asian country, often featuring people and food as much as landscape for a sense of place. Then, a breath of fresh air! as Ani writes her philosophy into a theme for the chapter. With rice it’s about Social Fitness, before the dessert recipes, Happiness (of course!), with soups and curries it’s about Toxic-Free Living, and before noodles recipes, there’s Rest and Relaxation. As I said in an earlier post, we look for cultural identity in recipes, and feel more engaged when a collection is enriched with lots of cultural lore. For our times, our lore insists on how-tos for basic things and Ani gives us those too with how to make kimchi, pickled ginger, hot and sour soup, coconut milk (yes, you can make it from desiccated coconut!), date syrup or paste, nut butters, and more, like dehydrating a recipe.
With cultural inspiration this broad, the recipe book is an invitation to consider enlightened menus for entertaining, celebrations, picnics and buffets, or even to revive your own spirits with a kickin’ salad dressing, the comfort of soup, an lively afternoon sun tea, or fabulous dessert! One of the ideas you can expand on is that a raw dressing goes over raw vegetables to marinate them and can be kept in the fridge for a few days if you don’t eat all at once. And Dressings are creamy and spicy, made of oil and garlic, to taste, and other ingredients like sesame oil, nama shoyu, apple cider vinegar, fresh ginger, miso, and a sweetener like stevia, agave or maple syrup, or others that trump plain old and bad-for-you white sugar!
Even if you’re not that used to imitating Asian dishes, don’t worry you’ll be lost in a sea of new ingredients and methods. Ani has prepared introductory notes, how-to pages, and easy methods of obtaining a specific taste, mostly without unusual ingredients. What you don’t know up to now about Korean namuls, Ani will have you successfully preparing in minutes after you’ve seen her photographs and instructions. Even the most unlikely combination of ingredients, once put together yields wonderful Asian-inspired flavors and textures. Raw preparation teaches lots about the textures of vegetables and the science of combining and proportions because you can see the results developing right in front of you. Drinks is the first chapter and is loaded with nutritious libations are shakes, lassi, smoothies, and cocktails.
Within the ten sections, soups and curries is an interesting collection of recipes. Because curries are a kind-of soup-y dish, made in Asian traditionally by braising vegetables in a curry sauce, most likely a brew of coconut, spices and onions and garlic, etc. And soups, requiring a thinner broth, and less spicy flavors can also be made with coconut milk, but also sometimes with tahini, or miso and filtered water. One of the curries I especially like is “rendang curry” from Indonesian origins. It features a curry paste of lemongrass, ginger, garlic, Thai chili, spices, sweetener, coconut milk and shoyu that’s massaged into the vegetables. Its heavenly flavors are to die for.
To start, Ani’s Asian desserts are quite fabulous, mostly because they’re so delicious, but also because they can be made at home in your own kitchen. There’s a saying that goes like this” “Life is unpredictable—have dessert first!” and it would not be out of place at this raw foods table. Although I’ve successfully made two of the recipes already (coconut balls in sweet rose kream with pistachios, and Asian black “rice” pudding), I want to try all these royal and luxurious tasting sweets for my friends and family. There’s cashew “rice” pudding or cashew ice kream, with flavors like spicy chai, coconut vanilla, lavender and matcha green tea for starters. What about poached pears with candied walnuts, sweet sesame halvah, chocolate syrup, and even chia pudding? With complexity of layers in a recipe, you can be inventive with a dessert, the taste will be Asian-inspired, and you’ll be indulging in a superfood that tastes very rich and satisfying. In most cases the recipes are just 5 or 6 ingredients long and creating and assembling them is the snap of a button on your blender or food processor, finishing with a stint in the freezer or refrigerator.
There’s loads more content for you to discover in Ani’s Raw Food Asia than recounted above—but I didn’t want to reveal everything just yet! Regarded as my new key to Asian taste in un-cooking, I believe it’s the first guide to Asian raw for raw foodists. And that’s pretty fantastic considering the surplus of quick guides for raw on the market that really cannot match this book for easy Asian-inspired recipes!
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