Cacao Butter Massage

Massage is sensual and relaxing, and can be great for your skin’s health. A chunk of slightly warmed organic cacao butter is all you need for a great-smelling, moisturising massage bar. Coconut butter works well too, and melts a little faster in your hands.

For a little more pizazz, melt some cacao butter over a bowl of hot water or in a dehydrator, add a few drops of fragrant essential oil or some rose petals, and pour into a heart-shaped mould to set.

For more elaborate and luxurious homemade raw bath recipes, have a read of The Holistic Beauty Book.

Romantic Raw Chocolate

What would Valentines be without chocolate? Our Passion bar, aptly-named and with a heart-decorated wrapper, makes a perfect post-dinner treat. Or make a gift of the Rawr Love Collection – 4 raw vegan chocolate bars (including Passion), with red ribbon, heart-themed tag and optional gift message. Alternatively, create your own chocolate gift.

Bathing with Love

Run a relaxing, nourishing bath, adding essential oils, a few sprinkles of grated cacao butter, rose petals, or a natural pre-made bath soak, such as Raw Living’s bath salts or bath bar. Don’t forget the…

Toxin-Free Candlelight

Most regular candles are made from petrochemicals, which release toxic fumes as you burn them. Not terribly romantic! Make sure your Valentines candles are made from plant wax, such as these tea lights from Funky Raw.

Raw Dinner, in or out

If you’re in the UK and are lucky enough to live in or visit London, there’s an increasing number of raw restaurants where you can enjoy a romantic meal out - Saf, Inspiral Lounge, Vantra, Wild Food Cafe to name a few. If you want to eat raw at home without the preparation, Raw Fairies offer a food delivery service.

Dinner at home allows you to tailor your meal to your partner’s (or your) favourite raw foods. For example, if you both love avocados, why not make a delicious avocado-based salad followed by chocolate-avocado pudding?

Check out these raw food website and book suggestions for recipe ideas. This list of aphrodisiac raw foods will help give your dinner an extra boost!

Saturday 12th Nov. – Planet Organic, Muswell Hill

Tuesday 15th Nov. – Planet Organic, Devonshire Square

Wednesday 16th Nov – Planet Organic, Torrington Place

Thursday 17th Nov. – Planet Organic, Westbourne Grove

As a type 1 diabetic, this is really exciting. So I gave the phase 1 diet a test run.

Phase 1 is the first stage of Cousens’ Rainbow Green diet, from the book Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine. Cousens recommends his diet for anyone – not just diabetics or those healing from illness.

The diet covers 3 raw vegan phases: phase 1 (very low sugar), phase 1.5 (low sugar, but including low GI fruit and veg like berries and carrots), and phase 2 (almost all raw veg allowed, higher GI fruit as an occasional treat). People with serious illness or needing a major cleanse are recommended to follow phase 1 for 3+ months, then go to 1.5 and then to 2. Those needing less cleansing are recommended to start with 1.5, then 2. Phase 2 is ongoing, basically a raw vegan diet that isn’t too heavy on the sugar.

I planned extensively for my phase 1 experiment. I assumed that eating no sugar – no raw chocolate, fruit, or even ’sweet’ veg like carrots – would be incredibly hard, so I drew up detailed menu plans for every day.

It was surprisingly easy to follow. I did occasionally crave ’something more’ between meals (i.e. something sugary), but I was never hungry, and the food was so tasty! The recipes in Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine are amazing – this is a fantastic recipe book, even if you have no interest whatsoever in following the 3 phases. Definite favourites included the Rawtwurst Wraps, Chili, Pasta with Red Pepper Marinara and Israeli Salad. Many of the recipes I’ll make again and again. There were very few I followed that turned out badly – that doesn’t happen for me with many raw recipe books!

The only downside to my phase 1 menu was that it was very, very nutty. This was partly down to my menu planning – I included too many entrees and nut-based sauces from the recipe book for it to have been a truly cleansing diet. More green juices, smoothies and simple salads would have been better – I just got too excited by all the wonderful recipes!

I didn’t follow phase 1 for long enough to see massive results in my blood sugar levels, but I do think it’s a diet I could follow for some time if I put my mind to it. Like all ways of eating raw, it takes some planning (soaking, dehydrating etc), but it really does taste good enough that I didn’t feel deprived. Just take a look at some of the yummy phase 1 meals I made!

We took along a raw lasagne and a cucumber, olive, leek, tomato, olive oil, lemon and salt salad (both recipes taken from Gabriel Cousens’s ‘Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine‘). Also on offer were numerous salads, a courgette and almond dip, corn crackers, goji berry coleslaw and raw cake! Just check out the juicy colours in the photo…

Have a look for a raw pot luck near you by doing a simple internet search or checking Meetup.com.

Veggie and vegan food was everywhere of course, but this year raw food had snuck its way onto the festival scene in a way bigger than ever before! A few cafes sold raw chocolates and cakes, there was an organic fruit and veg stall for stocking up on salad, but the best raw find was the little cafe Simply Rawgeous. Over the festival we sampled their spicy superfood green smoothie (ginger, turmeric, hemp milk, goji berries, dates, spirulina, maca, cacao and cayenne), raw falafels, raw lasagne and raw pizza – check out the pictures! Although it was tucked away in the corner, by the end of the festival it was hard getting a seat there – proof of raw food’s ever-growing popularity.

‘So You Want To Be a Raw Foodist?‘ is unique. It’s not a recipe book or a nutrition manual, but a straightforward guide on incorporating more raw food into your diet. Without any guidance or support, that’s not always as easy as it sounds.

What I loved about this book is that it really simplifies the notion of raw food. Emma makes clear raw is a way of eating that you choose to follow because you want to. One thing this book won’t do is put any pressure on you to eat more raw food, drum away about how terrible cooked food is, or create some complicated nutritional science around eating raw that would daunt anyone let alone a beginner. There are plenty of other raw food books out there for that!

What ‘So You Want To Be a Raw Foodist?’ will do is:

• Make you think about your own raw journey and why you’re embarking on it. The book is dotted with exercises and questions to help you along, which are incredibly useful – you’re not going to eat more raw long-term unless you’re focused on why you’re doing it!
• Offer some fantastic and very do-able ways to incorporate more raw into your diet. (This section of the book is genius!)
• Offer ideas on how to eat raw socially, explaining your diet to family and friends, or eating raw when you have a non-raw partner (Emma’s previous e-book, Me Raw: You Cooked, was on this very subject).
• Give ideas on where to get support in your local community.
• Give tons and tons of inspiration in the form of interviews with raw foodies, who’ve been eating raw for anything from months to years. Reading how other ‘real life’ people have made the transition can be both comforting and motivational.

So would I recommend this e-book? For those who are already eating as much raw as they ever want to and always find it easy – might not be top of the reading list. But for beginners – definitely. For those who’ve read a lot about raw but haven’t actually made much change to their diet – definitely. And for those who already eat a lot of raw but struggle from time to time – definitely.

You can download Emma’s book for £6.99 here, and be sure to have a good browse around her blog while you’re at it.

Four 70g eggs in multi-coloured foil: orange Zest, After Dinner mint, 70% Purity and our newest flavour, 80% cacao Intensity. Raw, dairy- and refined sugar-free, vegan and handmade, as with all our chocolates. £8.95, with free shipping. Order your raw chocolate Easter eggs here.

Cashew Power

1) Emma MacDougall of Raw Food Scotland did a review with her raw food meet-up group and video-taped it! Definitely worth a look. Check out the whole review here. Here’s a summary of what she thought of our different flavours:

Rawr Intensity: “definitely my favourite – this one I didn’t share with anyone!  It really reminded me of the richness of Bournville chocolate.  Really smooth, dark and powerful…”

Rawr After Dinner: “very reminscent in taste of After Eight dinner mints”

Rawr Zest: “nice and deep without being too overwhelming or sickly”

Rawr Passion: “the goji and vanilla work very well together”

Rawr Purity: “I really liked the simplicity.  As with the Intensity bar, it had a rich dark flavour uninterrupted by other flavours or ingredients”

Rawr Cashew Power: “it was very nice to have the combination of the choc and the creamy cashews together”

Rawr Intensity

2) Brit Chick Runs. Read her review here.

“Well well well! It was SO silky, SO intense, and SO lovely! And I’m not just saying that (I’ve had other brands of raw chocolate before and was distinctly unimpressed – too dusty textured), it truly was the smoothest chocolate ever. Melty deliciousness.”

Rawr Zest

3) Moves ‘n Munchies. Read her review here.

“Packed with taste is an UNDERSTATEMENT!!!!!

I am SO for real when I say that this is the best chocolate I have ever tasted. EVER. Not only is it the best raw chocolate, but the best chocolate HANDS DOWN.

I cannot get over the SMOOTH texture that literally MELTS in your mouth.. this isn’t hard and snappy- its soft and delicate!”

Rawr Passion

4) White Lace and Strange. Read the whole review here.

Rawr Intensity: “The chocolate had a lovely dark colouring with a glossy sheen (not what I expected with the raw alternative),also the bars are nice and solid and making a pleasing “snap” sound when you break a square off.”

Rawr Passion: “I was so impressed with this chocolate as although it was just as smooth and glossy with the same tempting smell,the texture was not grainy in the least and actually reminded me of the more conventional processed chocolate bars.”

Purity and Zest

5) Salad and Sequins.

“I tried the Purity Raw Organic Dark Chocolate last night and WOW this was good!… When I think of a bar of Cadburys after tasting something like this there is no contest I’m staying raw!”

Read the whole review here.

Neem Shampoo Bar

It’s taken me a long time to find a truly natural shampoo. There doesn’t seem to be a liquid shampoo which is 100% natural – even those trying their hardest to market themselves as just that.

Until I discovered my new hair saviour, I was facing the prospect of making my own shampoo bar – something I’ve tried in the past and wasn’t exactly successful with! But then, happy day, I stumbled across Just Bev Angelic Soaps.

Bev makes two cold-pressed shampoo bars, one with kokum butter for dry hair and one with neem, nettle, peppermint and rosemary which is especially good for itchy scalps. Both contain purely natural ingredients such as saponified olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil and other essential oils. Not only that, but they are handmade, from a family run business, use only organic ingredients where possible, and encompass reiki healing! And if you’re going away and want to pack minimally, you can even use the shampoo bars as normal body soap.

How many shampoos have fairies on them?

The test for me though, is what they do to my hair. And they’re wonderful. I’ve tested both shampoo bars and although the kokum butter one for dry hair was too heavy for me, the neem and nettle bar suits my hair perfectly. The oils in the soap do cause a little build up after a week or so and then I just wash my hair once with my old-style ‘natural’ shampoo and continue on with the shampoo bar. Apparently a rinse with lemon juice would have the same effect and would be even more natural. As time goes on and my hair gets used to its new shampoo I’ll hopefully be able to use my old-style shampoo even less.

The shampoo bars are just £3 each and, in my experience, will last about 2 months when used every other day. You can buy them here. Have a look at Bev’s cold-pressed soaps and other natural bath goodies too.

It was hard to resist eating these long enough to take a photo...

Summary: If I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life, it would be these. I never understood the raw food obsession with kale chips until I tried and adapted this recipe from gliving.com. The cashew cheese makes a wonderful dip, but dehydrated on kale chips is divine. This recipe makes about 3 dehydrator trays.