Fun At The Food Prep Retreat!

When it comes to increasing the amounts of raw vegan foods and wholefoods in the diet, it can be quite daunting! Knowing how to prepare raw foods so that they are tasty, what equipment to use and how to put it all together so that your family will enjoy it, is a huge learning curve for many people! It has been a goal of mine for a long time, to complement the Embracing Health Detox, Healing & Raw Food Retreats with more intensive, hands-on food preparation retreat, so that people have somewhere they can go to have a comprehensive learning experience when it comes to preparing this type of food.

This weekend we are underway, running the very first raw vegan, Food Preparation Intensive Retreat at beautiful Byron Bay – and intensive it is!!

With a full house of 12 participants, we have hit the ground running as raw food chef Andrea Brosnan from Really Awesome Wholefoods (RAW) takes us through our paces in the creation of almost every dish that we are eating this weekend. We are covering four nights and three full days, where we are creating everything from green smoothies, nut milks, pate, dips, pasta alternatives, nori rolls, decadent desserts, living pizza and much, much more!

With several three hour sessions preparing up to six different dishes, the guests are certainly gaining an incredible understanding of the process of creating raw food meals. From selecting produce, to the different kitchen equipment found in a raw food kitchen, knife skills, combining tastes and flavours, creating alternatives to traditionally cooked recipes and with a load of health information thrown in, it is a weekend that is expanding minds, teaching solid kitchen skills that will last a lifetime, with a healthy dose of fun to top it off!

The amazingly organised and competent Andrea has such a knack for breaking down what seem to be complex recipes into simple terms that makes them easy to understand and recreate. And with an organic farm trip and a fermentation workshop to come, – we’re packing it into this Intensive and making it rock!

This retreat has been such a success that we are creating a Winter Warming Workshop for June 2014, teaching how to make raw food in winter. One of the challenges that many people find with raw food is that they find it easy to eat mainly raw in summer, but find it difficult in the colder winter months. This workshop will teach the tips and tricks to make it easy to eat more raw in winter. Not that we believe you must eat only raw food all the time (!) however this workshop will give options to those who would like to continue eating more raw food throughout winter, but find it a bit hard.

Raw food can be such a pleasure to eat, and knowing how to prepare it well can make the difference between eating healthfully or going back to bad habits. Eeating healthfully is no more effort than eating badly, it’s just knowledge that is the key. And I am so proud that we are able to offer this type of learning experience that is going to serve our guests for a long time to come!

Hope to see you at the next one!

Leisa