Getting 'The Glow'

Photo by Rawlando With only scraps remaining, food prep instructors Pamela Sterling, left, and Celeste Williams are on to the next dish. It's good to be enthusiastic about your subject matter but sometimes it's hard to keep that onestep removed reporter's stance, especially when something looks delectable, bursts with an array of fresh and juicy flavors, is easy to prepare and clean up — and they say is so good for you that you can eat as much as you want while attaining your ideal weight, improving your health and increasing your energy. Oh, but I digress.

It's a Wednesday night in Laguna Beach and 16 attentive women, one with her eager 10-year-old daughter (Fiona), gather at Laguna Green, a bath and kitchen design shop using all sustainable materials. We're here to learn about the benefits of eat- ing a raw vegan diet and how to "prepare" — not cook — our food for greater taste, more nutrition, less environmental waste.

"I called this series 'Going Green on the Inside'," store owner Pamela Sterling, who will instruct this first class, explained, "because it's just as important to be green on the inside as it is on the outside."

Green on the inside, she suggests, means feeling more vital and vibrant by eating food that is fresh, organic and "closer to the vine" (i.e., vegetables and fruits) than the butcher's block, the stove or, for that matter, the laboratory.

The reason it's important to eat these foods without cooking them, Sterling tells her culinary students, is enzymes. "If you cook food above 118 degrees, its enzymes are destroyed. Enzymes digest food. When eating cooked food, our bodies use stored enzymes, which is a limited supply, and that takes more energy."

Because our bodies spend so much time and energy digesting cooked food, the rationale goes, there's not much left over to take care of health concerns or take us to optimum well-being. By eating living enzymatic foods, Sterling proffers, the body can do what it was designed to do, heal itself and thrive. It's right there in Wikipedia: "Almost all processes in a biological cell need enzymes to occur at significant rates… Many drugs and poisons are enzyme inhibitors. Activity is also affected by temperature, chemical environment…."

Best-selling author and M.D. Deepak Chopra, an expert in India's traditional Ayurvedic medicine, states in his book "Perfect Health" that optimal health begins with optimal digestion. "Enzymes," Sterling contended, "are the secret to perfect digestion."

Vicki Stern, an Ayruvedic naturopath in Laguna who has practiced for 25 years, disagrees that relying on 100% raw food is good for everyone. "In the thinner body type, the ectomorph body, raw foods create too much air," she said. "If they have gas and bloating, they've eaten too much."

"Who tooted?" may be a question often asked vegetarians, but "where do you get your protein?" is the top question asked raw food proponents, said Sterling. According to one of Sterling's favorite books, "Raw Food, Real World, 100 Recipes to Get the Glow," by Matthew Kenney and Sarma Melngailis, fruits and vegetables, are full of enzymes and, thus, full of protein.

Enzymes, asserts Sterling, give raw foodists "the glow," but eating only carrot and celery sticks isn't how they got it.

To demonstrate, Sterling, a vegetarian since 1976 and a raw foodist for 1.5 years, brought out a colorful variety of ingredients to make four of the six appetizers recipes.

Everybody knows that the fun of a food prep class, cooked or non, is making the food. So it was briefly disappointing to see that this was going to be a demoonly class with Sterling preparing the food solo. That plan vaporized after the first appetizer was gingerly tasted and only scraps remained nano-minutes later, when Sterling asked, "Does anyone want to help?"

"I'm sold," said Mary Anne Henderson of Laguna. "It tastes fabulous. I could entertain with this and it would be a knock-out. And you're doing something good for yourself." The party continued with all of us gathered 'round the counter (concrete inlaid with chips of beer bottle glass and mother of pearl), cutting, chopping, dolloping and devouring. You could almost feel the glow.

Here are the two top favs:

Endive Corn & Cherry Bruschetta: fresh-off-the-cob corn kernels, cherry tomatoes, olive oil, lemon juice, cilantro, basil and green onion topped with a sauce made from macadamia nuts, lemon juice, green onion with a feta-like flavor.

Lasagna Bites: three sauces — pine nut ricotta, sun-dried tomato and basil-pistachio — layered between zucchini rounds and topped by half a cherry tomato.

Tammy Cusick, a culinary arts teacher at an alternative high school in San Diego, was there on a mission. "Our principal is a vegan and has inspired us all so I want to offer something he would appreciate as well as something healthy and tasty for the kids."

The next class in the Wednesday evening workshop series will cover Spectacular Raw Soups and will take place from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., July 8. The cost is $40 per class seven days prior to the class date, $45 after (series discount available). Contact Pamela Sterling at pam@laguna-green. com or 714-654-9860.