After posting my article on fitness newspaper about nutrition I decided to finally get round to putting my blog up about my favourite place in the world to eat…

I have spent literally a year trying to write something to do Pure Food and Wine NYC justice and after spending all day rereading Sarma’s blog have decided to post it tonight. It is 90 days until Matt and I get married and I am ready to get juicing again and find that refering to www.oneluckyduck.com always leaves me feeling inspired.

I hope you check this out and if you are ever in New York, make this your first food destination, you will not be dissapointed!

Over the past 10 years I have tried and tested almost every diet in order to find something that makes me feel and look good and found the only thing that truly makes me feel fit, strong, healthy and pain free is eating natural foods the majority of the time (it is good to have a treat now and then), I found quite quickly that eating about much more raw food daily made me feel fantastic, it also gave me more energy to train harder and made

my skin look much better. I also found that I was no longer getting energy dips in the afternoon. But I found myself getting a little bored eating similar foods everyday.

So in January 2011 when we visited New York I was thrilled to find out that there was a raw, vegan, sugar free, gluten free and organic (all of my dietary requirements) restaurant that sold a chocolate cake that was healthy!

So Matt and I found the restaurant, Pure Food And Wine quite quickly and entered the most inviting restraunt we had been in, the decor was very intimate and the staff were the most helpful we had ever spoken with (and since going to other raw places in the UK still outshine anywhere)!

After studying the long and delicious sounding menu we decided to try the lasange and tacos with a chocolate milk shake. The food came very quickly, as it only needed to be made not cooked! The presentation was the most impressive I have ever seen having tried lots of not so good vegetarian meals in the UK, this was a completely different level, so good we had to take photos! But the chocolate milkshake was so amazing, we had already devoured 3/4 before taking a photo!

We decided to share the meals and tried the first mouthful of lasange, after the initial silly comment of “this is cold” we slowly worked our way through the most tastey meal either of us had ever eaten (Matt loves meat, and he genuinely loved every bite). It was a completely different experience, I normally take time to chew food, but don’t always neccecaraly love the taste, whereas we savoured every bite! The lasange was made of a sun dried tomato sauce, the most incredible pesto I have ever had a macadamia cream and slices of courgette instead of pasta. It was so good we are going back for our honey moon!

Then we ate the sun dried tomato tacos, with guacamole and bean filling, dressed with lime juice! I still think about them now! Words can’t really do the food justice! I had felt before finding Pure Food and Wine that although I felt great eating more raw food (so much so I see it as a life time plan that I will always use) that I would not be able to get the same enjoyment from eating food raw as when it is cooked, but this food was even better than anything I had eaten cooked, ever!

The very helpful man who took our order gave us a bit more information on Pure Food and Wine, saying that the founder, Sarma, was a trained chef who stumbled into the raw food ethos and it changed her views on food and what she wanted to put in her body so much so that she opened a raw food restaurant and has an amazing website which is the place I always go to read her very honest and inspiring blog and all things lovely and healthy.

To find out more about her and Pure Food and Wine check out the website, www.oneluckyduck.com or as I did invest in her book below. Sarmas outlook on food is based on health, but also a well balanced approach where no food
is banned. It is making a choice about what goes into your body and what you are happy to put in.

Our raw food guide then went on to explain a lot of the ingredients of the food, teaching us that raw cacao (the stuff that makes the chocolate milkshake and cake) is full of antioxidants and is very very good for us! Great!

So after the most satisfying lunch ever, we decided to treat ourselves to the chocolate ganache and a moon pie to share. The pie came over and was a cute little box shape of chocolate shell with different layers of creamy fillings,it was very very good!  Then the ganache, this is what we had really come for (most people know Matt and I have soft spot for all things chocolatey!) It was a good sized slab with what appeared to be vanilla ice cream on top! The first bite melted in the mouth, it tasted like the inside of a really rich, amazing chocolate truffle and the ice cream was a perfect, even better than dairy and sugar laiden stuff I avoid! Again, to our amazment, we slowly enjoyed every mouthful! We were sad to see the last bite go down, but very very satisfied and, yet not stuffed, not bloated and not needing an afternoon nap!

The whole experience was wonderful, I felt changed and excited about the possibilities of raw food I had never realised were options. I knew when I got back home I would experiment more with raw foods and learn how to recreate similar meals at home. Then, sitting in the candle lit restaurant I saw Sarmas books! Recipe books! Sold!

As soon as we got back to the hotel I started reading the book, not only full of the food we had eaten today but full of easy to make shakes, smoothies and deserts, plus tons of information on nutrition, explanations and ideas of how to live a healthier life! I have tried a few of the recipes so far and found the different options for making nut milk so easy to use everyday and much tastier than shop bought.

With our wedding approaching I am looking forward to having a recipe or two from Sarma’s book on our menu! It means I can eat food even more delicious than the unhealthy options and I will feel full of energy all day and night!

We are going back to New York for our honeymoon and we can’t wait to eat here every day. Thank you Sarma, you made food exciting again! Roll on May 19th!