Here are some customer reviews of
Leading with the Heart: Coach K's Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life
: then I'd be able to make and eat all this fabulous food!
I did like this book very much, but for the average working person, most of the recipies seem too complicated. I did enjoy reading the book and the photo's are beautiful.
I did try the Cinnamon Banana Shake pg 83 (using Pacific Almond Milk though) and it was a very delicious shake! I do hope to try a few of the easier recipies in the future.
 I like this book for all the gourmet raw food recipes it provides. The ones I've tried have been really great. What I don't like are all the people pictures. They waste space and make the book more expensive, bigger and heavier. Food pictures are appropriate in a cook book, but all the pictures of the authors are probably not necessary. The content is still very good, so I give it 5 stars.
 To begin with, although I do not follow a strictly raw food diet, I am vegetarian and raw food makes up almost half of my daily intake. I do not follow food fads but made a conscientious decision to stop eating meat, as I am Buddhist and an animal rights activist. Going raw came about in a similar way, a friend of mine introduced me to it and I realized that this was an excellent way to lose weight and get healthy.
It is very difficult to find good books on raw food. I have just about every single one published and some are just laughable like "Raw : The Uncook Book: New Vegetarian Food for Life by Juliano Brotman", who is such a freaky little thing, he immediately turned me off to the entire concept for about a year after reading his book to the impossible, "Raw by Charlie Trotter and Roxanne Klein" which puts a gourmet spin on things but only for people who are interested in creating food that takes anywhere from 12 hours to 2 days to prepare.
So many raw cookbooks are filled with hard to find ingredients and time-consuming preparation that makes it quite obvious why more people do not adopt the lifestyle.
That said, I am not sure what "REAL WORLD" Matthew and Sarma live in, but in my world spending $14.00 on a tiny jar of raw almond nut butter then using a third of it to make 2 cups of raw almond "milk" to use for smoothies is not within the realm of reason.
Nor is purchasing a $200 dehydrator or $500 Vita-Mix blender. Many of the recipes in this book cannot be created without either one. Or both. For someone just exploring raw food this is quite an investment to make the recipes.
The ingredients are all very expensive too. To go organic, it costs nearly twice as much as eating non-organic. Just setting yourself up to make recipes from this book could run you about $1,000! (If you plan on changing your lifestyle to raw foods.)
What is most disturbing about this book is that a raw food lifestyle in the way that Matthew and Sarma live it seems to be a controlled form of anorexia. I cannot believe that either of these incredibly emaciated (and I do mean this, they are thin to the point that their bones and sinews show in the over-abundance of fashion-layout photos of them through-out the book) was ever a real food-loving chef!
The book pointedly shows dozens of photos of Sarma, especially (who is so stunningly gorgeous that it is distracting, I forgot this was a book about food and could easily be some kind of bizarro "blonde drinking a smoothie with plumped up lips" photo essay) which I cannot seem to understand how this will benefit me in regards to creating the recipes. I am happy for Matthew and Sarma that their lives are so fabulous that they decided to share so much of themselves in this photographic accounting of their skinniness, but I honestly thought this was going to be a REAL WORLD example of raw food, not some treatise on junk science and sexualisation of a fruit smoothie by having Sarma's big luscious pink lips straining at the straws as she "sucks" the health into her slim, supple body.
These perfect people are also obsessed with "colonics" and "cleanses". Not only do they not really want to consume any food, they don't want that food cluttering up their perfect intestines. Sarma particularly goes into how she has often done it because she loves the "flat stomach" it gives her.
Wow, that's um - very UNHEALTHY, considering that Sarma is about 112 pounds and most of that is in her clavicle and lips!
With an over-referencing to raw food as "sexy" I wonder what else besides a decent meal is "lacking" in this couple's relationship. Honestly even as a vegetarian I have never wanted to tell two people to please have a cheeseburger, a couple of beers and get a hotel room for some hot monkey love. Trust me kids, you'll really get the GLOW then!
I got this as a gift and I love it! Looking through this book is so inspiring! The recipes sound wonderful (although I have yet to make any of them) and there is a good deal of information about the raw diet and lots of other things that go along with it. The photos are beautiful, although it seems like they could have left some of the people photos out, and the book could have been a few bucks cheaper, but that's no big deal.
I like that the authors aren't preachy, and that they recognize that not everyone is going to go 100% raw. I found it easier to relate to, especially when they confessed to eating certain non-raw food items on occasion. I plan on incorporating a lot more raw foods and juices into my diet, but right now I don't forsee going 100% raw, so I am happy to read about two people who are dedicated raw foodists, but who aren't crazy obsessed about it.
 For the most part, I've been quite pleased with this book; it is full of well-written, tasty and interesting recipes. Still, it often veers into frustrating ideological excesses that undermine its appeal. This cookbook strikes a welcome balance between the inaccessible coffee-table fussiness of the high end "Raw" by Trotter and Klein and the earthy, overzealous raw books that read like cult indoctrination manuals. There are a number of elaborate recipes from the restaurant, but also many geared towards everyday use and accessibility (like the 30-second nut milk and shortcut nut `cheeses' that don't rely on the esoteric or hard to make rejuvelac.) Instructions are careful and detailed with helpful sidebars on unusual techniques and ingredients like cutting young coconuts. Doubly pleasing are the beautiful pictures that will help you know what to expect from some relatively unfamiliar food preparations (even though too many focus on the good looks and hipper-than-thou "lifestyle" of the authors-this is a cookbook, not a vogue spread, right?).
Fair warning: more than half of the recipes require specialty equipment that is sometimes expensive (such as a cleaver for getting into young coconuts, a fancy dehydrator and ultra-powerful blender) and for esoteric ingredients. The recipes themselves are usually time and sometimes also labor intensive.
In spite of the incessant hyperbolic language and exaggerations, I'd say that raw food definitely requires a little getting used too. Textures, especially, are different than those you may be used to from the closest analogues of raw foodstuffs. The surprising qualities of raw foods just add to the fun for me-it's like exploring an unfamiliar ethnic cuisine for the first time and getting used to all the new flavors and textures, some of which you like and some of which you don't. I have found it a lot of fun to experiment.
My most general complaint about the recipes here is their overuse of sweeteners and, to a slightly lesser extent, very rich ingredients. I have disliked the unpleasantly cloying and rich dairy replacements, especially the ice cream-pastry cream- whipped cream simulations used in desserts. These all tend to have the same basic, overpowering flavor (of coconut, cashews and a heavy hand with the vanilla extract) and viscous, waxy, mouth-coating texture. In a similar vein, I prefer dairy milk or plain-to-lightly-sweetened nut milks to their saccharine versions with a million `enhancers.' (The maple pecan milk in particular has roughly the same sweetness level as lucky charms.)
On the positive side, the fresh recipes that I've tried have been well balanced, bright and unique. For example, the arugula pear salad uses two new and interesting techniques (a luscious, fun dressing composed of pureed near-whole meyer lemons, and shaved pear which creates textural interest). Various raw `crackers' ( such as "jalapeno corn tortilla chips" and sun-dried tomato herb crackers) are very appealing, with rich, savory flavors and interesting, slightly unusual textures. As for sweets, the macaroons are great; although not all that different from their cooked counterparts, the maple flavor adds a welcome new dimension. The buckwheat cereal is a fun new flavor and texture for breakfast- quite addictive, actually- and the raw granola has a deep, sophisticated flavor and satisfying texture (though its rich-it's all nuts and no grains). The chocolate ganache tart is a particularly impressive-a bowl-you-over mounds bar flavor and luscious, dense chocolate mousse texture achieved through an inspired-and easy-combination of ingredients.
I'm highly skeptical of the author's constant stream of nutritional claims, warnings and advice (as well as a bizarre obsession with digestion, aka "assimilation," enemas, etc.) all presented in the breathy, overzealous manner of a new proselyte. After an introduction in which they say that different eating styles are probably best for different people and that they aren't setting themselves up to tell you what you should eat or not eat, they launch right into new-miracle-diet promises and hysterical language (e.g., white sugar is compared to heroin, corn syrup is labeled "evil" and a page long diatribe against milk accuses dairy of "clogging our arteries and give us respiratory and heart problems"-for details, they direct you to milksucks.com). I recommend taking virtually all of the nutritional pseudo-science with a very large grain of salt. If you have trouble tuning this kind of stuff out (or even if you don't), you might find the book extremely annoying. But if you're looking for a reliable, well-tested introduction to a new, different, and highly flavorful cuisine, this book can be a very practical and successful guide.
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