Michael Klein ’78 and his wife, Roxanne, are proving that raw foods can also be extremely well done...

Extras: Bio of Michael Klein '78 | Review of Roxanne's | Raw Foods Recipe

You’re dining at Roxanne’s—a Bay-area restaurant owned and operated by Roxanne Klein and Michael Klein ’78—mainly for the sheer indulgence of a truly sensual gourmet meal. You had to make your reservations more than a month in advance to assure a table at the 64-seat converted coffeehouse, and now you’re eagerly anticipating an extravagant meal prepared under the supervision of Roxanne Klein, one of Forbes Magazine’s top chefs of 2002.

Chances are you’re dining at Roxanne’s for another, more esoteric reason as well. If you’re a “foodie,” your interest likely was piqued by the buzz in the food press. (“…An astonishing adventure in pure, sensual flavors” raved Gourmet magazine. Renowned chef Charlie Trotter said, “Roxanne’s culinary vision is extraordinary, and it has inspired me on many levels.”)

If you’re “green,” you support the Kleins because they champion sustainability in their personal and professional lives. The couple has made Roxanne’s as environmentally friendly as possible, and they donate the profits from the restaurant to community organizations and the Rainforest Action Network, where Michael serves on the board of directors.

If you’re health conscious, you appreciate that Roxanne’s uses only locally grown, organic, fresh produce—much of it from the Kleins’ own three-acre garden. You may also be part of the growing raw-food community—people who believe that eating uncooked, living food maximizes energy, promotes top health and even extends life.

That’s right: raw food. The savory Pad Thai, the extra-silky vanilla ice cream and sumptuous chocolate cake, the enchilada in mole sauce—they’re all fashioned entirely from raw, living vegetables, fruits, flowers, seeds, herbs and sprouted nuts. Roxanne and her kitchen staff make cheese and ice cream by creating “milk” from puréed, raw nuts that can be frozen or dried. Crackers, cakes and crusts are made from “doughs” of ground seeds and nuts with the moisture removed. Noodles are tender young coconut shoots or micro-thin slices of zucchini. The restaurant’s kitchen has no oven, only dehydrators, blenders, warmers and an array of high-end slicers, dicers and food processors. Nothing is ever heated above 118 degrees. The traditional meld of flavors most chefs achieve through cooking? Roxanne creates that through her use of herbs and oils and her uncanny ability to sequence flavors and “play” a diner’s taste buds as a virtuoso might play a Stradivarius.

Of course, you could also be a skeptic of the whole vegetarian/vegan dining scene—someone who thinks it can never transcend derivative, faux-meat concoctions such as tempeh “chicken,” veggie “burgers,” and the dreaded tofurkey—and opt not to dine at the restaurant at all. If that’s the case, you’ve completely misunderstood the whole idea and you’ve cheated yourself of an extraordinary culinary adventure.

It’s a common misunderstanding, and one that the Kleins have become, from necessity, deft in debunking. Michael explains how local food critic Michael Bauer began showing up at the restaurant when it first opened in 2001. Bauer has confessed in print that he fully expected to ridicule the experience. “He hates vegetarian food, and he can absolutely destroy you,” Klein explains. “He talked with Roxanne after each meal, and he eventually said, ‘Oh my God, I think I’ve got it! It’s about the food!’” Bauer’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle gave the restaurant three-and-a-half stars (a flat-out rave for Bauer that still has the food community talking) and he speculated that Roxanne “…may be as revolutionary in vegetarian cuisine as Alice Waters has been in the mainstream.”

And yes, Roxanne’s is all about the food. Or, more precisely, intense flavor. If you can remember how sweet strawberries used to taste before agribusiness made them uniform and bland; if you can close your eyes and conjure the smell of fresh rosemary or lemon verbena, then you have an idea—and only an idea—of the spell Roxanne can cast on your palate. She explains, “For me, this is the most sensual dining experience. If I thought other ingredients would make a better experience, I would do it, but this for me is the ultimate—using the freshest possible ingredients at their most flavorable point. When you’re cooking, you can get away with using lesser produce. If you don’t have an incredible ingredient, you’ll taste it when it’s raw.”

Just listening to Roxanne will make you hungry. She speaks a kind of food argot that appeals directly to your senses. It’s a way of looking at her craft and the world that stems from her training as a chef; she studied at the California Culinary Institute, interned in Provence, France and worked at noteworthy California eateries such as Stars in San Francisco. Her world view also grows out of her upbringing on a Northern California farm. She likes to tell how her grandfather would take her out to the garden when she was a child and ask her what she smelled. “Strawberries,” she might say.“Good,” he’d say, “That’s what’s ripe, and that’s what we’ll pick and eat.”

“I learned that at such a young age—3 or 4,” Roxanne explains. “I didn’t know until maybe fifth grade that people bought vegetables and their food from a store. What we ate was what was in the garden.” Michael explains his wife’s flavor affinity this way, “Roxanne understands what is supposed to happen. She’s one of these people who can take a bite of anything and tell you every single ingredient.”

Like most great chefs, Roxanne shines when she’s improvising. Because of the strict parameters of what she’s set out to do—develop a style of “not cooking” that has a limited choice of ingredients and little if any precedent—creativity is a given, but proven techniques are essential. Once Roxanne and Michael settled upon the idea of sharing their passion for raw food and Roxanne’s talent with others, Roxanne took two full years to develop recipes and techniques. “I’ve done a lot of experimenting,” she says. “A lot of people think, ‘Oh, your approach is so limited,’ but I think it’s wide open because every day there’s a new discovery which is exciting. Every day in the kitchen there’s an experiment going on.”

Roxanne’s kitchen, which she designed herself, is so revolutionary that it’s frequently visited by chefs from around the world who are dying to know how she does it. An early champion was Charlie Trotter, the restaurateur/food celebrity who was a pioneer in raising vegan cooking to an art. Trotter and Roxanne will have a coffee table picture book featuring Roxanne’s food published by Ten Speed Press in the fall, and Roxanne is talking to the publisher about a follow-up book of raw food recipes and techniques.

The restaurant’s menu is unique as well. Roxanne’s insistence on peak freshness means that her offerings change frequently and seasonally. There are favorites, however, that have become a constant—the Pad Thai in particular. For $100 per person, diners may try the chef’s tasting menu that offers 10 courses developed that day by Roxanne or her Chef de Cuisine Stephanie Valentine, accompanied by full wine service from the restaurant’s stellar collection of organic wines assembled by top sommelier Larry Stone. (See “My Dinner at Roxanne’s” on page 18.) Other choices include a cultural tasting menu reflecting the flavors of a particular region (Morocco, Mexico, Thailand and Tuscany are favorites) for $69 per person, an entrée with three starters for $52, or an entrée with two starters for $49.

Roxanne’s reliance on cultural food models grows out of the Kleins’ passion for travel and cultural exploration. Roxanne talks about her kitchen process as a translation. In describing how she developed her signature Pad Thai, a dish that traditionally is cooked and contains meat, egg and other vegan no-nos, she says, “The inspiration was that I like the sweet and sour of the tamarind. I like the spiciness and crunchiness of the nuts. The lusciousness of the noodle. So, I’ll take those things I really love about a dish and then transform them into something that I have created.”

It’s as if Roxanne’s food could seem so foreign that she must offer a point of reference from more traditional dining. “Maybe that’s going to change later; I think it will,” she says, hinting at a possible hope to woo diners—through seduction of the palate—to a sea-change in how they think about food.

Which brings us to the part of the story and Roxanne’s restaurant that some critics have found, well, rather hard to swallow: the philosophy behind eating raw food. Both Michael and Roxanne are quick to say that the idea of the restaurant is not to preach or convert, however Roxanne’s exquisite Website (www.roxraw.com) does offer a treatise on the health benefits of eating raw food. In a nutshell, the theory is that cooking robs food of nutrient-rich water, concentrates impurities, releases free radicals and destroys or alters natural enzymes. Raw foodists believe living, raw food contains all of the enzymes the body needs to digest it and that when such enzymes are lost, the body must deplete its own finite supply of natural enzymes. For raw foodists, aging and most disease can be ultimately attributed to this loss of enzymes.

“Roxanne has a gift and a talent that is unbelievable, and the most important challenge we’ve had to face is to not stigmatize that experience by letting people think they’re doing something for their bodies or something for the planet when they come in here,” Michael says. “That’s a good way to ruin a dining experience. That’s not our goal at all.” However, both he and Roxanne will tell you that since they switched to a mostly raw food diet in the mid-90s, they have been in the finest health of their lives. To look at them is to see two remarkably beautiful, energetic people. The only real difference between Michael in 2003 and the photo on his Pomona College application is a few grey hairs.

The couple is not fanatically strict about eating raw food; they were leaving on the evening of this interview to dine at a vegan, cooked-food restaurant at the invitation of a chef friend. Each has a warm sense of humor about their raw food enterprise and the controversy that surrounds it. Michael illustrates with a story of how, when the restaurant opened, he wrote an eight-page booklet that he hoped to have as an educational tool for diners. It described the health benefits of a raw diet and how it alters the body’s digestive process. “I worked as hard on it as I had for my senior thesis, I think. I got done with it, and I was so proud of it. I gave it to Roxanne and she starts reading it. She stops. She looks up and says, ‘You will not talk about colons in my restaurant!’”

The Kleins are sufficiently idealistic to hope that the restaurant’s current popularity will advance the cause of sustainably grown, organic produce and healthier eating. They have developed a long-range business plan that calls for Roxanne’s To Go, a deli that will offer take-home, pre-packaged items from the restaurant’s production kitchen. The first one will open this year next to the restaurant, and the couple wants to have up to six more in San Francisco. They are even considering an expansion into Los Angeles.

A sad reality about the economic and practical viability of healthy, organic, environmentally-sound living seems to be that it has increasingly become a lifestyle solely of the rich and famous. (Hollywood actor Woody Harrelson introduced the Kleins to raw food.) Michael understands this, and has tried to address it through the restaurant’s business plan. “On one hand it’s great to have a special-occasion restaurant where people can come for their birthday if they make their reservation a month of two in advance,” he says, “but that doesn’t help anybody. We’re snobbishly appealing to foodies—the fine diners—who are not going to continue to eat this way, and we’re not going to tell them to eat this way.

“The deli is a way that this food can fit into people’s lives. Why is Whole Foods so big? People go to Whole Foods because they believe they’re doing the best they can to take care of themselves and their family. Roxanne’s food, the deli, her ice creams—people are going to buy them because that’s the best you can do to take care of your family. And eating this way—it doesn’t fit into your lifestyle. Your lifestyle has to fit into eating this way.”

So when l’addition finally arrives after an evening at Roxanne’s, how does it all add up? One taste of Roxanne’s cuisine and you’ll agree that it is ultimately about the food. But the experience also is as radically complex as the interplay of flavors in the coconut green curry soup with avocado. That difference is all around you, in fact. The dining room is smartly decorated with chemical-free paints and organic hemp chenille and silk; it’s equipped with pressed wheat-straw tables. “If you chew on the trellis out there,” Michael quips, pointing to the patio outside the window, “you’ll find that it’s windblown, salvaged cypress from Sonoma County and it would taste better because it’s local!” Remarkably, there is no “kitchen smell” of hot oil or roasting meat. Even the restrooms are differentiated for the genders by only a picture of a tomato on one door and a zucchini on the other.

Obviously, the Kleins want to feed you and delight you. But they also want you to come away with an appreciation of a way of life that allows equally for indulgence and responsibility. Michael likes to cite a review from the New York Times that claims, in his words, “Maybe what they’ve done is, they’ve taken the sin out of eating and the penance out of health.”

If Michael were to preach to his clientele—which he is loathe to do—his message would be this: “I don’t think it’s about whether you’re a vegan or meat eater; I don’t think it’s about whether you’re ‘raw’ or ‘cooked’; all I’m certain of is, the more whole, fresh, locally grown produce you eat in your diet, the better off you are.”

Bio of Michael Klein '78
Sustainable Karma
Michael Klein ’78 has led an archetypal life for a tail-end Baby Boomer: graduate from college; “drop out” to follow the Grateful Dead around; “tune in” to the environment; “turn up” in Silicon Valley to start a telecommunication company; make the transition from Deadhead to Nethead to CEO; sell the company and retire. Only Klein has jumbled that sequence of life events in an intriguing way.

For instance, he started his first company more than a year before he graduated from Pomona. During his junior summer, he partnered with classmates while taking a computer course at Stanford. “I didn’t think I was nearly as bright as most of my peers at Pomona and definitely not as hard-working,” Klein now admits, “so I figured the only chance I had to succeed was to get an edge. And I just decided that computers were going to be that edge.” The company they founded did pioneering videogame programming for Atari and Midway.

Two more telecommunication company start-ups followed, and Klein now has successfully sold all three—essentially retiring twice before the age of 50. Only then did he take time off to follow the Grateful Dead, having met band member and fellow Marin County resident Bob Weir while playing flag football.

Association with the Dead led Klein to become CEO of Modulus Guitars, a leading manufacturer of bass guitars hand-made from sustainably grown woods. Klein’s Dead connections also strengthened his commitment to environmental activism with groups such as the Rainforest Action Network and ForestEthics.

“I wasn’t nearly concerned enough about sustainability and the environment until I had children,” Klein says, recalling the moment it first occurred to him that his generation’s legacy might include a heavy environmental burden. At the time he was staying with a regional company manager in Southeastern Australia. Klein learned—when his friend ordered his two children back upstairs for hats and sunscreen before they left for school—that it was illegal to send your kids outside for recess unprotected against the damaged ozone layer. Klein thought about his own two small children and how he had never worried about playing outside; then he made a big connection: “This is a huge, huge burden to put onto my children.” Today, Michael and wife Roxanne have expanded that family to four children—Nataraja (5), Alexandra (11), Lillian (13) and Warren (17).

In nearly 20 years of activism, Klein has shifted his focus from fighting politics to changing corporate and consumer behavior—lessons he no doubt encountered as an economics major at Pomona and while completing an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He and his organizations learned that working abroad to save the rainforest was an unsustainable battle. “We determined that the most effective way we could do our part was to change dynamics of consumption here in America,” he says. Their principal tactic has been to introduce a new model to the marketplace. As Klein explains, “Branding is this terrible two-way sword. It’s not about the relationship between your product and the consumer, it’s actually about the relationship between consumers and a whole set of values they identify with your brand.” Klein notes that this strategy has led to some significant victories. “We’ve been able to get Home Depot to stop carrying all wood that isn’t certified as sustainably harvested,” he says. The organizations also have encouraged office supply giant Staples to consider a commitment to post-consumer recycled paper and tree-free alternatives, and they have convinced several major homebuilders to stop using endangered woods.

Klein’s own eco-friendly, rammed-earth home in Corte Madera, Calif., used recycled lumber when it used wood at all. He did extensive research on the embedded-energy factors of all his construction materials, carefully considering the amount of energy it took to create or mine a material, move it on-site and install it. He next recycled much of what he learned in the eight years it took to create the house—“It took twice as long to build as the Hoover Dam!”—when he and Roxanne converted the building that houses their restaurant in near-by Larkspur.

For a man who is twice-retired, Klein keeps extremely busy with his commitment to ecology and his shared passions with Roxanne for promoting their living-food restaurant and exploring other cultures. “It’s a lot of hard work, and we are very focused on making a difference, on making something happen,” he says. “That’s a deeper motivation than financial success. I get a big kick out of the fact that doing what we believe in can actually help support the things we believe in, too.”

Klein understands that success requires a touch of the intangible as well. “I’ve been lucky to work with things I care about, love and enjoy,” he says. “It’s been a lot of good karma.”

Review of Roxanne's
My Dinner at Roxanne's
I have always thought the grande dame of food writers, M.F.K. Fisher, had one of the all-time great gigs. Who wouldn’t want to roam the world and write thoughtfully about cuisine as culture?

Invoking her guiding spirit, I set out for Roxanne’s, the Marin County restaurant that has made its mark among food aficionados for successfully marrying two previously uncrossed cultural currents: higher consciousness and haute cuisine.

Roxanne’s is tucked away on a main drag of Larkspur, California, a suburban hamlet that might qualify as bucolic if a simple shepherd could only afford to live there. Any thoughts of a kinder, gentler pace of life, however, were erased a few feet from the restaurant when my dining companion and I were nearly mowed down by an SUV piloted by a cursing soccer mom.

Safely inside, I was glad to find an oasis. The tranquil interior spoke in equal parts to luxurious comfort and eco-consciousness. The food promised the same, although I was intrigued by the restaurant’s reliance on raw produce. Would this be a breakthrough in dining or just one of those—dare I say it?—California trends? I quickly learned that Michael and Roxanne Kleins’ commitment to the lifestyle is genuine, and Roxanne’s offers the chef-as-dining-auteur experience that makes for a great signature restaurant. It’s as if you’ve pulled up a chair in the personal dining room of one of the world’s great chefs who whips up a little something for you. Or, as Michael Klein ’78 puts it, “Talk about tactical errors. We started Roxanne’s so we’d have a place to eat, and now even we can’t get a table here!”

But I do have a table tonight, as well as an expert and friendly wine steward and wait staff. Roxanne’s is offering the chef’s tasting menu: 10 courses created from the day’s freshest produce to suit the kitchen’s whim served as a series of appetizers and salads, two entrees and two desserts, accompanied by a selection of wines that would make the most jaded connoisseur weep for joy.

The opening amuse bouche, two intensely flavored dabs of cold fruit and vegetable soup, sent a wake-up call to the palate. “Hello, this is something new!” Likewise, an herbed crepe filled with fresh summer corn, spinach and mushrooms and a kaisou seaweed salad with hijiki vinaigrette and herbed white shoyu were memorable both for the outstanding quality of the ingredients and for the complex interplay of flavors and textures.

Two cultural appetizer offerings—a Taste of Thailand and a Mediterranean Platter—showcased Roxanne’s considerable flair for regional cuisine; remarkable when you consider that little of what we ate was as it seemed. Dolmas without grape leaves, hummus without chickpeas, a satay without marinated meat—this led my companion to mint the evening’s dominant metaphor: “This is food as trompe l’oeil.” The nut-milk cheese on the Greek salad illustrated the point nicely: it was delicious and had the right “mouth feel,” but it lacked the earthiness you associate with feta.

Roxanne’s inherent innovation—to create without cooking—became a measuring stick for the meal. Dishes delighted when they stood on their own merits; an outstanding Pad Thai “ate” as a viable variation and not an approximation. Other dishes, although well-executed and quite delicious, caused varying degrees of disconnect as they bridged the gap between the raw and the cooked. I missed the oven heat in a lasagna terrine of mushrooms, baby spinach, corn and cashew cheese, but I reveled in the unexpected zest of a marinara sauce of pureed fresh and sun-dried tomatoes. We requested the tamale with queso Amarillo, corn and chipotle vinaigrette because we wondered how a dish traditionally so dependant upon cornmeal and meat might fare in the raw. The ground corn casing seemed doughy and struck me as the meal’s only misstep; however, the pumpkin seed and raisin–based mole sauce was easily the best I’ve had anywhere.

A strawberry sorbet, bursting with flavor, cleansed the palate for dessert. Chocolate crêpes with caramelized bananas and walnuts, vanilla bean ice cream, Aztec chocolate and cajeta sauce shared a plate with a whimsical ice cream sandwich of vanilla nut-milk ice cream between layers of crispy chocolate. Both were so scrumptious I was tempted to run into the kitchen to make sure Sara Lee and Ben and Jerry weren’t hiding inside!

We left the restaurant satisfied and well-fed, but without that stuffy feeling that often accompanies this level of indulgence. What was full to overflowing was our conversation. We talked about the food—the sensational flavors versus those moments when we became aware that we were “dining in the raw”—for the whole of our return trip.

My dinner at Roxanne’s also rekindled my interest in organic, local produce; I’ve been to the farmers’ market every weekend since. But I was also quite happy on the night after that dinner to return to the world of cooked food, enjoying braised skate and pâté fois gras. But with a difference—now I am all too aware of the battle between the ol’ bean and the bread-basket. Suffice to say I’m perfectly happy to ponder just how Roxanne Klein can turn a nut into scrumptious vanilla ice cream, but I prefer not to think about what that poor goose went through to sacrifice its fatted liver.

At what price, then, our exquisite indulgences? M.F.K. Fisher—who always preferred dining at home to going out—remarks in An Alphabet for Gourmets, “When I hear of a gourmet with exquisite taste, I assume, perhaps too hastily and perhaps very wrongly, that there is something exaggeratedly elaborate, even languidly perverted about his gourmandism. I do not think simply of an exquisitely laid table and an exquisite meal.” Had Fisher the opportunity to dine at Roxanne’s, she might have found that simply exquisite and gloriously gourmet needn’t be mutually exclusive.

—David Scott is director of stewardship and memorial funds at Pomona College.

Raw Food Recipe
Roxanne's Lasagna Terrine

This recipe is one of the many culinary creations of Roxanne Klein, chef of Roxanne’s Restaurant in Larkspur, California.

1 recipe Marinara Sauce (recipe below)
1 recipe Herb Cheese (recipe below)
4 cups cremini mushroom, sliced
2 tablespoons shoyu
2 1/2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 bunch spinach
1/2 cup basil, chiffinade
1 dash salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
8 ounces corn kernals
3/4 cup onion — minced
4 whole zucchini — sliced on Japanese vegetable slicer or mandolin to make paper thin, wide lasagna noodles

For Garnish:
1/4 cup Rawmesan (can be purchased from www.roxraw.com)
1 cup Cherry Tomato and Corn Salad (see recipe below)
olive oil and/or basil oil

Marinate mushrooms in shoyu, garlic and 2 tablespoons of olive oil in refrigerator for 20 minutes. For assembly, drain off excess marinade, cover and refrigerate until assembly is needed. Toss spinach, basil, salt in 2 tablespoons of olive oil, cover and refrigerate until needed. Place corn and onion in dehydrator at 105 degrees to soften and dry for 30 minutes, cover and refrigerate until needed.

Layering lasagna:
Line terrine mold with plastic wrap. Lay down a layer of zucchini noodles, covering the bottom and sides of terrine, with a 2-inch overhang on all sides. Place a double layer of mushrooms, followed by half of the cheese, a layer of spinach (3 leaves deep), marinara, a single layer of dehydrated corn and onion. Sprinkle of salt and cracked black pepper. Then do a double layer of zucchini, the first in a horizontal direction and the next vertical.

Follow with a double layer of mushrooms, the remaining cheese, spinach (3 leaves deep), marinara, single layer of corn and onion, sprinkle of salt and cracked black pepper, spinach (this time only a single layer of leaves). Next pull up on plastic wrap to tighten sides, then fold over outside pieces of zucchini. Patch with more zucchini as needed to cover middle fully with a layer of zucchini. Refrigerate for one hour. Remove from terrine mold and slice gently. Place sliced lasagna in reach-in cooler. Note that terrine is best when made no more than 3 hours prior to serving.

To plate the lasagna, spoon a small pool of marinara sauce into the center of the plate and place a slice of the lasagna terrine on top. Then arrange the cherry tomato/corn salad and some fresh greens around the lasagna’s edge and drizzle with a touch more olive oil. Remove from the refrigerator 20 minutes before serving to bring to room temperature. Serves 8.

Marinara Sauce
2 cups sun-dried tomatoes (equal to 120g) — soak 1–4 hours in filtered water, then rinse and drain
4 medium Roma tomatoes, seeded
8 basil leaves (equal to 1/2 cup)
4 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon salt
12 cherry tomatoes (or 3 more Roma tomatoes)
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon onion paste
2 tablespoons oregano — fresh
1 1/2 teaspoons thyme
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
3 turns fresh pepper

Drain the sun-dried tomatoes, then place in blender with all the remaining ingredients except the fresh herbs. Blend until smooth, then pulse in fresh herbs. Cover and refrigerate until assembly of lasagna. Upon use, sun-dried tomatoes are soaked 1–4 hours in filtered water in refrigerator. Tomatoes are then drained, rinsed and processed immediately. After being processed, marinara is served immediately or stored refrigerated in covered plastic container for no more than 3 days.

Cherry Tomato and Corn Salad
3/4 cup fresh corn (cut from the cob, ideally)
1/2 cup halved cherry tomatoes
6 fresh basil leaves
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (the best quality you can find)
1 teaspoon lemon juice
Salt and pepper to taste

Method: Mix vegetables together and toss with olive oil/lemon juice combination. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Herb Cheese
1 cup cashew cheese
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon water
1 teaspoon onion paste
1/2 teaspoon garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon nutritional yeast
1/4 teaspoon salt, or to taste
1 teaspoon chopped fresh basil
1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme

Stir together all ingredients, except basil and thyme. Add basil and thyme after other ingredients have been well combined.

Cashew Cheese
3 cups cashews, soaked in filtered water 10–12 hours (yields 4 1/2 cups soaked)
1/3 cup Rejuvelac
1/2 teaspoon celtic salt

Homogenize previously soaked cashews. Hand mix in ground celtic sea salt and Rejuvelac. Place in bowl covered with milk bag or cheese cloth and place in warm spot (on top of dehydrator) for 8 hours. Form into cheese round and refrigerate for at least 24 more hours to allow to firm up. After cheese has firmed up, either serve immediately or store in covered plastic containers, labeled and dated, for no more than 3 days.

Yields cheese for one terrine.