I Walk In This World

Good Thursday mornin to ya!

Today I’m happy to post a review of the about-to-be-published Clean Food cookbook!  The publishing company kindly sent me an advance copy for my review and I’ve been marking pages with post-it notes for the last 2 weeks.

  

The cookbook is described as “A Seasonal Guide to Eating Close to the Source” and it includes more than 200 recipes.

The reason I chose to accept this cookbook and review it is that it fits in nicely with my mission to educate people about Ethical Eating. 

I’m not being compensated for my review, other than the free copy of the book.  My words and thoughts are mine and mine alone.

The cookbook opens with the author’s (Terry Walters) thoughts on the topic of food in the U.S., especially in regards to food sourcing and being connected to the foods we eat.  As you know, this is a goal I push in my Ethical Eating stance!

Terry spends several pages discussing what Clean Food means to her and how she envisions its link with good health and a sound mind.  And she pushes the envelope by encouraging us, the readers, to take charge of our nutrition and be our own “in-house nutritionist.”  And boy does she give us a lot of tools to do so!

She shies away from the notion of diet labels, a notion I support whole-heartedly.  I’ve always advocated the term “eating lifestyle” to represent each of our paths on the nutrition highway.

There are 9 great tips for simple in-house ways to improve health and well-being, including the notion to chew our food more, listening to and honoring our bodies, and to not buy food if we don’t want to eat it!  While many of us know these things already, it’s good to read it in print.  It’s like written permission to be better eaters.

My favorite part of the cookbook goes from page 11 to page 35, in which Terry offers:

• simple advice for basic kitchen tools (that are essential for the following 200 recipes),
• basic cooking methods for grains
• a dictionary of vegetables, legumes, soy, nuts/seeds, oils, and fruit
• a section on organic vs conventional foods
• a guide to reading and actually understanding recipe instructions; and finally
• (my favorite part) a section of Commonly Used Ingredients, and a What’s That section for a clean food eating lifestyle

The Commonly Used Ingredients section is a compendium of clean foods, with explanations of what they are, where you can find them in the store or market.  The What’s That section highlights a wide variety of clean foods, from aduki beans and agar to wakame and wasabi.  Terry does a good job not complicating the descriptions, such that we’d be too intimidated to try them in recipes.

The rest of the cookbook contains the 200+ seasonal recipes, and is broken out by seasonal chapters, which is cool.  Each season’s recipes only include items that are in season and local at that time.  I embrace this approach and think it merges nicely with my Ethical Eating mission. 

The recipes are fairly simple, which I like.  Just listen to some of the names!

• Shiitake Mushrooms and Bitter Greens in Filo (winter)
• Seitan Walnut Stuffed Collard Greens (fall)
• White Bean Salad with Roasted Tomatoes and Arugula (summer)
• Mixed Berry Couscous Cake (spring)

For you foodies and especially for you vegans, this will be your favorite part of the book!

The one downfall I see, is that readers may need to stock their pantries with new items in order to complete the recipes as-is.  This is often intimidating and costly for cooks.  Things like dried red clover flowers, arrowroot, and flax seed oil are not easily found and might be a turn off to busy people looking for a new cookbook.  People most enjoy cooking with the items they have.  Having to buy new and unusual items might sway people away.  That being said, the majority of each recipe is based on normal foods that most of us healthy food bloggers have no trouble rustling up.

Overall, I give this cookbook an A. 

If you want my quote…

“Clean Food is relevant and educational without being elitist or intimidating.  It promotes an eating lifestyle that meshes the beauty of seasonal local foods with recipes that will tempt your palate through the seasons from the pale warmth of early spring through to cold starry nights of deep winter.”

Oh, and as a treehugger…I dig this!

© 2009, Erin. All rights reserved.

Tags: Book Review, ethical eating

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 10:17 AM and is filed under Reviews, ethical eating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.