Book Review: Healthy Cooking on the Run

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Healthy Cooking on the Run

Author: Elaine Groen

Author's web site at wellness.com is too cookie-cluttered and slow-loading to rate a link here, but you can visit her online and real life if you're near Concord, California.

Date: 1992

Publisher: Bristol

ISBN: 1-55867-066-1

Length: 172 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Dorothy Davis

Quote: “Many cooks are drawn to 'cooking from scratch,' yet few of us have the time, or even the desire, to spend long hours in the kitchen.”

So here are quick, simple recipes to make at home. Some are on the granola side (Bristol Publishing was located in California) and some show, even revel in, the influence of the authors' Dutch ancestors. (Cheese is mistaken for a dessert; a chicken soup recipe contains cabbage and cinnamon rather than celery and garlic.) Some are standards that any cookbook collector knows would be good. A few are unusual enough that I'd need actually to make them to imagine how they'd work.

The usual grumbles apply: Very few if any recipes can be called “healthy” for everybody. Health-conscious cooks often follow restricted diets and, although a pleasing number of these recipes are gluten-free, dairy-free, low-carb, etc., and all of them are lower in fat than older recipes for similar dishes tended to be, many of them would make me sick; some of them would make you sick. Nature did not make us identical and interchangeable, did not intend all of us to be healthy by eating the same things. We inherit different patterns of food tolerance and it's probably healthier, even in the long run, to eat junkfood on the road and balance the nutrients in your overall diet later, rather than eat something that's wholesome and organically grown and not capable of being digested by your body.

A lot of “health-conscious” cooks out there still don't realize that, no matter how healthy whole wheat and whole raw milk are for some people, for other people they might as well be replaced by worn-out tires and wood chips. (Actually wood chips are a very healthy food if you happen to be a woodlouse...)

Then there's the paradox of so many “diet” cookbooks, aimed at people whose habitual tendency was to add more fat than their diets really needed: Because my own mother happened to be a sick, hypothyroid, fat celiac who didn't digest fat well, reducing the fat content was her first rule of cooking, such that I grew up thinking that most of the “lite, leaner, lower-fat” recipes (and products) are heavy and greasy and icky. So many cookbook writers assume that salad—a word taken from the Latin word for “salted,” meaning that adding salt was all the ancient Romans did to their veg to make salads—needs to be sludged up with some sort of oily “dressing.”

Nevertheless I imagine that cookbook collectors are likely to enjoy this book. Some of these recipes are so different. Americans do not normally put mustard in split pea soup, make vegetable soup with tuna fish, or expect to see peaches in a chicken salad. You'll want to try these things. You may conclude, as Fran Lebowitz grumpily did about some nouvelle cuisine served at fancy New York restaurants, that if nobody else is making this dish this way there's probably a good reason...and then again you might discover a favorite.

Toward the end of the book a few typos apparently slipped through the editing process: The pumpkin spice cake recipe on page 162 (beating the trend!) doesn't specify how much ginger to use, and in some recipes the authors apparently substituted “healthy”-trendier ingredients in their favorites and changed either the list of ingredients or the explanation of the method but not both. Margarine or applesauce? Meat or shrimp? Try it either way and see which you prefer, though don't be surprised if kids prefer cookies made with only ½ cup of applesauce to cookies made with only ½ cup of margarine.

Actually baking in a microwave “oven” can be tricky. This cookbook promises three recipes for muffins that bake equally well in a microwave or in a real oven. I'd have to try that to believe it, and I couldn't even eat the muffins (they're all wheat-based)...botheration! Since these are generous recipes, however, it'll be easy for gluten-tolerant readers to try it: Bake six muffins in your microwave muffin plate, six in your traditional metal muffin tin, and please report your results.

To buy Healthy Cooking on the Run at this web site, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the bottom of the screen. You can get copies cheaper from Amazon, but if you add five more books of this size to the package you'll probably save a good bit on the shipping cost. You'll also be encouraging a living writer: from your U.S. postal money order for $10 or Paypal payment of $11, this web site will send $1 to Groen or a charity of her choice.