Book Review: The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook

Title: The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook

Author: Jillian Michaels

Author’s web page: www.jillianmichaels.com

Date: 2010

Publisher: Crown / Random House

ISBN: 978-0-307-71822-8

Length: 276 pages

Illustrations: one-color drawings, not credited; black-and-white photo page at the back

Quote: “While [medication] may be an effective short-term aid to bring things under control, it fails to address the need to reverse and eliminate the most frequent under­lying cause of chronically high insulin: poor diet.”

First, for the guys: More photos of the body underneath that too-big T-shirt in the back of the book, along with information about how to buy full-color videos showing the body in action.

Now let’s dispel any illusions: The thing to remember about all those cookbooks and exercise programs featuring sleek, beautiful young people is that, if you’re not between the ages of 18 and 25, you’re not going to look like that. If you want your mature body to look like Jane Fonda’s or Jack LaLanne’s, or even like your own body before you settled down in a desk job, however, this new book just might help you.

Maybe. The trouble with all discussions of "healthy food" today is that people keep on repeating what they learned about the nutrients found in food, and ignore the fact that those nutrients are altogether irrelevant if the food contains glyphosate, since the body will reject the food violently in any case. If it looks like it just came from Old MacDonald's farm, bursting with natural wholesome goodness, and it's found in a supermarket and it doesn't have a hard shell you throw away, it is probably a glyphosate bomb and you'd probably be healthier not even walking through the "produce" section and breathing the fumes off it. Unless you know for sure that they were not exposed to "pesticide" vapor drift, don't even touch blueberries, raspberries, green leafy vegetables, apples, carrots, grapes, tomatoes, or any of your old childhood favorites. Also avoid anything that is sold or used in a hard, dry, seedlike condition--nuts, wheat or other grains, seeds, flour--unless you know for sure. Rice and wild rice are usually safe, but not guaranteed. The allium family (onions, garlic, etc.) are usually safe.

To test foods like hard-shelled tree nuts sold in their shells, oranges, melons, beans, coconuts, etc., eat one teaspoonful and wait for the early symptoms of your typical glyphosate and/or other "pesticide" reactions. If they appear, take a charcoal capsule and throw away the rest of the food. 

The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook is loaded with fun facts about recent discoveries about the effects different foods typically have on our metabolism, plus trendy recipes that...well...some of them are on the granola side, but most of them will disappear fast if you take them to a potluck dinner. A short summary of what Michaels learned about foods that affect metabolism appears on pages 3-41, with key facts repeated as sidebars next to recipes that use the recommended foods. Most of them are not on the safe list. Briefly, metabolism-boosting foods include fish, Brazil nuts, whole grains, pumpkin seed, sesame seed, almonds, spinach and other greens, whole grains, olive oil, hazelnuts, barley, beans, oats, brown rice, onions, apples, pomegranates, cooked broccoli, carrots, molasses, apples, raspberries, blueberries, grapes, rosemary, cooked tomatoes,  sweet potatoes, oranges, turkey, walnuts, and yogurt. Meats can have mixed effects on metabolism and are used sparingly in this cookbook. 

People on restricted diets can use this book if and when we get the bans we need; plenty of recipes are “free” from whatever natural food you’re trying to avoid, and when farmers stop spraying poison on food you may find that you can enjoy that natural food again anyway. If you’re serving these dishes to people outside the family, it’s a good idea to list the ingredients, since many of them do contain stealth allergy triggers like coconut oil and orange juice in unexpected places. There’s a good-sized section of vegan entrees. Several sauces are thickened with fruit or vegetable purees rather than simple starches. A majority of recipes are lactose-free, gluten-free, and/or casein-free, or can be made whichever of those things you require. When Michaels does use a dairy product, it’s usually yogurt, usually offered as a topping.

Vintage granola-period recipes substituted honey for sugar. In the 1980s efforts were made to debunk the myth that honey had any special nutritional benefits over sugar; both are basically sucrose, only honey has more calories, is much messier, and usually costs more. “Loaded with vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and antioxidants”? Not exactly; it contains traces of nutrients—enough to make a difference to an insect, but probably not to a human. Bees store honey made from different kinds of flowers separately and even humans can see and taste differences. Unfortunately, today nearly all honey is loaded with glyphosate and should not even be handled. 

The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook suggests agave syrup as an alternative to honey or maple syrup. Agave syrup is fairly new even to the health food market; I personally don’t live where it’s made, so I’ve never tasted it. 

More can be said for real maple syrup. It does not have to be made in Vermont. Sugar maples will grow in most of the United States (and in Canada); you just tap them at a different time of year. Maple trees that are native to areas other than Vermont  also produce syrup. “Invasive” Norway maples are excellent sources of syrup—we used to construct a little “syrup camp” and boil down sap from the Norway maple in the yard, and other maples in the woodlot, right in the shade of the tree, and it would become sweet and maple-y enough that a spoonful turned pancakes into dessert before it even became syrupy. As Noel PERRIN observed, federal standards for grading maple syrup were created at a time when the blandest, sweetest, most sugar-like syrup was considered the finest. If you’re after the more distinctive flavor and trace nutrients that help preserve male reproductive health—oh, what the heck, let’s stuff in a few keywords, real maple syrup may help prevent prostate enlargement and thus extend men’s sex lives and fertility—local maple syrup may actually be better than Vermont’s Finest. So if you like and can afford to pour maple syrup over your organic corn or buckwheat pancakes, enjoy it. (Women can safely enjoy real maple syrup too—if living with men under the influence of Jillian Michaels we may need it.) If you’re cooking or baking, however, read on.

If you’re trying to reduce the amount of sugar children eat, however, forget about the “honey is better because you use less of it in cooking” argument. What grainy, bready desserts partly sweetened with honey do for children is to activate sugar cravings without satisfying them. Mothers who cook with honey raise sugar junkies who beg, borrow, smuggle, and steal candy and sugar-saturated junkfood. I was one of the lucky little sugar junkies who found that, as an adult, exercising my legal right to eat sugary junk in front of Mother brought my sugar craving under control. I’ve known other sugar junkies who managed to ingest enough of Mom’s “healthy treats” and smuggle enough sugar to be hypoglycemic, diabetic, and/or depressed before age twenty-five.

What I’d recommend for kids is letting them fill up on plenty of raw organic vegetables before exposing them to sugar—natural or unnatural. Kids hate vegetables the way adults in our culture are typically taught to serve them—cooked limp and/or smothered in oil and vinegar. Kids love vegetables fresh from the garden and will happily snack on raw carrots, asparagus, peas, celery, cucumbers, tomatoes, spinach, and almost anything else in the organic garden. The natural sugars in raw veg satisfy children’s sugar cravings, provide plenty of fibre, and are easier for children to digest than some adults would have believed. I would let a child snack on anything I tolerated in the garden, and insist on cooking a vegetable only if the child became flatulent or complained of tummy-aches after eating it raw. If this plan didn’t keep the child from gobbling up candy and commercial desserts when those were available, I’d calm myself with the knowledge that the child was well exercised and supplied with fibre anyway.

Personally, I think vinegar works best as a cleaning product because it motivates me to keep rinsing and scrubbing away all traces of that disgusting odor, so I think there’s far too much vinegar in these recipes, but the idea of serving fruit with lemon juice instead of sugar or honey, as a salad dressing, is definitely an improvement over serving mayonnaise with added sugar.

I’d heard about the mixed benefits of raw broccoli for people with thyroid problems, and about the mixed benefits of eating phytoestrogen-rich soy products, but that millet, peaches, strawberries, pine nuts, bamboo, and peanuts “have been shown to create thyroid problems” was news to me. How does that work? Well, one thing those foods have in common is that in 2010 all of them were likely to have been "ripened" with glyphosate, which does seem to cause thyroid problems, up to and including thyroid cancer. If you have a serious thyroid or ovarian disorder, you’ll want to read the recent findings Michaels reports in this book, but bear in mind that the research was done by a process of wilfully ignoring the elephant in the room. Foods that have not caused diseases for thousands of years have started to cause diseases only when and as they've been sprayed with chemicals that have been intentionally not tested, despise evidence that their use is correlated with those diseases.

Book Review: 2024 Plant Based Diet Cookbook for Beginners

Title: 2024 Plant Based Diet Cookbook for Beginners

Author: Sarah Roslin

Date: 2024

Quote: "In your plant-based culinary journey, accuracy is essential."

And that's why this is not an ideal cookbook for beginners. It has pretty computer-generated pictures in the PDF version only, not in the printed version. Recipes are not well edited and in many cases will not yield results that resemble the computer-generated pictures. 

You don't want to do a "plant-based diet" unless you have access to 100% unsprayed plants...and that means free from drifting residues of poison sprays. That's why reading and reviewing this e-book has not been a high priority for me. I didn't want let the file sit until it was totally out of date (calling for products, like specific size packages of tofu, that may have gone off the market) but it's still not ready for the general public to use. 

Because you can't really go wrong with clean fruit and vegetables, as long as you have good-quality ingredients, what these recipes produce will be edible and may even taste good, but it may be very strange. Sometimes you can see how the computer-generated picture presupposes chunks of a vegetable where the recipe tells you to shred it. Sometimes you can't see how the picture shows a different size dish than the recipe will make. One recipe makes about a cup of a grain-legume mix, a good snack for the single cook, but the picture shows about a quart-sized pan full. 

Additionally, several recipes' lists of ingredients don't match the instructions given. Ingredients are not listed in the order they need to be used, so you'll be reading and rereading, going "Lime juice? It says nothing about lime juice...she must have meant the lemon juice in the ingredients list." 

Amounts of ingredients seem to have been copied verbatim from some other source. European cooks typically use postal-size scales and weigh out ingredients American cooks typically measure by volume. There are arguments in favor of either method. You get more precise equivalents of the original cook's recipe by weighing, but atmospheric conditions have a lot to do with the success of some recipes and you may have to spend less time tweaking proportions if you measure by volume. The only trouble is that beginner cooks in the US usually don't have scales. Knowing that a pound equals approximately 455 grams is only a little bit of help in measuring flour out of a 5-pound sack. 

For experienced cooks who have access to wide varieties of clean fruits and vegetables, however, here are some classic and some innovative combinations of produce from gardens around the world that are likely to delight the palate...because very few combinations of fruits and vegetables, in reasonable amounts, ever fail to taste good. 

"Plant-based" is explained at length in comparison with other trendy names for diet plans in the text. It means cooks use plant products when they can--in some recipes corn oil margarine or soybean sausages, assuming clean corn or soybeans, works just fine--but may use milk or egg products when they feel that they must. No recipe in this book calls for meat but some do call for butter, cheese, or honey. 

Most, not all, of these recipes are gluten-free. Most, not all, are sugar-free. All can be made completely nondairy, though some apparently disappointed the original cook when they were. The wide variety of plant products used means it's easy to avoid any specific allergy triggers you may still have even when plant products aren't poisoned with chemicals. (Most people, however, can tolerate clean fruits and vegetables. Most food allergies are sensitivities to chemicals rather than actual food.) 

Is it worth keeping a cookbook like this in the house? Meh. If you're going to find it terribly annoying or frustrating, don't buy a plant-based cookbook yet, but I personally like to keep them around as reminders of hope.

Bad Poetry: Desserts

This post combines the prompt at Napowrimo.net ("something magical and strange that happens at night, and could be a dream, but feels lifelike") and the one at Poets & Storytellers United ("something about desserts, or just desserts"). The dream is one I really had. The rest of the story also happened, but later.

In a dream I held out a plate to take

A slice of the very most fanciful cake

Ever. Little beads of sugar ran round and round,

Colored or gilt. The top was a mound

Of icing and candies. "Vanilla?" I said,

Taking a bite. "Why--it's just cold cornbread!"

I went to the kitchen, and there I made

A salad of fresh fruit in circles arrayed:

Green grapes and tangerine, strawberry slices,

June apple, banana, and raspberries; spices

Not needed, just a few squeezes of lemon

And sprinkle of sugar to please all the women

Expected for luncheon. And please them it did.

It pleased my palate, too. Only one dear old kid

Wanted no fruit but cookies just out of a box.

This was good; it left just enough. Fruit salad rocks.

None of it was left over. I thought I could eat

The whole thing by myself, but I'm glad, now, they beat

Me to that salad's finish. Some food treats are best

Enjoyed when there's just enough for all the rest

And those six perfect bites give delight that's unique,

Not compared with the leftovers eaten all week.

That way memories of the best dessert you ever made

Stay piquant and perfect, and never do fade.

Photo from Google, where it's credited to Natasha's Kitchen. Google has dozens of photos of fruit salads that aren't mine...enough to inspire any cook, whatever may be in the kitchen. Any good fresh unsprayed fruits, alone or together, are likely to become a great, memorable summer dessert.

One of the Recipes for Grandma Bonnie's Veggie Burgers

During Grandma Bonnie Peters' lifetime, the recipe for her Veggie Burgers was an official trade secret. I don't know whether she wrote it down or memorized it. I know that the Veggie Burgers that were sold in stores were made in industrial quantities and shipped out frozen. So this is not the recipe for the popular sage-flavored version some readers may remember eating. The proportions for a family meal's worth of any recipe are different from the proportions for the industrial version. 

Actually, because it was fresh baked, this version tasted better. Actually, finding the recipe brought back long-buried memories of the fun we used to have, cooking with vegetables, before 2009 when most commercially grown vegetables started to have glyphosate sprayed right on the part people ate. Will we ever be able to trust and enjoy vegetables in that way again? 

These Veggie Burgers were developed specifically for use with a low-protein diet. For me, the key to enjoying them is to recognize that they're "burgers" in name only, or resemble hamburgers only in their size and the ways you could heat up pre-frozen ones. They are a vegetable loaf designed for patients eating a low-protein, low-fat diet. The onion and potato give them a savory flavor people on such diets tend to miss, but in protein and calories they're closer to the bun than to the hamburger. If a low-fat, low-protein diet has not been recommended for you, as it was for the patients who inspired GBP to market Veggie Burgers, you can eat these "burgers" with a bean soup or even a meat stew.

Anyway, this was something close to the recipe for Grandma Bonnie's Allergy-Ease Veggie Burgers, in a size you can easily make at home. Some recipes for veggie burgers can be quite elaborate. GBP had worked out a few recipes that were as easy for her to throw together as a vegetable stir-fry or a pan of cornbread.

Ingredients for Family-Size Batch of Sage Veggie Burgers

1 can green beans (a pint-sized can)

2 cups your own vegetable stock

1/2 cup sunflower seed kernels

2 tablespoons oil

2 teaspoons molasses

1/4 cup of a safe soy sauce or Bragg's Liquid Aminos

 

1/4 cup dried onion flakes

1 tablespoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon dried parsley flakes

1 teaspoon dried basil

1 teaspoon paprika

2 teaspoons sage

1 cup rice flour

1-2 cups Betty Crocker Potato Buds (potato flakes) as necessary to make a dough

Salt

Method for Family-Size Batch of Sage Veggie Burgers

Heat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

1. Grind the sunflower seed kernels and finely chop the green beans. This is most easily done in the blender or food processor. Drain the beans, saving their liquid to add to your vegetable stock pot or jar, and put them in the blender container.

2. Measure in two cups of vegetable stock. GBP used whatever vegetable cooking and canning liquids she had. Supermarkets sell vegetable stock, but I don't think GBP ever used it. It tends to contain added salt and monosodium glutamate and may contain glyphosate residues. Carrots and celery are key ingredients of traditional vegetable stock; they also soak up glyphosate like sponges. 

3. Blend these ingredients almost completely smooth. Then combine with the others in the blender or in a mixing bowl. Use enough potato flakes to make a wet but cohesive dough. Taste, and add up to a teaspoon of salt as needed. GBP said salt probably wouldn't be needed if you used soy sauce.

4. Shape patties. You will have six burger-sized patties, which will fit nicely on a baking sheet you can oil or line with your Silpat baking sheet liner. 

5. Bake 20 minutes, then turn the pan and check for browning and doneness. They will need to bake 5 or 10 minutes more.

6. Although people who eat wheat could eat these burgers in buns, the burgers are breadlike and make a very bready sandwich. GBP served them with a hot soup, vegetable, or bread and a cold lettuce-tomato-cucumber salad. 

Is It Safe to Make These Veggie Burgers Yet?

The commercial conglomerates refuse to tell you whether commercially sold vegetables, even the ones misleadingly labelled "organic," have been sprayed with glyphosate or something else that may cause symptoms. You have to be vigilant. Know your reactions and, if you have a reaction to vegetables, don't use that kind again. 

However, people have been complaining about and not using glyphosate-sprayed veg for several years now, and most companies have taken heed. My experience has been that green beans are usually fit to eat these days. Potatoes are riskier, but often safe. Rice and spices are usually safe to eat. If you have good sources of unsprayed vegetables, it's safe to enjoy these Veggie Burgers. Soy sauce is the ingredient in this recipe that is most likely to be contaminated. If you can't find glyphosate-free soy sauce, substitute a a little more vegetable broth and use the full teaspoon of salt.

And if GBP had not clung to the idea that "vegetables are so good for us, we should keep on eating them even if they're poisoned," she might have lived longer. So be careful about using vegetables. I love vegetables and recommend eating them when you can, but stop using them if you find that they contain glyphosate or other poisons.

Book Review: Southern Living Vegetable Cookbook

I'm reading new books for you as fast as I can...I can read only so many pages on a screen at a time, and when new books turn out to be 800 pages long, that does slow down the queue. Here's an old book some people may want.

Title: Southern Living Vegetables Cookbook

Author: Lena Sturges

Date: 1975

Publisher: Oxmoor House

ISBN: none

Length: 80 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Ralph Mark

Quote: “If the vegetable begins to lose color, it is beginning to overcook.”

Southern Living was a spin-off from Progressive Farmer. These recipes show where progress was being made. When did Grandma ever worry about vegetables being overcooked? Did she ever eat them any other way? Crispness was undesirable in a world where most adults had bad teeth.

Still, it was only 1975, and several recipes call for four tablespoons of butter where one would do, or half a cup of oil and half a cup of vinegar where the juice and rind of one lemon would add as much oiliness and sourness as the salad could need.

What vegetarians and dieters will love about the Southern Living Vegetables Cookbook is that vegetables are promoted from side dishes to entrées. If you’re not a total vegan, but are trying to consume more vegetables and less meat, this is a cookbook for you. Vegetable omelets, or vegetables cooked with milk, contain enough animal fat and protein to make cruelty-free meals. Several recipes leave room for meat as flavoring or garnish for a dish that features vegetables.

What children, and adults with childlike taste such as the writer of this review, won’t love about this cookbook is that many recipes are designed to sneak second-rate veggies to the table behind layers of cream sauce, crumb topping, cheese, or even pie crust. To make an asparagus casserole, after cooking asparagus in the usual way you use the water to make a cream sauce, spread the asparagus in a greased dish, cover with cornflake crumbs, then chopped boiled egg, then cream sauce, more crumbs, more sauce, and shredded cheese, and bake for half an hour. Right. What I want to know is, who would let asparagus get into a shabby enough condition to need such a deep burial? Fresh asparagus is something you have to stop children from eating right out in the garden. I prefer to wash off the topsoil, myself, but I’ve never seen any reason to cook asparagus. It looks so much more, er, adult, while it’s raw, with a droplet of water glistening on the tip...

Grandma didn’t use recipes like these because she liked to nag children to eat vegetables. She invented these recipes during the long dark winters when the family ate their way through crocks of salted-and-vinegared vegetables and jars of overcooked vegetables they’d put up during the summer, and since they had no other vegetables and were on the verge of scurvy, they found it good. But Southern living is about having a garden and using vegetables while they’re so fresh that even the shelled peas, stringbeans, and potatoes taste good raw. Crisp, juicy, just slightly sweet, Southern vegetables are supposed to be treats for children.

The Southern Living Vegetables Cookbook was not written with restricted diets in mind, but does contain several meat-free, grain-free, dairy-free, and sugar-free recipes. Several recipes use all natural ingredients and can be made entirely from garden produce. And some don’t even bury the healthy veg in saturated fats and simple carbs.

Book Review: Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Cookbook

Title: Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Cookbook

Author: Amy Vanderbilt

Date: 1961

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 765 pages plus 42-page index

Illustrations: drawings by “Andrew Warhol”

Quote: “Many people have said, since the publication of Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette in 1952, that it should be followed by a complete cookbook. For, of course, I can cook.”

Modest wasn’t she? Dutch-American, super-rich, European-educated, and the sort of stickler for usage who insisted that it was Miss Vanderbilt although she was also Mrs. Knopf, Amy Vanderbilt was probably more fun to know than her reputation would suggest.

It would be hard to collect this many recipes and not include something that will appeal to everyone. Vanderbilt wasn’t aware of special diets but she was brought up with that obsession with “balanced meals” that, when followed, guaranteed everyone that almost every meal would include something they could eat. None of the menu plans is vegan but each includes enough vegetarian dishes to leave a vegan guest feeling well fed.

Vanderbilt and her friends had also lived through The War, when shortages created demands for sugar-free, egg-free, wheat-free, meat-free, and similar kinds of recipes. Some people hated the ersatz or “war” recipes. “War Cakes,” which tended to be heavy, egg-free, and sweetened mainly by preserved fruits, gave some Americans a guilt-soothing sense that at least they were suffering along with bombed-out London and the boys in the trenches. Yet War Cakes could be palatable, if they were done right, and became some families’ favorites. My mother taught her children to recognize and bake War Cakes; Vanderbilt’s collection of fancy baked deserts includes a few. The idea of rationing eggs so farmers could kill one another disgusts me, but it did generate recipes suitable for people who are allergic to eggs.

But of course in 1961 the war was over and the Waste Age’s economic bubble was near its fragile height. The appeal of cookbooks like this one was that not only the super-rich, but almost everyone who had a kitchen, could revel in waffles mixed in a blender and baked in an electric waffle iron, in things that had to be refrigerated or frozen to reach the right consistency, in all kinds of dishes that called for special pudding molds and rice cookers and seafood steamers. It was not considered a disgrace for young women who’d quit work to stay home with young children to figure out that rice can be cooked in an ordinary saucepan and cake batter can be whipped up in one bowl with one spoon, but if she didn’t imagine that the mixers and blenders and whisks would make cooking better, and more fun, she might be coming down with beatnik tendencies. And it seemed so, oh, American that Vanderbilt enjoyed canned soup and packaged baking mixes as well as long-simmered stocks and hand-rolled pastries.

So her cookbook is a period piece. Exhaustive though it was, it does not include recipes for several things we cook now. Vanderbilt mentioned arugula at the very end, as “rugola,” in a short list of garden herbs that (surprise!) were edible. She’d heard of pizza, and observed that my generation (then “the teenagers”) liked it, but she made it on a base of baking-powder biscuit dough. Yes. On the other hand, you might agree that her black walnut bread, gingerbread men, turtle candies, eclairs, and ribbon sandwiches deserve to survive.

The copy I physically owned sold in its third hour on display, but you can still buy copies online for $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment. This is a thick book; only one more of the same size would fit into one package, or two standard-size books would.

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. 

Book Review: Bodyworks Healthy Recipes

Title: Bodyworks Healthy Recipes

Author: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women's Health

Date: not shown

Publisher: not shown

ISBN: none

Length: 130 pages

Illustrations: color photos of food

Quote: “Welcome to Bodyworks Healthy Recipes, where you'll find simple, low-cost recipes to make delicious breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, and even desserts.”

Funny thing...I went into the little store across the street where I usually buy lunch in town. Usually I buy nuts or sunflower seeds. So this time there was a big sale on little cans of overpriced "Heart Healthy Mix" nuts. I usually only look at peanuts, cashews, and sunflower seeds because they're the only ones that are good bargains at this store. (There used to be another store where I only bought almonds.) But it occurred to me that I'd never bothered even finding out which nuts were in the overpriced "Heart Healthy Mix," because I'm not inclined to trust anyone who's not my doctor to tell me what's healthy for my heart. And after looking at the overpriced cans, I proceeded to the checkout counter with a packet of peanuts. I do not believe they're less healthy for my heart than any of those mixes of pricier, but equally oily, nuts are.

So...Bodyworks Healthy Recipes is one of those little government “booklets” that used to be mailed out free upon request if you sent the appropriate office the stamp, but it's...grown. It's metastasized. At the taxpayers' expense, instead of just compiling a few popular recipes, this government office has (1) spent hours surfing the Internet for popular recipes, (2) printed them on slick expensive paper with only one recipe to a page and lots of white space, and (3) bulked up the book with lots of full-page, full-color pictures.

Recipes have been ganked from U.S. sources, but some of them are written with distinctly foreign accents—a “Grape Pasta Saute” (well,recipe titles are often meant to sound exotic) calls for “gnocchi or large shelled pasta,” a recipe for “Homestyle Biscuits” calls for 2 cups of flour and ¼ teaspoon of salt and 2 tablespoons of sugar...in the U.K. “biscuits” may be sweet, but in the U.S. they're not.

And I'd accept “low-fat,” or “high-fiber,” or “plant-based” as ways to describe these recipes—and for most people that is relatively healthy—but what's “healthy” for anyone to eat is a very subjective thing. The first actual recipe in this book, on page 12, begins with “wheat and barley cereal.” If you inherited the minority gene for wheat gluten intolerance, that's so far from healthy as to qualify as “poison,” and so is the second recipe (for French Toast). These are followed by two recipes for fruit-and-dairy confections. If you inherited the majority gene for gradually declining lactose tolerance, the one that calls for vanilla yogurt might or might not be acceptable, but the one that calls for actual milk—pretentiously described, not as “skim milk,” but as “fat free milk”--would be certain to ruin your day. Then come three more wheat-based recipes, an egg-and-cheese recipe (egg allergies can be as melodramatic as peanut allergies), those biscuits...biscuits are junkfood even when they're made U.S.-style without a grain of added sugar. (American biscuits do have a sweet undertone, always traditionally produced by the interaction of baking soda and buttermilk, but they're supposed to be a salty contrast to the fruit preserves many people like to spread on them.) Need I go on? Home-cooking to meet the family's dietary requirements is, almost by definition, healthier than eating whatever overpriced, overprocessed commercial garbage the big chain stores try to sell us, but for many readers many of these recipes are, as written, very unhealthy.

Most people will find some recipes for things they can eat in this cookbook. Even those of us on special diets will find recipes we can at least tweak. Recipes tend to get tweaked in any case; you make a few strawberry shortcakes and then all the fresh strawberries are gone, so you try a blackberry shortcake. But if you have to tweak recipes to get results that won't actually put you in the hospital, are we talking about “healthy” recipes?!

From privately produced, corporate-sponsored books we might reasonably expect attempts to market products with overgeneralized, inaccurate, feel-good phrases like “healthy recipes.” From the federal government we should, I think, be able reasonably to expect objectivity. “Reduced-fat recipes for popular North American foods” does describe this book, but it should have been left between patients and their doctors to decide which of these recipes are “healthy”...and which are poisonous.

I am more likely to notice the appealing qualities of recipes in books when I've not been annoyed by claims that something that I know would damage my body is “healthy.” Most of the recipes in this book are anything but healthy for celiacs, as written, but there are some we can use. There is, on page 42, a relatively simple, naturally gluten-free gazpacho where the cook chops only the tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, onions, lemon, and garlic, and relies on V-8 for the murky mix of veggy undertones that make gazpacho great. The corn tortilla soup on page 46 is naturally gluten-free and healthy for celiacs if we can trust our sources of corn and chicken, which these days many of us can't. A grease-glazed barbecue chicken, as photographed, looks like saturated fat on the prowl, looking for arteries to clog, but it wouldn't immediately make celiacs sick. A “Crispy Oven-Fried Chicken,” “Chicken Oriental,” “Jamaican Jerk Chicken,” “Spanish Style Ricewith Chicken,” and “Baked Pork Chops” sound similar. An “Asian Salad” made with chicken, cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, cilantro, cucumber, scallions, and a tangerine,sounds more just plain weird than Asian to me but I could pick at it if someone made it for me and remembered to hold the dressing (I'm a salad nudist). There's a beef and rice casserole, and a beef gumbo with rice, that sound quite a lot like things I've done while experimenting, usually with ground turkey rather than beef. I'm not sure what's Mexican about the “steak and fruit skewers,” not having known or heard of any Mexicans who were into skewering steak, but anyone who likes the combination of super-sweet dried fruit and savory meat would like it. Stir-fried beef served on potatoes is another North American fusion fad thing that might actually taste good, depending on how well your taste matches your potatoes...Note, though, that I'm noticing only this handful of recipes out of forty pages of the book.

One thing we can learn from this book is that private authors and publishers produce better cookbooks than government offices. I wouldn't rate Bodyworks Healthy Recipes either especially high or especially low if it had been a normal collection of recipes some person or persons used, and had put together, investing their own money, for sale. As a use for my tax dollars, thrown out there to compete with so many other cookbooks, of which so many are better...I have to give it a D minus. The federal government does not need to be in the cookbook business.

On Amazon it's actually going "collectible." Well...you can order it here for $10 per book plus $5 per package (4 books of this size will fit into a package) plus $1 per online payment, but first you should try ordering it from the U.S. Government Printing Office for the cost of postage.

Happy Post: I.G.A. Roasted & Salted Pumpkin Seeds

This web site has not featured a happy product review, books apart, for a long time. Well, here is one.

Yesterday I went to the Independent Grocers Association store, all the way down the state line, because that was the closest store running a good sale on small bottles of Coca-Cola products. I wanted to sell cold drinks in the Friday Market this morning.

As local lurkers may have noticed, the owner of the cooler didn't show up again. She's not old, but has been ill. Pray for her. So once again what I had for sale were warm drinks. Last week I found a sale on Pepsi products, stayed with them until they actually started to feel warm, and took them home and drank them before they could deteriorate from the heat. Today I found a sale on Coke products, and people snapped them up before the chilly fog even lifted.

Anyway, while in the I.G.A. store, I dillydallied about waiting for a relative to load up a cart, in hopes of getting a lift home--which I did--and I found a whole rack of off-brand snacks, including ridiculously overpriced nuts, standard-priced candies, and a really good price on roasted and salted pepitas.

I've not seen roasted and salted pepitas in a U.S. supermarket before. They've not really achieved mainstream snack status in the Eastern States. I've seen Badia brand raw, green, unsalted pepitas--which are scrumptious, having a flavor of their own that's different from nuts or sunflower seeds, and good all by itself without any salt or other additives--and David brand pumpkin seeds in the big white outer shells, which I've never risked trying. I don't like peanuts "salted in the shells" and don't imagine I'd care for pumpkin seeds prepared that way either.

Recently, GBP having finally run out of pumpkinseed meal for my cats, I'd shared a pack of pepitas with them. They did figure out how to chew them properly, but the litter box showed that they swallowed an awful lot of those expensive, tasty snacks whole. I don't own a blender or grinder, or want one, and was not exactly looking forward to grinding my own pumpkinseed meal for the cats.

Much as the cats have learned to like pumpkinseed meal on their canned cat treats. Much as all outdoor cats need occasional pumpkinseed meal treats. Cats can benefit from the same proteins and minerals humans get from pumpkin seeds, but a lot of the internal parasites cats pick up from rodents don't tolerate pumpkin seeds.

Anyway, I bought a package of roasted and salted pepitas. Well, I'm human, with teeth designed for grinding, and I'm used to eating pepitas raw. But what I noticed right away was that being roasted in oil had softened the seeds even further. It gave them a gratifying crunch, but it made them easier to chew.

I said, "Heather! Kitty-kitty-kitty! Have I ever found a treat for you!" I ran a handful of pepitas under water to get the salt level down where a cat could stand it.

Heather agreed that they were a treat. Cats' teeth aren't designed for grinding things that are naturally thin and flat, like pepitas, but the softer, oilier shells of the roasted kind crunched just right for a cat.

I'm not going to post a picture, or even a description, of the contents of the litter box this morning. Let's just say they were gratifying.

For myself...the price is about the same, Badia being a name brand and the I.G.A. special being unadvertised, and I'd probably pick the raw pepitas next time.

Since I'll probably continue buying pepitas to share with the cats, any time I'm in (or passing by) the I.G.A. store, I'll probably pick the roasted, salted pepitas every time I have a chance.

I'll probably have to give the cats their treat first in order to get the package inside and eat any pepitas for myself, and since the cats don't enjoy taking worm medicine and do enjoy eating pumpkin seeds, that's a clear gain. (They'll still get worm medicine occasionally, but less often.)

This post was mainly about I.G.A. Can it have an Amazon book link? Well, if we count Kindle "books" as books, here's one some readers may enjoy:

Book Review: Deliciously Light

Title: Bon Appétit: Deliciously Light

Amazon is behaving oddly

Author: Bon Appetit magazine staff

Date: 2001

Publisher: Condé Nast

ISBN: none

Length: 80 pages

Illustrations: a few black-and-white drawings

Quote: “For many people, serving soup and salad together captures the essence of light, delicious dining.”

What you’ll love (or regret) about this cookbook is that it is, even more than the recipes it contains, “deliciously light.” This is not a big glossy coffee-table cookbook, nor is it a Complete Collection for Complete Beginners. It’s aimed at people with some cooking experience, quite a lot of money, and an interest in trendy, yuppie-friendly, relatively “light” recipes.

+Sandy KS recently complained that some people are down-rating all food blogs because it’s hard to tell whether people have tested the recipes they post. Well…in some cases that’s true. The number of combinations of foods that people will try to put onto the same plate is probably finite. After reading and testing a certain number of recipes for cucumber-and-yogurt dip you can say that (a) the tzatziki recipe on page 6 is likely to appeal to those who like that sort of thing, and (b) it’s a long way from being the “lightest” tzatziki recipe in any extensive collection since it does add sour cream to the yogurt, and (c) if you’re not really wild about the taste of yogurt and/or sour cream, plain old cucumber slices with a sprinkle of salt and/or lemon would be a great deal lighter than a cucumber-flavored cream dip scooped up on wheat pita chips, and would also be vegan and gluten-free, and (d) but then again, if you do like yogurt and/or want to use unsugared yogurt as a probiotic supplement, you’ll probably like tzatziki with or without sour cream. 

Then again there are combinations—I think of a recipe from a popular children's "encyclopedia" of my youth, a party dessert that was basically whole juicy oranges slurped up through mint-flavored Life Savers—that may look better on a page, or even on a plate, than they actually taste: I’ve never met anybody who remembered ever enjoying any combination of mint and orange flavors as much as they enjoyed either flavor by itself.

If enough people fund my web site to bring this “bookstore” to real life, one thing we may do is test recipes.

I’ve not tested most of these recipes and don’t plan to, but I can encourage less adventurous readers to try some of them for yourselves. There’s a walnut-garlic dip that still contains more oil than I’d care to dip my raw veg into, but that gets its thick consistency and creamy color from boiled potato rather than whipped oil, egg, or cream (it’s a vegan recipe). There’s a naturally pink “Watermelon Lemonade” that’s rich in trace minerals and guaranteed to be yummy with or without alcoholic additions. There are trendy, yet tasty, baby spinach and fruit salads (several of them). There are lots of recipes that are “free” from whatever you’re trying to avoid.

There are some recipes I personally wouldn’t care to bother with. Why, if people want to eat “light,” would they want to add lots of butter to rice and pack it into ramekins rather than just, y’know, boiling it? Cooking rice in chicken broth adds more than enough calories from saturated fat without adding butter! And why would anyone interested in eating “light” even consider breading their chicken not only with flour and breadcrumbs, but with cheese? And, given that most of us are accustomed to eating green beans either steamed, or stir-fried in just enough oil to film the wok, how can a “light” cookbook even mention boiling the beans in saltwater and then tossing them in six tablespoons of olive oil? Obviously the magazine editor was “lightening up” a recipe that must have called for melting a whole stick of butter into those beans, but…yuck! How overripe did “green” beans have to be to give anyone the idea of adding fat to them in the first place?

However, if you can get good fresh fruit and veg, I’d imagine that any of these recipes would be delicious, because fresh fruit and veg are delicious. The trend for light,  plant-based food is far from over, and the “trend” to push people into places where they can’t raise their own veg if they tried should keep anything that involves fresh local produce a status symbol for years to come. If you enjoy cultivating a reputation as a gourmet cook, you'll probably enjoy this book.

Magazine offices are not living authors so this is not a Fair Trade Book. It is, however, small and light enough to fit into a package with several Fair Trade Books, so you're encouraged to scroll down and find some. To buy it here, send $5 per book + $5 per package by postal money order to P.O. Box 322 (addresses at the very bottom of the screen, or send that amount + $1 per online payment to the e-mail address Salolianigodagewi will send you. 

Gluten-Free Recipe: Cornmeal Pancakes

Since I just tweeted that this breakfast/snack is hard to beat, I suppose there ought to be a link for it...How to Make Cornmeal Pancakes That Are Hard to Beat. Classic cornmeal pancakes are gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, and vegan, but many traditional variations add meat and/or dairy products and/or sugar; you can take this recipe wherever you want to go with it.

First start your fire. This is a very oldfashioned camp-style recipe that works well with an open fire. Even if you use an electric stove, it's essential that cornmeal pancakes be dropped into a sizzling-hot skillet. It also works well with a wood, gas, or electric stove, or hot plate, or even a Coleman stove. It's not for microwaving.

Ingredients for Cornmeal Pancakes

1. Cornmeal: As much as the people who will be eating these cakes are going to need. Figure 1/2 to 1 cup of meal per person over about age 10, 1/4 to 1/2 cup per small child. This is a flexible recipe based on proportions rather than exact amounts. The important thing is to get GMO-free, glyphosate-free, natural cornmeal, which can be difficult. +Bob's Red Mill has a good reputation for that sort of thing. The fresher the meal is, the closer you are to the time and place where the corn (maize) was picked and ground, the better the cakes will taste.

2. Leavening: If you have buttermilk, use baking soda. If not, use baking powder. Figure 1 teaspoon per cup of meal; beyond 1 cup of meal and 1 teaspoon of baking powder, ignore extra fractions-of-cups.

3. Salt is optional, but traditional. (These are like fluffy tortillas, not tea cakes. No sugar!) If somebody is on a low-sodium diet, sprinkle a saltshaker over other people's cakes while they're cooking. The traditional method was to stir in 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of salt for each cup of meal.

4. Cornmeal pancakes are supposed to be crumbly, but you can make them a little easier to handle, and more nutritious, by adding a little flaxseed meal to the dry ingredients. If you don't have flaxseed meal, a traditional alternative is to beat an egg or two into the batter. Either flaxseed or egg will add some nutrients and an extra layer of flavor to the pancakes. Either is optional.

5. Liquid: You need enough liquid to make a thin batter that will spread out flat when the cakes are dropped into the hot skillet. If you use water, you can heat it to just below the boiling point for faster, fluffier pancakes. If you use milk or buttermilk, you'll get some extra flavor and calcium, and since you'll need to use cold liquid you'll have time to add eggs if you want to add eggs. (If you use broth, stock, fruit or vegetable juice, you're creating a variant recipe, not classic cornmeal pancakes.) The precise proportion of liquid to dry ingredients is generally almost, not quite, one-to-one. Since the weather and the freshness of the meal affect this, it's better to calculate by the actual consistency of batter than rely on predetermined measurements.

6. Oil, butter, margarine, meat dripping if you've been cooking meat: Cornmeal contains its own oil, but you do need a thin film of hot oil to coat the skillet. The hotter the oil, the less fat you add to the cakes, which is generally a good thing. A teaspoon of canola oil to start the first batch, and another teaspoon if the skillet starts to dry out between batches, is plenty for me. However, some people rave over the flavors bacon dripping, chicken schmaltz, or fresh country butter add to their cornmeal pancakes.

Method for Cornmeal Pancakes: 

(Start heating the skillet first of all. In a camp situation this will give you plenty of time to do other things; if you're using an efficient electric stove, you'll have just about as much time as it takes to mix the batter.)

1. If using hot water, heat it. If using milk and eggs, beat them together.

2. Combine dry ingredients. Film hot skillet with oil.

3. Combine dry and liquid ingredients. Do not overmix.

4. Drop a few drops of water into your hot, oily skillet. They should sizzle and skitter across the pan.

5. Drop generous tablespoons or extra-large-mixing-spoons of batter into the skillet. They should spread out flat and puff up almost simultaneously. When the bottom of each cake has cooked and dried out, the top will show bubbles, and it will be possible to slide a spatula under the bottom, turn the cake, and cook the top side light brown.

Serve hot or cold with any accompaniment you like.

Traditional Accompaniments for Cornmeal Pancakes: 

* Bacon

* Other thin portions of meat that cook quickly and leave a film of rendered fat in the skillet

* Fried or scrambled eggs, or omelets

* Cold milk or buttermilk. (Kids traditionally crumble their cakes into the milk and eat with a spoon, as in panada. Many adults like to do this too. Yogurt would also work.)

* Applesauce or apple butter

* Sorghum molasses

* Extra butter, for those who like butter

* Fruit

* Ripe tomatoes. (For my father's favorite version of cornmeal pancakes, you need home-grown, vine-ripened organic tomatoes, which are much softer and juicier than the supermarket kind, and need to be "sliced" into a rimmed plate or bowl. This is another way to eat pancakes with a spoon.)

* Cooked green vegetables

* Cooked dry beans

Less Traditional Accompaniments for Cornmeal Pancakes: 

* Immediately after pouring them into the pan, top cakes with precooked sausages--links, patties, soybean sausages, hot dogs, Vienna Bites, whatever.

* Or bacon bits

* Or dried fruit

* Or blueberries

* Or chocolate chips

* Or chives

* Or a thin slice of Vidalia onion. (Onions won't cook as fast as the cornmeal batter, so if they're not Vidalia onions they'll taste awfully pungent. Vidalia onions will taste crisp and sweet.)

* Use a can of fish as part of the liquid. (Canned fish is flaky enough to melt into the batter.)

* Or a can of tomatoes

* Or one or two mashed bananas

* Or applesauce

* Or other fruit puree, if you want sweet and fruity cakes

* You can even add sugar (or honey, molasses, syrup, etc.) directly to the batter. The cakes will be a little trickier to cook without scorching and will not be traditional, but they will be good.

* You can also mix in any kind of "flour" or "meal" you want, including ground nuts, wheat flour, rye flour, oatmeal, etc. Wheat flour will definitely make the cakes easier to handle and, of course, not gluten-free. Ground dried beans or peas were added to cornmeal cakes by Confederate soldiers, at least one of whom famously described the result as "miserable." (However, you can use fully cooked, mashed beans or peas for the liquid; this is known as Bean Bread, and it's heavy but not bad.)

* You can use cooked or canned vegetables for the liquid if you want to. I happen to like cornmeal pancakes made with a can of greens as the primary liquid. A can of carrots would also work.

* You can use cooked grits as the batter base. Grits are made by eliminating niacin-blocking corn bran from corn, which can offer a real benefit to anyone on a low-protein diet.

You can buy the skillet on Amazon.

New Book Review: Clean Eating Bowls

Fair disclosure: this is the third of those three books of which I received review copies, which I read and reviewed in the order in which they came out of the package. Because I'm rushing these reviews online in order to generate as much good publicity as possible, I've not actually tested the recipes at home yet. On the other hand, I'm getting free review copies of new cookbooks because I've used and reviewed a lot of the old ones; I can visualize (taste-ize? gustatorize?) how recipes are likely to taste. This is the quirkiest of the three California-cuisine cookbooks, and maybe you have to be familiar with California health-food-store food...I am. I found it appetizing, and I give Clean Eating Bowls maximum points for presenting the best recipe for a simple, not-necessarily-too-sweet, gluten-free, virtually-guaranteeable version of granola.

Title: Clean Eating Bowls

Author: Kenzie Swanhart

Date: 2016

Publisher: Rockridge

ISBN: 978-1-62315-786-9

Length: 154 pages plus 5-page index

Illustrations: color photos

Quote: “Diving into a clean eating lifestyle can seem daunting—cutting out sugars and processed foods in favor of cooking fresh fruits, vegetables, and lean meats—but bowls make it simple…to focus on all the goodness you can eat, rather than thinking of it as a restriction.”

Inspired by the “paleo diet” or idea of eating things as close to their natural state as possible, Kenzie Swanhart has progressed to exploring recipes for one-bowl meals. They’re organized into “Smoothie Bowls” (blender-processed fruit and veg), “Breakfast Bowls” (fruits, cereals, and/or eggs), “Grain Bowls” (rice, quinoa, farro wheat, barley, or oats), “Salad Bowls,” “Soup Bowls,” “Noodle Bowls,” a few “Dessert Bowls,” and finally ten “Bowl Necessities”—sauces, almond milk, and granola. 

Each chapter outlines how to “build a bowl.” Swanhart is neither vegan nor vegetarian, but each type of Bowl has many vegan options, and vegetarian recipes outnumber meat recipes.

For a Smoothie Bowl, Swanhart blends together a cup of flavorful fruit, a “base” of banana, avocado, or mango, a liquid, “some superfoods (optional)," sweetening (also optional), “sneak in some leafy greens" (half cup, optional), and when these are smoothed out in the blender some unground “toppings” of  fruit, nuts, or granola.

Breakfast Bowls can be sweet, assembled by stacking up a base of yogurt or cereal, a cup of fruit, “superfoods,” sweetening, and toppings similar to the Smoothie Bowls, or savory, with a base of grain, “a protein” (1/2 cup of meat, beans, or egg), a cup of vegetables, 2 tablespoons of dressing, and a sprinkle of nuts or seeds. One savory Breakfast Bowl that may surprise readers is “Baked Eggs and Ramps,” a “decadent Sunday brunch”  featuring wild onions wilted into a sauce, simmered with tomato, and used to poach one egg per serving.

The basic outline for Grain Bowls is one cup of grain, one cup of vegetables, one cup of “a protein,” 2 tablespoons of sauce, and the optional sprinkling of nuts, sprouts, or avocado.

Salad Bowls consist of one or two cups of greens, ½ cup of “a protein,” one cup of other fruits and veg, ½ cup of nuts or grains, and “ginger, lemon, oil, vinegar, salsa, vinaigrette. (to taste). The protein in some of these Bowls is cheese.

Soup Bowls begin with 1-2 tablespoons of oil or butter, then four cups of liquid, one cup of protein, two cups of vegetables, spices of choice, and toppings that may include more spices, nuts or  seeds…or bacon.

Noodle Bowls begin with a cup of noodles, topped with 1-2 cups of hot broth, ½ cup of “protein,” a cup of vegetables, and a topping of nuts or seeds. One recipe title that was new to me was "Poke Noodle Bowl." In the Appalachian Mountains, where the pungent wild onions known as ramps are native, another native food some people like is called "poke salad"--traditionally made by cooking the early, tender, low-toxicity first shoots of pokeweed. Was that the featured ingredient in the Poke Noodle Bowl? No; apparently the Hawaiian word poke, rhyming with "okay," has made it into Pacific Coast English as a new name for a specific tuna dish, so the Poke Noodle Bowl is a fish dish. It sounds a little more flavorful than the canned tuna Easterners usually eat.

Dessert Bowls are likely to be the strangest. Suggested bases are “avocado mousse, banana ice cream, chia seed pudding, coconut cream, or Greek yogurt,” topped with a half cup of fruit, sweetening and/or nut butter if necessary, and toppings of nuts, seeds, goji berries, or cacao powder. This is a short chapter and I have to admit that reading the recipes did not inspire me. However, there’s a valid reason why natural food enthusiasts concoct such weird desserts. If you’re seriously eating a “paleo” or natural-locavore diet, you don’t actually need dessert recipes. Most of the time, sun-ripened fruit provides all the sweetness an adult could want. (In winter, the “paleo” diet features dried fruits, which tend to be sweeter than I personally like. I can handle a spoonful of plain sugar, even a few dates or banana or pineapple slices chopped into cereal, but raisins…! Ouch!)

If you can use coconut oil (or substitute some other kind!), Swanhart’s granola recipe may be the simplest and tastiest I’ve ever come across. Most granola recipes call for ten or twenty different ingredients, at least one of which some member of your family probably hates, and if they feature raisins and honey they'll either be too sweet or have to be toned down with something that starts out bitter and gets bitterer in storage, and so on. Swanhart's recipe consists of oats and nuts, tossed with honey, cinnamon, and vanilla, and baked. If you can eat nuts, that granola is likely to taste good...for a good long time, too. If you have a trustworthy source of oats, it's gluten-free. If you slowly toast good fresh oats, almonds, cashews, and cinnamon to the right point, even if you lubricated the pan with a non-sweet oil, you can forget about the honey and have a naturally sweet sugar-free granola. 

The usual caution about honey applies: bees know they’re swallowing and regurgitating different concentrations of sweet goop, which they store in separate combs, but when humans mix it all together we never know how concentrated the sucrose is going to be or what other flavor notes are going to dominate the finished product, so if you do cook with honey you need to use caution and taste as you go...and even then, honeys made from different flowers react differently to heat! No recipe that calls for honey is reliable; most desserts made with honey tasted either unsweetened or disgustingly over-sweetened to me, with very few striking the balance we’ve all learned to expect from things sweetened with sugar. (The honey-sweetened desserts I've liked featured fresh fruit that was probably even better without the honey.)

Swanhart's “Bowls” are definitely novel cooking ideas (Salad Bowls are probably the easiest to explain to guests who haven’t read the book). If you’re blessed with access to good, organically grown, GMO-free fruit, veg, and grain, that means hundreds, maybe thousands of delicious novelties. (Given an outline for each type of Bowl, you can use these recipes to generate endless seasonal and local variations; the specific recipes merely offer cooking and seasoning suggestions, which your garden will expand...)

Most of these recipes are naturally “free” from sugar, chemical additives, and other things special diets help individuals avoid. Not all are gluten-free, vegan, dairy-free, and for diabetics’ purposes honey is basically super-concentrated sugar, but for most restricted diets I suspect the majority of the Bowls are acceptable. Because “building a bowl” is so simple, it’s not hard to tweak any recipe you can’t use as written, either. Can’t eat barley? Substitute rice. Can’t eat rice? Substitute farro…and so on.

(Some people can't eat rice! Although this web site exists by and for Irish-Americans with wheat gluten intolerance, we have to mention that there's also a gene, noticed mostly by a minority of Asian people, for rice gluten intolerance. Natural rice, our staff of life, is those people's poison. Some real Chinese food is wheat-based, and some Chinese people actually need it to be. Ah, biodiversity...) 

I have to mention that the phrase “clean eating” sounds more than a tiny bit judgmental, and my personal definition of clean eating would definitely exclude bacon, hemp seed, and honey! Well, of course you don’t have to become a food nanny to use recipes that are part of some people's "healthy eating" or "clean eating" plans. Actually, several of the Soup, Grain, and Salad Bowls have flavors that would work quite nicely with a cheap greasy hamburger from the local fast-food shack, if you want to eat one of those. Maybe you do have to be a bit of a foodie to want to construct a Bowl of oatmeal, apple slices, pumpkinseeds, dried cranberries, chia seeds, and chopped ginger, but you don’t have to be a fanatic…if you slice in enough sweet, juicy apple and candy-like crystallized ginger, even oatmeal haters will enjoy that Bowl. 

I will admit some personal insight into the thought process that drives some people, if they’ve eaten a bowl of beet, carrot, Brussels sprout slices, kale, garbanzos, pomegranate, avocado, and miso, to go out and look for a cheeseburger. (That's what Swanhart describes as "probably the healthiest" Bowl of health-food-store favorites, but unwrinkle your little noses, kids...those flavors do work together, mellow each other out, and make quite a palatable "crazy salad.") Even if the cook has said not one word about how “healthy” the Salad Bowl was supposed to be, chasing it with a bag of greasy, salty chips can feel a bit like reclaiming a piece of the individual soul. Nevertheless, if you have good fresh fruit and veg, and you resist the urge to preach about them, even junk food junkies would eat most of these Bowls…and like them.

So…even within the California genre of cuisine, this is a strange cookbook, but in a nice way. Buy it if you can afford to buy excellent food and want to attract attention by doing something delightfully different with that excellent food. Especially buy it to tuck into a gift package along with a set of good-sized, handmade, beautifully quirky bowls.



Hmm...that's a nice mixing bowl. Maybe your family would prefer single-serving bowls?