So this is the cookbook, "Feeding the Whole Family", by Cynthia Lair, which I was promising to do a book review on. Let me first give a disclaimer in that this book is designed for families with babies and littles, so some of the things that made me go "that's so cool!" might not row your boat.
The premise of the book is fairly simple--cooking "whole foods" for your family in tasty, doable ways. Lair defines a whole food as, among other things, "fresh, local, and organic". I pretty much ignore all three of those requirements and hone in on the "can I picture where this food came from" criteria--did it have a mother or did it grow somewhere, or was it manufactured? If manufactured, natch, probably not a whole food. This is almost the only beef I have with her--she tends to take the "whole food" thing a bit far. Pretty much I just figure a carrot is always better than a Twinkie, whether it's organic or not. So just take this attitude with a grain of salt; even so, Lair is much less pushy about it than many food authors I've read.
The other thing I ignore in this cookbook is her avoidance of white sugar. Her recipies usually call for maple syrup, honey, or a number of other "natural" sweetners which, while I'm sure they're delicious, are generally fairly expensive. I've used white sugar in her recipies with good sucess.
Those caveats aside, I've found the recipies in this book very tasty and fairly easy to fix, even when they call for strange ingredients like nori (sheets of dried seaweed used in making sushi). Hands-on time is limited, although often things might need to soak/bake etc. for several hours. Lair, who is a vegetarian, includes many animal protien recipies and manages to avoid the condescending or downright hostile attitude many vegetarians have to those of us who eat meat. The vegetarian recipies are equally tasty and many of them could be easily converted into animal-protien recipies by adding a little chicken or shrimp.
Lastly, of course, everything in this book is good for you, which is handy for me just now in my "Lose the Baby Weight Without Making Toxic Breastmilk" quest.
Lair teaches nutrition at a university and helpfully includes her meal planning strategy, which I will detail here (the animal protein version--I don't think any of you are vegetarians):
1. First you choose a whole grain (like brown rice or whole wheat bread) or a startchy vegetable (like a potato) depending on what you have in mind for step 2. (Potatoes go better with steak than brown rice would, but brown rice might go better with a delicate fish--get it?)
2. You choose your animal protein--meat, fish, eggs, cheese, whatever.
3. You choose a green vegetable.
4. You choose another vegetable.
5. You choose a "digestive"--something pickled, raw, fermented, or cultured (yogurt, buttermilk, sauerkraut, salsa, salad, pickles...etc.)
It seems like a lot of food until you realize that the digestive is usually combined with one of the vegetables (i.e., a green salad) or is a sauce on things, and that these don't have to be separate dishes--you can fit them all in a beef stew.
I've been trying to plan meals this way lately. The digestive is the hardest part, but it does boost your veggie consumption and the inclusion of the whole grain makes you stay full longer.
There you have it-- my first book review. The next one will be a lot different since it'll be fiction and I know something about writing fiction. :)
Cheers,
Breanna
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