Monday, January 28, 2008

An Excellent Whole Foods Cookbook



My mom sent me an excellent whole-foods cookbook with lots of everyday, easy-to-prep recipes. While not allergy free and it does include refined sugar, I am able to use my list of substitutions and make most recipes in this book. The cookbook is from the "everyday food" magazine related to Martha Stewart Living and is called "Great Food Fast: 250 recipes for easy, delicious meals all year long". They are all wonderful "whole-foods" recipes (you will never see the ingredient 1 can cream of mushroom soup!)

So far I've made the Enchiladas with Pumpkin Sauce, Carrot Soup, Lentil Soup, Crispy Apricot Pork Chops and Salmon Steaks with Hoisin Glaze. The enchiladas were great because they were made with corn tortillas (I made my own out of yellow corn masa flour) and canned pumpkin puree instead of wheat and tomatoes. The recipe called for chicken, but we had shredded roast port tenderloin since my husband is allergic to chicken, and white sharp cheddar cheese (which I substituted soy cheese for my husband and regular cheese for my daughter).

The carrot soup was very creamy and sweet (no sugar, only the sweetness of the carrots and mild curry) - my kids could not eat enough. I substituted my vegetable broth for the chicken broth. I made the crispy apricot pork chops, not with breadcrumbs, but with Ryvita rye crackers and they also turned out well. Since I don't like fish, I used the hoisin glaze on my chicken and just left my daughter's chicken without the sauce. Instead of buying a packaged hoisin sauce, it was just as easy to find a recipe online - but it included soy and peanut butter.

If you're stuck on meal planning and need some new ideas to make whole-foods fast, try this book. A nice feature is that it is arranged by season!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

OHhh those pumpkin enchilladas look really good! I wish I could eat at your house... I'm still doing the college pasta and sauce routine :(

Anonymous said...

hello sara ..my name is sebastian genovese ..we met in the shop on the clopton rd in stratford where you did a book signing ..at the time i was within a relationship with anabell unfortuneatly thats ended ...anyway thats not the reason for this email .i am writing to invite you and your husband to the chipping norton theatre on the 24th of may where i am doing a demonstration of sicilian cookery and a talk about the origins of the food and culture also at the moment we are producing a dvd and also we are about to market a fantastic tomato sauce wich is the base of many dishes and also we did talk a while back about the ice cream ...well thats also something that you showed an interest in as its sugar free pure fruit and healthy its marketed as gelatto genovese i hope you will be able to come on that night and i hope we will be able to work together in some way thankyou for reading this and i hope i have sent this to the right person regards sebastian my email address is sebgenovese@googlemail.com and my phone number is 07510285902