The Healthy Kitchen - Hardcover

The Healthy Kitchen

The Healthy Kitchen follows on from Eating Well for Optimum Health, one of Amazon's bestselling health books of 2000 in which alternative-medicine maverick Andrew Weil revealed his version of the ideal diet (and backed it up with scientific proof): a variety of unprocessed, or "whole" foods; just-picked, organic vegetables; whole grains; "good" fats, such as the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and nuts; fresh herbs and spices instead of heavy sauces; and a minimum of meat and dairy products. Eating this responsibly is certainly an admirable pursuit, but home cooking of this calibre can be intimidating, requiring much more energy than it would to pull up to the drive-through and order a burger and fries.

In The Healthy Kitchen, Weil successfully teams up with Rosie Daley, chef to Opera Winfrey, to show how to cook with confidence within these dietary guidelines, creating dishes that are not only good for you, but are also fun to prepare, beautiful to look at and delectable.

For those of you predicting a tofu-fest, have no fear: Weil stresses he's "unwilling to eat food that is boring, artless and devoid of pleasure even if it's somebody else's idea of healthful." Indeed, the gorgeous colour photography in The Healthy Kitchen will get you drooling over healthy main courses like Warm Chicken and Asparagus Salad and desserts like Lemon Yogurt Sorbet. You can be proud to serve these recipes to your family and friends--many of the starters and main courses are perfect party foods, sized to feed a dozen. Some recipes are notably more complicated than others--Cold Vegetable Pasta Primavera involves grilling five different veggies; baked Vegetable Wontons are time-consuming if you're not familiar with the folding process. However, Daley and Weil advise working your way up to these more complex dishes.

Sprinkled throughout the book are witty and wise health tips from Weil and cooking shortcuts from Daley. The two admit they don't agree on all cooking matters; Weil would substitute cashew milk for coconut milk and adds his two cents on making the Thai Shrimp and Papaya Salad spicier, for example. The book places much emphasis on seasonal fresh foods and boasts sumptuous photography and tempting menu suggestions. Weil and Daley supplement the recipes with calorie and nutritional breakdowns for each dish, shopping guides for easy meal planning and tips on encouraging children to help out in the kitchen (and develop lifelong healthy eating habits in the process). --Erica Jorgensen.