I’ve located a few old reviews that I don’t seem to have posted here, so I thought I’d go ahead and add them while I work on catching up with new ones.
Pros: Fantastic recipes, useful charts and tips, clear and easy instructions
Cons: So-so recipes, bad “…and next ten ingredients” instructions
Rating: 3 out of 5
Originally written: Jul 07 ‘00
This is one of my favorite healthy cooking cookbooks. My fiancee and I don’t often repeat recipes. We like variety, and we love to explore new tastes. However, there are a number of recipes in here that we’ve made over and over again. This cookbook isn’t perfect. There are a number of recipes in it that aren’t particularly appealing.
The potato skins with cheese and turkey bacon are very good. Particularly with the nonfat sour cream and the cheese, I actually quite liked the turkey bacon. This dish tasted surprisingly like traditional high-fat potato skins.
The honey-mustard glazed meatballs were sweet and wonderful, although we found that they didn’t tend to hold up as meatballs. They’d be better as a meat and sauce to go over mashed potatoes or bread.
is all about quick, delicious ways to prepare vegetables you will want to eat! (Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean vegetarian, although many of these recipes would qualify.) My only reservation is that the title of the book might be mildly misleading; I doubt people will quite be expecting dishes that start with “silky braised fennel” and the like in a cookbook with a title that starts with “fast.” As long as you’re expecting it, though, it’s wonderful—so now you’ve been forewarned.
is a great place to start if you want to “green” your kitchen but aren’t sure how to start. It will help you decode food labels, explain the differences between organic, sustainable, fair trade, and other terms, tell you which types of produce retain the most pesticides, and so on. There’s information on composting, making environmentally friendly changes to your cleaning and cooking habits, and more. Getty is realistic—she encourages you to pick one change you’re comfortable with and get used to it before you move on to the next.
