book report by mb

author:	Heidi Swanson
title:	Super Natural Cooking:
	5 Delicious Ways To Incorporate Whole & Natural Ingredients into Your Cooking
publisher:	Celestial Arts, 2007
illustrations:	photography by Heidi Swanson
cover and text design:	Toni Tajima
length:	215 pages
page size:	medium (7" wide, 10" high)

You know how every once in a long while a novel comes along that actually changes your life? Which novel does this is different for everyone (for me there were two, Ender's Game and Siddhartha) but everyone who loves reading has had the experience I'm talking about.

Well, this is that novel -- except it's a cookbook.

My husband and I are both huge fans of healthy, natural living in theory. But truthfully, in practice we love meat and cheese and chocolate and butter and donuts and everything that's bad for us. I mean, here I am trying to figure out how to make the perfect pot pie, you know? I love pot pies, don't get me wrong, but I'm also well aware that they're not healthy. So my mom says, "Oh, you want to do a pot pie project? Ok, I'll send you 8 million pot pie books." And now when I go to look for a cookbook to find something new to cook, I'm instantly drawn to my giant selection of pot pie books. So I keep cooking pot pies and then going back and looking for something else to cook and only finding more pot pies! (I'm not complaining, merely providing some context.)

But then my mom came for a visit and brought with her a copy of Super Natural Cooking and the catch-22 of the pot pies ended. Here was a book that made cooking and eating healthy food appealing, not purely in theory, but in practice.

First of all, this book is gorgeous. I mean drop-dead, spectacularly, wish-everything-in-the-entire-world-looked-this-good gorgeous. Heidi is a professional photographer; her pictures are colorful and lush. And the layout of this book (Toni Tajima is credited with the "text design") is to die for. Across from page 1 of the introduction, with its description of beans and their "beautiful patterned skins" is a close-up photograph of a tablecloth, bright yellow with intense pink flowers. You can see the weave of the fabric and the juxtaposition of the photo and the description of the food is perfection. This is merely the first example. Every spread in the book is that good.

It isn't solely the attractiveness of this book that makes it so appealing though, it's the quality and type of food being offered.

The subtitle of this book is Five Ways to Incorporate Whole and Natural Ingredients into Your Cooking. Heidi has divided the book into the five chapters: Build a Natural Foods Pantry, Explore a Wide Range of Grains, Cook by Color, Know Your Superfoods, and Use Natural Sweeteners.

There are no recipes in "Build a Natural Food Pantry." This chapter is Heidi's introduction to the concept of the book, letting us in on ideas for how to replace ingredients we already have in our kitchens, new things to try, foods to avoid. The chapter is split into several different categories: Flours, Meals, and Powdery Stuff; Oils and Fats; Sweeteners; Spices and Seasonings; and Fermented Staples. These are the staples of a kitchen, the necessities for cooking from scratch, and she's helping us to revisit our ideas on what staples are supposed to be. The theory is that once we are done with this book we will no longer go directly for the all-purpose flour and the granulated white sugar. No, now we will have an idea of what else is out there and what we can do with it.

"Explore a Wide Range of Grains" has us cooking with grains that we might not be familiar with: amaranth, buckwheat, farro, wheat berries, quinoa, barley. This chapter isn't only about baking either, though there is baking going on. Here we are presented with a wide variety of ways to use grains, from Wild Rice Flour Pancakes to Risotto-Style Barley with Winter Citrus and Arugula. This chapter is about going past the all-purpose flour and white rice and -- well, as she says, exploring a wide range of grains.

In "Cook by Color" Heidi talks about phytonutrients (plant nutrients) and what they mean to us. She names a few important phytonutrients, and then talks about some of the powerhouse food in each color category: red, orange and yellow, green, and blue and purple. She doesn't get overly technical, doesn't make you memorize names and numbers and complicated facts that you won't remember by the time you're done with the chapter. What she does is say, "The thing to grasp is how important it is to eat a wide range of brightly colored fruits and vegetables. Eat them raw, eat them cooked, and eat them daily." The recipes that follow are for colorful, lush foods, from Gnocchi alla Romana to Curried Tofu Scramble. This chapter is about choosing our foods by color, not just for how pretty they make the table look, but for the intense nutrients that come with the color.

The next chapter is "Know Your Superfoods." These are natural, whole foods that provide "nourishment, health benefits, and protection from disease." These are the foods we all need to find enthusiasm for: alliums, cruciferous vegetables, nuts and seeds, sea vegetables, sprouts, tea, and yogurt. These are the heavy hitters of the food world. Heidi acknowledges that although it's easy to get nutritionally excited about these foods, it's often hard to get excited about actually eating them. So she shares with us her recipes that are guaranteed to get everyone interested. Golden-Crusted Brussels Sprouts -- yum!

And finally we have "Use Natural Sweeteners," which is the most inspirational of all the chapters for me. See, I've got a vicious sweet tooth, but have recently been discovering that traditional overly-processed white sugar makes me feel like crap. So I've been thinking about how to keep my sweet tooth fed but also not have it be exceedingly bad for me. Here Heidi gives us ideas for desserts that aren't filled with the usual white sugar, but instead use molasses and brown-rice syrup and agave nectar, while still managing to be utterly appealing.

So why is this our cookbook of the month? Because every time I sit down to look at it I find something new that I want to cook. Because over the course of 215 pages Heidi easily convinced me that I can change the way I eat and not sacrifice anything, not be left wanting. Because there has never been a cookbook that has inspired me the way that this one has. And because we want to share our excitement with you.

Three recipes that intrigue me:

Mesquite Chocolate Chip Cookies (pg. 182)
Giant Crusty and Creamy White Beans (pg. 152)
Creamy Wild Rice Soup with Sweet Potato Croutons (pg. 60)

Be sure to check out Heidi's website, 101 Cookbooks. It's an inspiration and a guide to us.

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