Customer Reviews

Canyon Ranch Cooks: More Than 200 Delicious, Innovative Recipes from America's Leading Health Resort

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

From the legendary health spa comes this sensuous cookbook loaded with info and recipes and aids to help the home gourmet who wants to tone down the cooking yet keep it exciting both to the eyes and tastebuds.

This cookbook accomplishes its goal by clear layout with attractive color photos and much helpful aids likes appendices for cooking beans, stocking pantry, glossary, gluten-free and dairy=free recipe listings and more.

To me one of the strengths of this collection is the soups and salads. Try the likes of: Albondigas made with turkey; Bohemian Chicken Soup with Dumplings; Ahi Tuna Salad with Cinnamon Plum Sauce; Southwest Roasted Pepper and Avocado Salad with Pineapple Vinaigrette; Stuffed Yellow Bell Pepper; Baked Wild Mushrooms Madeira with Pecan Pastry Crust;

Entrees like Potato-Crusted Salmon with Dijon Shallot; Sauce;Turkey Breast Medallions with Blackberry Sauce; Beef Tenderloin with Apple Bourbon Sauce will wakeup any diet!

There is a neat and unique "Create-A-Pizza Toppings" two-page chart with helpful nutrition breakdown as well as topping combo suggests.

Desserts are not spared either: Spice Pear and Fig in Phyllo; Lemon Blackberry Pie; Grand Marnier Creme Brulee.

A wonderful addition to any cook's collection, especially those who want health with the gourmet touch.

The recipes are absolutely delicious and nutritious but a word of warning! VERY expensive to make! Buying specialty items and natural health food to prepare these meals is probably beyond most average family budgets and in many parts of the country, impossible to find in their local markets! Geared toward the more fortunate in the purse and in the availability of many of the foods.

Everything I cook in this cookbook is delicious. I can serve the recipes for parties and no one knows it's "healthy" in a diet-like way. Very interesting sophisticated combination of ingredients create wonderful tastes that have helped my husband I keep our weight down without deprivation. I think I've made the majority of recipes, and this is from someone that doesn't cook a lot. Highly recommended!

Frankly, I expected more from Canyon Ranch. After reading Mark Hyman's wonderful book UltraMetabolism (he was medical director at Canyon Ranch for ten years), I am stunned -- STUNNED -- to find that Canyon Ranch Cooks is full of recipes calling for refined sugar and processed flour. Twenty years ago, just cutting back on those toxins and substituting baby food prunes was about as good as you could do. Not today. Not with the plethora of truely healthy foods available and the cutting edge information available about what havoc refined sugars and flours wreak on your body.

You'd never know it from this cookbook, but there are wonderful substitutes for sugar (and I'm NOT talking about Splenda or any of the other chemical concoctions....Agave Nectar is healthy, affordable, easy to use, readily available and very low on the glycemic scale). Any cook dedicated to real nutrition has figured out how to use whole grains (whole wheat flour, soy flour, chick pea flour, even Quinoa) instead of All Purpose Flour. All Purpose Flour. You've GOT to be kidding me! If your intent is to get serious about your health, this cookbook flunks on a grand scale.

I can't fully express how much I have enjoyed cooking from this book. I have always loved collecting cookbooks and making interesting recipes from them. However, January 1 I decided that I wanted to take charge of my lifestyle and eat more healthily. I was disapointed as I started to look at most healthy cookbooks available. They seemed like healthy retools of Betty Crocker favorites and often seemed to use a lot of very processed ingredients. Or they seemed very focused on the health aspect of food with little emphasis on taste.

What I love about this food is that it tastes amazing and oh by the way, happens to be healthy too. Every dish in this book features really big, well balanced flavors that make you feel as though you are dining in a fine restaurant. You completely forget you are eating healthily!

So far I have made 11 recipes and all have turned out great. I especially like the vanilla bean ice cream recipe as it is so easy to experiment with other flavors and tastes amazing. I don't miss full fat ice cream at all. I also enjoyed the Spinach Eggs Benedict, Macadamia Crusted Mahi Mahi, and Raspberry Mustard Crusted Chicken Breast. Beyond these recipes there are still many, many more that I cannot wait to try.

The photography is also gorgeous. It makes me get very excited about what I am going to make. I also appreciate that there is a section on vegetarian meals because while I do eat fish, meat and poultry, I occasionally like to make something purely vegetarian and that section gives me some nice options.

Overall I love this cookbook and have gotten so much use out of it over the past couple of years and could not recommend it more highly.

In Canyon Ranch Cooks, Barry Correia and Schott Uehlein (with the support of the Canyon Ranch kitchen staff) have compiled more than two hundred outstanding recipes drawn from the menus of Canyon Ranch -- one of America's most successful health resorts over the last two decades. Each individual recipe is nutritionally sound, free from additives, preservatives and chemicals, and offer mouth-watering flavor and appetite-pleasing substance. From Lox and Cream Cheese Frittata; Peach Mango Raspberry Smoothie; Chicken Gyoza with Wasabi Soy Sauce; and Roasted Salmon Salad with Honey Mustard Vinaigrette; to Sweet Potato Cakes with Jicama Slaw; Macadamia-Crusted Mahi Mahi; Lamb Chops with Pomegranate Molasses; and Chocolate Polenta Cake, Canyon Ranch Cooks is an impressive presented and highly recommended collection of kitchen cook friendly recipes.

This is not a fabulous cookbook. I have made several recipes from it and not been impressed with many of them. There are also typos. The recipe for zucchini bread called for one tablespoon of baking soda. While I should have known this was wrong, I trusted the recipe. It came out absolutely dreadful and inedible. Also, the granola recipe (which comes out soggy not crunchy)indicates that it has a whopping 200 calories in a quarter cup. If this is correct (which I don't think it is), that is very fattening, even for granola. The soups are pretty good and the marinara sauce is a keeper. For my money, Cooking Light produces much better cookbooks.

My first experience with Canyon Ranch Spa cuisine comes from tasting their food onboard the Queen Mary 2. This book reflects their style and quality and is one of those that make any at-home cook happy: healthy recipes with easy to follow instructions. I am a big fan of cookbooks with photographs and that is another reason why I like this book. Baked Wild Mushrooms Madeira in Pecan Pastry Crust and Spice Pear and Fig in Phyllo are definitely my favorites.

-EV/Cruising Cuisine-

I was requested to cook from this cookbook and so I purchased it. I was really happily surprised by the sophisticated tastes of this healthy and mostly simple food. I am continuing to cook from it and am ready to try other Canyon Ranch books.

This cookbook is all that it represents--photos are attractive and inspiring. Recipes are innovative yet simple and easy to follow, logical preparation and healthy ingredients = delicious meals! LOVE the book!