Customer Reviews

Cooking the Whole Foods Way: Your Complete, Everyday Guide to Healthy, Delicious Eating with 500 VeganRecipes, Menus, Techniques, Meal Planning, Buying Tips, Wit, and Wisdom

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Anyone who is interested in incorporating whole grains and more veggies into their diet should have this cookbook in their kitchen! While their may be a few "exotic" ingredients to the newbies of macro/vegan cuisine, there are dozens and dozens of delicious recipes that incorporate whole grains, beans and soy products. Several of these items can be found at your local natural foods store or the health food section in your grocery store. Some of my favorites from this cookbook are the basic miso soup, chickenless salad, italian vegetable stew, brown rice & millet croquettes, quinoa salad, steamed spring rolls with citrus mustard sauce, temeph stronganoff, hearty sauteed greens with ginger, mushroom pate, sweet and sour cabbage with tart apples, pasta primavera, marinated vegetable and tofu salad, asian noodle salad with cashews, oat-raisin scones, olive nut bread, tarte tatin, and chocolate decadence brownies to name just a few. Christina does not use any refined sugars, white flour or dairy products in her recipes. Her delciious recipes require a shift in thinking from the SAD (Standard American Diet) to a natural, organic whole foods approach to enjoying food. This is a must have for any vegan or anyone just wishing to incorporate more vegetarian meals into their weekly diet.

Take it from someone who has always been a bit hesitant to try new things (and who has also not had a very healthy diet in the past) - This book, along with Pirello's other books, have helped me start to include more variety in my diet and to understand how these foods help me feel better physically and mentally. Any of her books are great purchases.

We have made a handful of recipes from this cookbook so far. Ingredients can be difficult to find if you're not used to shopping at Asian markets or don't have a good health food store nearby. A lot of this stuff you just won't find at your average grocery store. We happen to have a grocery store that has an excellent nature's market section and international section and I still had to get some of the ingredients at the health food store.

What we've made so far was tasty but way too time consuming to do on a week night. This book was definitely written for someone who is obsessed with cooking and loves to do it up in style. Spending two and three hours on a meal can be fun, but it's not something I want to do on a regular basis. On weekends that we get snowed in, it's been fun spending the time in the kitchen with my 12 year old daughter working on a recipe together.

Also, having tended towards a raw food diet, the vegetables in these meals seem awfully over cooked. Since it's winter, I wanted more ideas for cooked vegetables, but these recipes go overboard with many of the recipes having two parts - first cooked on the stove and then in the oven.

A friend and I both ordered our copies at the same time and we both have been truly impressed and amazed. Mrs. Pirello's years of efforts, trials and experiences have enriched our lives. She has given us instant access through her wonderful book to what has taken her years to formulate. And for such a great price, as this info is priceless! It has opened us up to new, exciting foods and even healthier ways of eating then what we were doing before which was fairly healthy.

I loved Christina's TV show, but have found this cookbook to be unreliable. One risotto recipe I followed completely skipped adding the broth. The other one (baked) took 1.5 hours to make, not the 25 minutes the cookbook claims; I also uncovered the dish after one hour as opposed to "tightly covering" as instructed.

The index is awkard. For example, carrot cake would normally be under "C", then "Carrot", the "Cake". In this index, it's under "18-Carat" instead of "Cake" - I eventually found it, but not the day I needed it! Instead I walked away, scratching my head wondering why a carrot cake recipe would be missing.

My success with replicating recipes from her TV show is much better than my success with following the recipes in the book. I find the book useful to inspire new recipes, but don't feel I can fully trust them. My copy is full of notes of improvement. It's fun for me to treat it as my basis for a test kitchen, but I don't recommend it for novice cooks.

Christina Pirello's recipe book, Cooking the Whole Foods Way, is chock-full of time-consuming, complicated, and overly expensive organic vegan recipes. Be prepared for your food budget to sky rocket, especially if you have a family. Even the most basic beloved comfort foods like chocolate chip cookies (pg. 321) have way too many "far-out" ingredients that your local grocery store will most likely not carry. Granted I live in Mebane, NC (aka: Where the hell is that?) and the only two grocery stores in town don't carry most of the ingredients Christina touts as essential. I suppose if you live in Carrboro, Portland, or San Francisco then you won't have any problem with busting your bank account for avocado oil, carob powder, brown rice syrup, umeboshi plums, and a different array of seaweeds. The only redeeming fact this book has is the recipes ARE incredibly healthy and you will drop weight in no time (just avoid making any of the deserts near the back of the book). However, I'm far more inclined to believe that if you make low-fat recipes and avoid refined sugar, there's no need to go this extreme.

I came across this book in a Border's bookstore when I decided to go from vegetarian to vegan. I wasn't familiar with Christina or her show on PBS. What attracted me to her book is the introduction where she explains how her diet saved her life from cancer. It's a bold statement which I don't believe 100%. But solely changing your diet will help out if you have high cholesterol, diabetes, or heart disease. When I took the book home and thoroughly read the introduction, I was surprised when Christina readily admitted her vegan diet put her into another life-and-death situation. Christina writes on page 4:

"One bright April afternoon, I suffered a brain stem aneurysm, landing me in the neuro-trama intensive care for eight days. Test after test revealed that while I had suffered a rupture, the bleeding had stopped and the vein healed itself, leaving me with a pool of blood at the base of my brain and excruciating head pain. The brain surgeon told me that my condition was the result of a diet too low in fat and protein and vitamin B12, which created elevated homocysteine levels, resulting in the hemorrhage."

Christina goes on to say that she started to incorporate more fat, protein, and B12 in her diet. But the message I took home is that you need to be careful on a long term vegan diet, because you might not get the sufficient amount of nutrients your body needs. This part of the introduction is harrowing because I felt like I needed to be extra careful when choosing recipes. The level of scrutiny concerning my diet became obsessive partly because being vegan means being careful about what you eat. But I also had to be careful to eat the appropriate things so I wouldn't land myself in an intensive care unit.

I took this book home and read it from front to back in less than a couple of days. Along the way I wrote down recipes I was interested in making. My initial reaction was shock because all the recipes required a multitude of crazy oils, vinegars, and sugar substitutes. I dismissed this as what I had to do in order to be full-fledged vegan. I knew a diet change meant buying different stock from the grocery store. For the next 4 months I made long trips to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. My grocery bill was astronomical. When I came home and prepared a recipe, I discovered there were multiple steps like taking food from the stove top and putting it into the oven. And often the end result was an overcooked flavorless mess of vegetables. I'm sure Christina has it down to a science when she's cooking it herself, but I felt lost and overwhelmed with many of her dishes. After making her vegan meals for about a month I started to flip through the book looking for the most simple recipes that required the least amount of ingredients. One such recipe is her Baked Brussel Sprouts and Shallots on page 149. This recipe calls for:

2 to 3 cups fresh Brussel Sprouts, trimmed and left whole
3 or 4 shallots, halved
2 or 3 cloves fresh garlic, finely minced
sea salt
2 TB extra-virgin olive oil
2 TB balsamic vinegar

This recipe is great but it does require an hour or more of cooking time. Let's look at something that is more complex like Chilled Asian Rice on page 46:

8 ounces extra-firm tofu, cubed

Marinade
1-2 tsp light sesame oil
juice of 1 lemon
juice of 1 lime
2 cloves fresh garlic, finely minced
1 TB fresh ginger (see Note, page 164)
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp brown rice vinegar
1 TB brown rice syrup
spring or filtered water

7-8 snow peas, cut into thin slices, blanched
1 celery stalk, cut into large dice
1/2 red bell pepper, roasted over flame, peeled, seeded and diced (see Note, page 262)
2 cups cooked medium- or long-grain brown rice
2 tablespoons minced, pan-roasted walnut pieces (see Note, below)
1-2 fresh green onions, thinly sliced on the diagonal, for garnish

This recipe is a complete joy to make! Imagine draining tofu and pressing it with paper towels while cutting each veggie to perfection after making sure one is roasted just right (placed over an open gas flame or under a broiler, transferred to a paper sack, sealed tightly, allowed to steam, rubbed with your fingers, cut, and diced) and another is blanched (boiled briefly). Then take into consideration that brown rice has to simmer for at least 45 minutes before its done. Don't forget to look at all of Christina's notes in the recipe (See Note this and that) for making ginger juice (grating ginger and then squeezing it) and roasting the walnuts in a dry skillet over medium to medium high heat. If you were to just skim over the recipe you would think it would take 10 to 15 minutes. Don't be fooled into thinking any of her "simple" recipes are easy by any means. Ignore her in the introduction when she writes:

"Natural cooking seems to be shrouded in mystery, reputed to employ strange, exotic ingredients cooked in bizarre ways, like stirring in a clockwise direction while standing on one foot under a full moon. Well, as much fun as that sounds, the fact is your can purchase most basic whole foods in your neighborhood supermarkets. You may need to supplement your weekly shopping with occasional trips to a natural foods store, but for the most part, you'll be able to find all that you'll need in your local market."

LIES. Absolute lies. Most of her recipes take copious amounts of time and energy. My advice is to use VegWeb.com. Everything on that site is easy to make and FREE.

I've tried several recipes out of this book and have been less than thrilled. They are fine, just not very exciting. I've also compared the recipes she has done on her show to the book. Although all of them are in the book, the recipes themselves are very different. So far, I've prefered the tv version of the recipe to the cookbook version every time.

The recipes were simple enough to make for a busy mom, inspiring enough to get you cooking, and yummy enough to eat. This was just what I was looking for. I felt the personal touch to her style of cooking/writing brought her into the kitchen with me. I would love to see her cooking show someday.

I became vegan a few months ago after reading "The Kind Diet" I tried many of the recipes in that book and found most of them bland. I am so glad I found "Cooking the Whole Foods Way"! I've made many of the recipes and they have all been fantastic! I love the upbeat and honest approach that Christina Pirello takes! It's a fun read with a ton of helpful information about Macrobiotics as well. It was getting tough for me to support my vegan lifestyle when I was making dinners that were bland for my fiance and I. Now, he always likes what I make and seems surprised that my meals are free of animal products. If you are considering going vegan or just need some inspiring/easy recipes, I would definitely recommend this book!

The title of this cookbook threw me - I thought "Everyday" meant foods I could obtain (and recognize) easily. I had to learn a whole new vocabulary for foods I've never even heard of, let alone tasted. Fortunately, Pirello provides a good one.

Everyday also means (to me, at least), doable. Dinners can't take hours to make or my family wouldn't eat dinner till 10 PM! There is not a single microwave recipe in this book, and only one for pressure-cooking - brown rice.

That being said, Pirello has produced many truly awesome, tasty recipes. I guess my cooking skills will just have to be put to the test as I attempt to adapt these recipes to a working woman's lifestyle.