Customer Reviews

Super Natural Cooking: Five Delicious Ways to Incorporate Whole and Natural Foods into Your Cooking

5 star:		(77)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

There are plenty of new products coming out to meet the demand of folks now eager to try the natural food movement, but it's hard to know how to use them well. Amaranth flour, buckwheat flour, brown rice syrup? Simply trying to substitute them into your favorite recipes rarely works--you need to know how to use them to their own best advantage, and that takes time, effort, and plenty of practice to work out.

Luckily, Heidi Swanson decided to start that process for us.

"Super Natural Cooking" is packed with information on how to best store, handle, and use all of the wonderful ingredients you'll find. You'll find out which all-natural sweeteners have a surprisingly low glycemic index, making them appropriate for diabetics and those worried about their blood sugar or carbohydrate intake. You'll learn how much of those exotic flours you can substitute, which recipe-types they work best in, and how to make sure their different characteristics don't cause your recipes to fail.

The recipes from this book more than prove Ms. Swanson's skill in the creative kitchen. One of the surest signs I've found of a brilliant cook over the years is the ability to take a few, often mild ingredients and turn them into something that is more than the sum of its parts--a wholly new and complex flavor. This she does easily with such recipes as a luscious fig spread that includes a bit of honey, lemon juice and black pepper. Then there's a curry noodle pot that yields new tastes in every delicious bite. I feared the seed-topped amaranth biscuits would be unduly heavy after feeling the texture of the dough, but they came out tender and wonderful, with an elusively delicious flavor I can only attribute to the amaranth flour. Each recipe came out perfectly without any alteration on our part; the directions were simple, clear, and without error.

The book even makes a beautiful gift, as it's filled with Ms. Swanson's own food photography--and believe me, these photographs will make you hungry!

"Super Natural Cooking" is an exciting and tasty introduction the world of whole foods. The book has an unusual arrangement. Rather than lumping appetizers, entrees, soups, salads, and desserts into sections - the book is rather arranged like a course on natural foods cooking. The book begins with instructions for building a natural foods pantry - what foods to include and what to avoid, including flours, oils, sweeteners, spices and seasonings.

Then she moves on to whole grains, beginning first with information about the different types of grains (helpful because many may be unfamiliar), she then moves on to recipes. There are baked goods like Seed-Crusted Amaranth Biscuits and Espresso Banana Muffins; soups like Toasted Wheat Germ Soup and Creamy Wild Rice Soup. The Spring Minestrone with Brown Rice made with fresh asparagus and snap peas has been a regular for us on Fridays when I get my box of produce from the local CSA. We also loved the Risotto-Style Barley made with crème fraiche and lemon zest.

Next, Swanson encourages us to "Cook by Color." This section is all about fruits and vegetables - brimming with essential phytonutrients (don't worry if you're not sure what they are, it's explained in the book.) Recipes include Baked Purple Hedgehog Potatoes (your kids will love these), Red Indian Carrot Soup, Curried Tofu Scramble, and Crema de Guacamole with Crunch Topopos.

If those foods weren't healthy enough, the next section teaches you to "Know Your Superfoods:" alliums, cruciferous vegetables, beans and legumes, nuts and seeds, sea vegetables, sprouts, tea, and yogurt. Dishes include Beluga Lentil Crostini, Sprouted Garbanzo Burgers, and Golden Crusted Brussels Sprouts. My family absolutely loved the Creamy Cauliflower Soup.

Of course even natural foods eaters love their desserts and there a plenty of good ones here as Swanson presents a section on natural sweeteners. There are recipes for Thin Mint Cookies, Spiced Caramel Corn and Ginger-Amaranth Shortbread. The Dairyless Chocolate Mousse is so rich and decadent, no one will believe it was made with tofu. The biggest hit of the desserts for us - I've already made it several times - was the Raspberry Curd Swirl Cake. My gosh, it was good. I couldn't find Raspberry Curd at Trader Joe's so I used Lemon Curd and it was wonderful. Really, really great.

Whether you are already into natural foods like I am (but there were ingredients here I've never tried like wild rice flour, teff and farro) or completely lost in a natural foods store but want to know more, this book will work for you. The recipes are very "normal" and nonthreatening - like chocolate chip cookies with a bit of mesquite flour millet-fried "rice." In other words, comfortable favorites with a little twist. Swanson does an excellent job of explaining the ingredients (and offering substitutions if you are unable to find some of the more uncommon ones). This books is vegetarian - many recipes use dairy products but there are some great vegan recipes as well.

Review as seen on www.vegfamily.com by Cathe Olson

Well, my title sums it up basically. First off, to give fair warning, I am not at all a vegetarian, though I do eat a "whole foods" diet, but one inspired by say, Alice Waters, or Sally Fallon, or Julia Child. I appreciate that the author does not promote low-fat vegetarian fare, as I don't believe the saturated fat hype, but was dissapointed by how sugar laden many of Heidi's recipes were. The photography is beautiful, stunning pictures make each page worth a peek even if you're not inclined to try the recipes. I wish that the recipes, in general, had less starches, sugar, and gluten-grains.

Heidi's new book, "Super Natural Cooking", is luscious.
She didn't have to make it this beautiful. But she did.
I love the warm paper and the sturdy construction. It took me a few minutes to grasp that there's a dust-jacket on this paperback book. How cool.
Luxuriously textured with rich color photos (love the dahlias, the Christmas stockings and the tattoo), and dotted with charming graphics, you realize the book is a treasure before you even get to the recipes...
I feel the book has so much to teach me; expedient, because I am anxious to learn about whole grains, natural sweeteners and alternative oils. Along with her talent for photos and food; I love the way Heidi speaks to us. Intelligent. Amusing. Never dull.
Allowing no personal bias as a fan of her web-site, I am charmed and excited by this book on it's own merit. Because I have cooked from her first cookbook, I know the recipes will work and impress. In my collection of three hundred or so cookbooks, this is a stand-out.

I've followed Heidi's blog via email updates for about a year now. I have made a few recipes from there, and I picked this book up at the library.

As other reviewers have noted, she has gorgeous photography, and her instructions are clear and helpful. She is artful in her use of the English language, I must say. She is my go-to source for tasty and creative vegetarian dishes. I should mention that I am not a vegetarian, although probably a third to half of the meals I eat each week are. (I did experiments with going veg that didn't work out for me, because I seem to really need animal protein to be healthy.) I do genuinely think veg food is tasty, but I don't think it is a healthy diet for everyone.

So why three stars?

PROS:
-She stresses using organic, quality, whole ingredients. That is essential, in my mind, for healthful cooking.
-She doesn't stray from saturated fats. Thank goodness! I was so glad to see that Heidi isn't part of the anti-saturated fat campaign. If you are skeptical, and believe that saturated fats are terrible for you, google the "diet heart hypothesis" and "women's health initiative" and you will see that in the past few years, research studies are showing that a diet low in saturated fat actually doesn't reduce your risk of heart disease or cancer. Even more interesting is that the whole idea was built on shaky use of data to begin with. Google "Ancel Keys".
-Did I mention Heidi is an amazing photographer?? I want to eat the pictures.

CONS:
-Heidi does a lot of innovative work, and these recipes are testament to that. However, some of her methods aren't based on traditional cooking techniques. For example, there is phytic acid in whole grain flour (wheat, rye, etc). Phytic acid blocks nutrient absorption and causes other digestive issues over time. I am not going to go into a lot of detail, but it is important for flour to either be soaked before it is used (like the teff flour she mentions from Ethiopia--they always ferment it for a few days to make injera bread in Ethiopia), or the grains should be sprouted and then thoroughly dried before they're ground into flour. I didn't see evidence of her mentioning that in the book. (If I'm wrong, I would appreciate someone pointing that out.)
-This may draw the ire of some vegetarians, but I have read a lot about soy foods being harmful to one's health. As a woman in my child-bearing years, I have chosen to remove soy foods from my diet, even though I had a happy love affair with tofu for a long time. Soy foods can mess with your hormones, ladies. I think traditionally speaking, soy was fermented or specially prepared to be consumed in smaller quantities (miso, soy sauce). And we generally eat a lot of soy here, either knowingly as vegetarians or often unknowingly in processed foods. So recipes in this book that are soy heavy, I just skip. That is a bummer. (And again, I recommend googling the subject for more info.) After I went totally organic in dairy and meat, and cut the soy out of my diet, my menstrual cycle is like clockwork now. Sorry if that is TMI, but it's true. This is after 14 years of it being unpredictable.

So I give three stars to this book. What I do is take what I've learned about traditional food preparation methods (i.e. soaking flour/sprouting grain, etc) and incorporate those practices into these recipes to have something tasty and healthful--in a way that has stood the test of time. It's a win-win: healthy preparation + awesome Heidi taste!

For more info on traditional food preparation, I recommend Nina Planck or Michael Pollen books for the theory, or Nourishing Traditions for the practicality.

We ate meat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Due to some dietary changes we decided to become vegetarian. I have a 2 and 4 year old boy, and a hearty eating husband. We were starving for the first couple of days until I found Heidi's book. The recipes we have tried are delicious! We could never be happier and have not looked back to meat since. In fact my family loves my cooking better (thank you heidi!), and my very particular and vegetable hating 4 year old is chowing on almost everything I put in front of him. In fact I had to take a picture of him eating the Garbonzo burgers stuffed with avocados and yellow peppers to send to my parents because I know they wouldn't believe their eyes. All I could say is thank you, thank you, thank you for this wonderful cookbook!

I am not a skilled cook. I am not a vegetarian. I do not live in a big city where exotic spices or international produce are particularly common. I shop in regular grocery stores and sometimes eat fast food. But I love this book.

Heidi Swanson takes nothing for granted, teaching simple techniques (I never took home economics!), identifying the different spices, grains, produce and natural sweeteners, and offering substitutions for the harder to find ingredients. All the recipes are simple and delicious, with lots of helpful hints and information about the whole foods philosophy. She's done her homework, and she admits that cooking in a new way can be daunting. That makes people like me feel more comfortable using this cookbook.

I highly recommend this book. The hardest part about cooking this way is tracking down all the ingredients, but it's worth it.

Heidi Swanson creates the most interesting vegetarian dishes--anyone who follows her blog, "101 Cookbooks" knows this. This book contains her own recipes using natural, organic ingredients. I haven't tried all of them, but so far, so good. One complaint of mine is that the number of portions seems to be a little larger than what she indicates--or maybe we just like smaller portions at our house. In any case, it's easy enough to adjust. A second complaint (hence the 4 stars)--some of the ingredients will be very difficult to locate for some people unless you live in an area that has a quality natural foods store. Heidi does include a list of mail order retail stores to purchase items, but more "substitutions" might have been useful in this book.

The photography by the author is beautiful. This is my first purchase of her books, although I'm a regular reader of her blog. Highly recommended, even for this non-vegetarian reviewer.

Great book - simply fantastic. Contained within are flavor, creativity, and health. There is some use of esoteric ingredients, as I have seen some complain of, but that was kind of the point of some of these recipes - use ingredients you may not always use. I have been a fan of Heidi's website for quite a while, and this book contains the same level of warmth, and obvious love for good food you'll find there. The photography, as always with her work, is stunning, and the recipes are usually winners. I have to admit that I find the organization of the book confusing - that's about the only negative thing I can think of to mention. Buying vegetarian cookbooks can be tricky - some are way too "crunchy granola" and focus on meals of sprouts, tofu, and "groats" of some sort or another, while others combine pounds of cheese with gallons of eggs and butter for nearly every recipe! This type of book is hard to find - the recipes are healthy (generally), focus on (GASP!) whole grains and vegetables, and there is flavor to spare in all of them. And, no, I'm not a vegan, I just believe in enjoying a thing for what it is, not pretending you're eating something different than you are. Tofu? Sure, on occasion. TVP? No thanks, I'd rather eat toenail clippings.

That being said, it would be nice if there was a nutritional breakdown for each recipe. Most people who are concerned with their health these days seem to be on one diet protocol or another. I imagine most of them would like to know what they are getting out of each recipe, other than satisfaction.

I'll come clean right up front: I was a recipe tester for this book, and Heidi is a friend of mine. That said, I only really got around to testing a handful of the recipes while she was writing it, and I just got my copy the other day and eagerly opened it and put it to use, so this review is based on my impressions of the finished cookbook.

First off, Heidi's food photography is just stunningly beautiful. The presentation is beautiful and focus is crisp, revealing texture and color. Plus, flipping through the book, it appears that almost every recipe has a photo, so it's useful for knowing what the finished plate ought to look like. Sometimes I use cookbooks with no photography and wonder, at the end, whether I missed a step. Not so here.

The whole book is as pretty as the photos. The paper stock is smooth and pleasant just to hold, the fonts are tasteful and attractive, the ornamentation is great. It's just a beautiful book.

And the recipes? The ones I've made have been delicious. I made the wild-rice flour pancakes with the mesquite syrup for brunch and they were a giant hit. I've made the quinoa-corn crepes several times, and the sauce is so good I triple it to have leftovers for the next week. The list goes on. I've probably made 10 or 11 of the recipes so far, and haven't been disappointed with any of them.

I'm especially excited about this cookbook coming out right now because I'm working on losing a few pounds, and while this book certainly has some recipes for foods rich in calories, it also has a ton that aren't. Plus, every recipe is so rich in nutrients that I can eat smaller portions of any of them and still know I'm getting what I need. I'm particularly excited about the various ways to put greens and beans to use in my kitchen.

Finally, the price is kind of hard to turn down. Amazon's selling this for less than fourteen bucks right now? I'd have paid more than twice that for this book, no question.