Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating | Date: 28 April 2011, 04:04
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Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating
By Lisa Jervis
* Publisher: PM Press
* Number Of Pages: 128
* Publication Date: 2009-09-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 1604860731
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781604860733
Product Description:
This rousing call to action for healthy, conscious eating is an inspirational primer for those who want to move beyond packaged and processed food toward a more responsible and sustainable way of eating. Many people are learning about the political ramifications of what they eat, but don't know how to change their habits or expand their kitchen repertoire to include meatless dishes. This compendium offers a straightforward overview of the political issues surrounding food, and a culinary toolkit to put principles into practice. Without resorting to faux meat, fake cheese, or obscure ingredients, the recipes focus on fresh, local, minimally processed ingredients that sustain farmers, animals, and the entire food chain. Instead of a rigid set of recipes to be replicated, it offers tips for improvisation, creative thinking in the kitchen, practical suggestions for cooking on a budget, and quick and delicious vegan and vegetarian meal options for anyone who wants to eat fast, tasty, nutritious food every day.
Summary: A New Approach
Rating: 5
More than finding a specific recipie, absorbing the way Lisa Jervis thinks about food and its preparation has made reading Cook Food worthwhile. It hasn't meant that I won't make mistakes like not realizing that 6 cardamon pods won't equate to a teaspoon of cardamon seeds. My dish of Indian Greens was overwhelmed by that mistake. However used as compote over white rice brought some balance back to the mixture. This book pushed me into discovering beet tops and stems which I actually like better than the roots.
Even though I have read Michael Pollan and others, the hands on perspective of this "manualfesto" has helped me improve what is served at our table and made me more at ease with my food choices.
I also really enjoyed the conversational and slightly acerbic tone of the author.
Summary: Motivating!
Rating: 5
This book is a great motivator to begin exploring a more natural diet. Great, simple recipes and ideas. I love that Lisa creates meals without relying on "fakes" and using real-food options. She gives good reasons to change your ways, but is not pushy or overbearing. It's a great book for NYC dwellers due to our local greenmarkets.
Summary: Exactly what I was looking for! Excellent book!
Rating: 5
I have been wanting to get into cooking -- I was really inspired by "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan -- and this book is just perfect. Jervis writes in a very approachable style that makes me unafraid to tackle these delicious-sounding recipes. A wonderful, inspiring book that came along at just the right time. Highly recommended to anyone who cares about not only the politics of food, but eating delicious cuisine!!
Summary: Educate, don't alienate
Rating: 5
The vegetarian cookbook genre, to put it bluntly, is a mess -- shot through with asceticism (Francis Moore Lappe), quasi-religious gibbering (Laurel's Kitchen), and outright pseudoscientific idiocy (Christina Pirello, Michio Kushi). In the culinary cacophony, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of room for people who just want to add to their vegetarian repertoire or eat more responsibly without having to deal with no-compromise nutritionist wannabes or preachers. In times past, there was always Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook and its spiritual descendants by the later collective, as well as (more recently) entries by people like Mark Bittman.
But we do hit a snag when it comes to actually putting green ethics and meatless cooking together -- this is where we get back into the domain of the Lappes and Pirellos, combined with the stark raving madness that is the ecology section of your local bookstore, where good scientific data is lost between the sort-of-right hard greens and the cynical corporate apologists. "Cook Food" is a quick, inexpensive solution to the problem, a vegan cookbook by someone who isn't even fully vegetarian. It lays out the issues in a straightforward, concise, and non-dogmatic manner; while ethics are a major issue in the book, the fundamental point is solutions, not preaching. Author Jervis even includes an extensive bibliography on subjects such as cooking, sustainability, food production, and the like.
One can't forget the recipes either -- though relatively few in number (only about 20), they're picked specifically to allow vegetables and things like tofu to stand on their own while still being palatable to pretty much anybody (including a recipe for vegan brownies for people to play with baking a bit). Necessities for a vegetarian kitchen are covered in detail, and the book also includes a section of short, not-quite-recipe preparations that the author likes. And for the price, it's very much like The $7 Meals Cookbook -- not only are the recipes cheap to make, the book is cheap too.
Sadly, you won't find this book in many bookstores -- the publisher is a small one with a very diverse but small catalog. But it's definitely worth seeking out and reading, especially if you're interested in helping to deal with the problems of our modern food supply. (Incidentally, I can't claim credit for finding this one on my own; I learned of it in an article by Amanda Marcotte on Pandagon. She does seem to have good taste in books.)
Summary: DIY Scrumptious
Rating: 5
I was lucky enough to be a test taster/test reader for this book, and all I can say is "DIY scrumptious."
Lisa's recipes are waaay easy to follow, leave room for a little creativity, and don't require a bunch of esoteric ingredients. More importantly, the end result is crunchy-salty-savory goodness.
This is in stark contrast to those monk monastery cookbooks out there that equate health with cold watery tofu. Or the equally annoying "add a teaspoon of low-fat bottled dressing, mix with plain nonfat yogurt" cookbooks that may as well be titled Weight Loss and Heart Disease Recovery for the Stereotypical American. But I digress.
This book works equally well for those who don't know how to cook, those who only know how to cook stuff they would no longer be caught dead eating, and those who cook all the time but want some new, interesting, and fast recipes.
As well as those who just can't resist anything called a manualfesto.
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