mmcphee's Full Review: Dean Ornish M.D. - Everyday Cooking With Dr. Dean ...
As we embrace our new vegan lifestyle I have been borrowing lots of cookbooks from the library. One that seemed most similar to the program we are following as outlined in Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease is Everyday Cooking with Dr. Dean Ornish.
Inside the Book Dr. Dean Ornish espouses an entire lifestyle change to prevent and even reverse heart disease. He recommends yoga, meditation, regular exercise and a low-fat vegetarian diet. In Everyday Cooking, Ornish publishes 150 recipes touted as easy to make with common ingredients. The recipes include fruit, vegetables, grains, legumes, fat-free dairy and egg whites; there are no oils, or meant in any of the recipes.
The first section of the book contains the basics of his eating plan; an explanation of what you can and can't eat and why. He provides lists of acceptable foods as well as cooking tips before delving into the recipes.
The recipes are organized by season, meant to allow people to take advantage of seasonally available fresh fruits and vegetables. Each season has 11 complete meals, which includes a salad or appetizer, main dish, side dish and dessert. The last section includes 10 breakfast recipes. Each recipe includes a list of ingredients, paragraph style instructions, serving size along with calories, fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates, protein and sodium. Most recipes serve four. There are no photographs of any of the recipes. With the exception of the special occasion meals, Ornish claims all meals can be prepared in less than an hour.
My Experience While we like the handful of recipes we tried from the Everyday Cooking, I do not like the organization of the book. When I am looking for a soup, side dish or dessert, I want to flip through that section and find something that sounds good. To find a good side dish I have to read through the pages that mark each section, which is the only place the recipes are listed. If I am trying to use a particular ingredient I can read through the index, but if I am looking for inspiration this set-up simply doesn't work for me. None of the pre-designed meals worked for my family; there was always some major ingredient that someone wasn't going to eat, or a recipe that couldn't be modified to work with our diet. It simply added to my frustration with the layout of the book.
While I understand the theory of dividing a cookbook like this, there is very little in the way for fruits and vegetables that aren't available year round. While it is certainly easier to find butternut and acorn squash in the fall and asparagus in the spring I can't remember anytime in the last 10 years I haven't been able to find any produce I've wanted at any time of year. Yes, tomatoes taste better right out of the garden, but at my grocery store they taste the same 365 days a year.
Probably the best recipe we have tried is fresh tomato and basil sauce, but I didn't really need the book for that. Creamy coleslaw, made with a tofu dressing, is decent and I was able to modify a corn bread recipe to make it fit our vegan diet. Many of the recipes use dairy and eggs, food we don't eat. While I can use soy or almond milk in some recipes, non-dairy sour cream and yogurt require a trip to a specialty store so I typically skip those. The recipes mostly rely on whole foods, which I really like; I have no desire to feed my family highly processed soy products made to resemble meat. Most of the ingredients are readily available at my local large grocery stores, making the recipes convenient to assemble.
I also prefer recipe instructions to be numbered or bulleted. I find it much harder to keep my place when cooking if I have to keep rereading long paragraphs of instructions. More often than not I end up missing a step until the recipe becomes second nature. I also found the cooking instructions to be more wordy than necessary; for example one recipe includes detailed instructions on how to cut a mango. That belongs in the general instructions, not part of the recipe.
Final Thoughts Other that a couple of "keepers" none of the recipes I read impressed me enough to want to search through the book for more. Those that I came across, like chili and Mexican rice, are readily available in every vegan cook book I've seen. If you like the idea of having a complete vegetarian meal laid out for you then Everyday Cooking with Dr. Dean Ornish may be a nice addition to your collection, however if you are like to flip through a cook book to find just the right recipe, this cookbook isn't for you.
Renowned cardiac researcher and bestselling author Dean Ornish, M.D., has inspired millions of people to choose a healthier lifestyle and a low-fat di...More at HotBookSale
In this bestselling cookbook, the author of Dr. Dean Ornish s Program for Reversing Heart Disease shows readers how to make low-fat cooking fast, deli...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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