•  Book Review: Healthy Jewish Cooking

The Dreaded Broccoli Cookbook: A Good Natured Guide to Healthful Eating with 100 Recipes
By Barbara and Tamar Haspel
Scribner
317 pp $23

This Can't Be Tofu! 75 Recipes to Cook Something You Never Thought You Would -- And Love Every Bite
By Deborah Madison
Broadway Books
132 pp $15

Essentially Eggplant
By Nina Kehayan
Fisher Books
224 pp $16.95

Most of us swear allegiance to the foods we ate growing up. As adults, we may realize on an intellectual level that a childhood diet of canned spaghetti, grilled cheese sandwiches, and Ho-Hos is a nutritional nightmare, yet the emotional part of us simply isn't convinced that those foods were really that bad for us. After all, we're still standing, aren't we?

Probably first on anyone's list of foods they don't like is some type of vegetable. They just require so much preparation for such a low payoff on taste. Yes, yes, they're good for us. Every kindergartner who has ever seen the food pyramid on a cereal box knows we're supposed to eat at least five servings of vegetables and fruits a day. Yet recent estimates claim that the average American eats only two -- if you include french fries.

The stumbling block to eating more healthfully may be the simple fact that fat tastes good. The very idea of giving up, say, butter on a baked potato is enough to cause psychosomatic withdrawal. What's the point of a baked potato, we might reason, if you can't slather it with butter? The answer to this culinary conundrum is not to give up fat, but to find other ways to season the potato.

A book that gives vegetables their due and then some is The Dreaded Broccoli Cookbook by the mother-daughter team Barbara and Tamar Haspel. The book evolved from their Dreaded Broccoli Newsletter, a quarterly publication that includes news about healthy eating. Its origins date from when Barbara's husband had bypass surgery and was prescribed beta-blockers that were, she says, "turning him into a zombie."

Barbara began reading everything she could about coronary disease and nutrition. "Most of these books featured bad science, tasteless recipes, or turgid writing," she recalls. She found hope in Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease, and began serving up his recipes at home. Her husband's health improved, his cholesterol plunged from over 300 to 197, but there was something draconian about Ornish's call for only 10 percent of calories from fat (and fewer than 5 milligrams of cholesterol) per day. Barbara began tinkering, experimenting, and writing about her discoveries. Tamar joined in, and the newsletter has been going strong since 1992, and the book soon followed. Today the newsletter has plenty of paid subscribers and has been praised by newspaper food critics around the country.

The writing in The Dreaded Broccoli Cookbook is witty and erudite. The Haspels can skip from paring a vegetable to quoting Isaiah Berlin without missing a beat. They're also adamant about who's in charge of what we eat. "This book is about taking back your kitchen from the guys in white, whether they're wearing chefs' toques or lab coats. It's about recipe independence; it's about cooking as a craft ... and it's about techniques for making healthful food palatable."

The authors make good on their promises, and the "dreaded broccoli" is just one of the many overlooked foods they cover. They also explain how to saute using very little fat (while keeping lots of flavor), how to make baked beans tantalizing by substituting a chipotle chile for pork fat, and how to use meat as an ingredient rather than the centerpiece.

The book is also full of entertaining asides on items the Haspels love and hate, like their nominations to the Gadgetry Halls of Fame (garlic peeler, lemon zester) and to the Hall of Shame (the Crumbster, a battery-operated crumb picker-upper).

Although each of the recipes is accompanied by a summary of calories and fat grams (the latter broken down to saturated and unsaturated), the Haspels don't harp on eating low-fat dishes. In fact, quite the contrary -- Barbara laments that there are few things less appealing than a pile of steamed veggies without sauce, and she lists plenty of healthful options. For dessert, Tamar offers a killer pecan pie, and a Nutritionally Correct One-Bowl Chocolate Cake, in which whipped prunes stand in for some of the fat and sugar. You gotta love a low-fat cookbook that understands we all need a little chocolate cake once in a while.

Deborah Madison's This Can't Be Tofu! also makes good on her promise that you'll love every bite of these meals. In fact, with this book you can transform what ordinarily looks like astronaut food into something we Westerners can, under Madison's tutelage, easily envision becoming a kitchen mainstay. A prolific and celebrated author (her last book, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, won the Julia Child Award for Cookbook of the Year), Madison is also the founding chef of Greens, a well-known vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. Yet she understands most Americans' reluctance to embrace this bland soy-based food, and begins her book with an anecdote about a man approaching a woman in a supermarket, asking her what she does with the tofu she was purchasing. "She said that normally she put it in the refrigerator, looked at it for several weeks, and then threw it away. The man replied: 'That's exactly what my wife does with it. I was hoping you had a better recipe.' "

Madison has 75 recipes that range from incorporating tofu into a stir-fry, to whisking it into soups, to swirling it into smoothies. There's a long introductory chapter that describes different kinds of tofu and tips for selecting and preparing them. One common problem with cooking a soft type of tofu is how to keep it from falling apart during the cooking process. According to Madison, this is easily remedied: Let it drain on paper towels first.

Another problem is getting the family to eat one of the most notoriously bland foods. But I fed Glazed Tofu, pan-fried and sluiced with molasses and soy, to my 11-year old, and he pronounced it, "Not bad." The Coconut Red-Curry Soup with Butternut Squash and Lime, which is rich and fiery, or the nutritious Date Shake made with silken tofu are sure crowd pleasers. For anyone with even a passing interest in tofu, this is by far the best of the new books on the subject.

Throughout history and across cultures, eggplant has unfairly earned a bad reputation. The Chinese called it ch'ieh-pzu , meaning "poison" (the appellation has since been shorted to ch'ieh ), and the Italians called it mala insane , or "bad egg." And yet properly prepared, eggplant is a lustrous, delicious, and beautiful food, as Nina Kehayan demonstrates in Essentially Eggplant.

The book begins with a long chapter describing the numerous different types of eggplant. The recipes that follow include three different kinds of eggplant "caviars" (from Provence, with black olives; Lebanon, with tahini; and India, with yogurt and spices), an unusual and very pretty Armenian eggplant salad with walnuts and a drizzle of grenadine, an American cheddar souffle mounded into eggplant skins, and crisp Italian eggplant sticks that look like (and are as addictive as) french fries. There are also several nice jams, chutneys, pickles, and a host of complementary dressings and sauces, each with an ethnic twist.

Full disclosure: I was a person who, until a few years ago, detested eggplant. In fact, the only time I'd ever had it was in some soggy takeout eggplant parmesan. But Kehayan generously helped me surmount my food fears, and my family and I are richer for it. We may never go back to Ho-Hos again.

-- Nancy Rommelmann is a freelance writer and reviewer in Los Angeles.

Last updated October 20, 2008
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive

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