Recipes and Books archive: August 2007

by Valerie Cupillard

Published by Grub Street
ISBN 978-1-904943-90-7

This is a wonderful book that explains everything you ever wanted to know about sprouting your own sprouts from seed, and how to use sprouts creatively to flavor every type of recipe.

Regularly eating sprouts can have a dramatic effect on your general health and wellbeing. Clinical research has proven that sprouts support human immunity, improve digestion, and help prevent serious diseases such as cancer. Packed with micro nutrients,

Split into an introductory section and a recipes section, this book has stylish and modern photography, including appetizing recipe shots and practical step-by-step guides.

The introduction explores the nutritional benefits of different kinds of sprouted seeds and grains. There’s a comprehensive section about different store-bought germinators, a guide to easy sprouting using an empty glass jar, and a guide to every kind of sprout you can imagine, including alfalfa, black radish, sunflower, fenugreek, dill and adzuki.

The author seems to relish her subject, enthusiastically sharing her personal experiences with sprouting, whether it’s to let you know that a particular kind of seed is difficult to sprout (carrots) or to share her penchant for a particular flavor (dill).

There are 70 vegetarian recipes split into 8 different sections:

* Appetizers
* Soups and veloutes
* Sauces and dressings
* Raw dishes
* Main dishes
* Cheese
* Desserts and fruit
* Grass juices

The bias for this collection is modern whole food cooking. There are plenty of ideas for daily treats, but the recipes don’t stop there. Fennel Coulis With Buckwheat Sprouts would be a lovely addition to a more formal meal, and Stewed Apples Stuffed With Sesame Sprouts is absolutely heavenly. Try sprinkling fennel seed shoots onto cubes of yellow melon, or making a simple salad of sprouted red lentils drizzled with walnut oil and seasoned with salt and ground cumin.

Editor-in-chief Sheherazade Goldsmith
Foreword by Alice Waters

Published by Dorling Kindersley
ISBN 978-0-7566-2873-4

This book is a wide-ranging compendium of everyday ideas for a greener lifestyle. Edited by the wife of the founder of the UK’s Ecologist magazine, A Slice of Organic Life is a rough beginner’s guide to organic lifestyle.

The focus is firmly on the home and home garden, with some great ideas for window boxes, homemade cleaning products, eco-gifts and composting. Find out how to make your own wood floor polish out of beeswax. Learn how to distinguish edible wild mushrooms from poisonous fungi.

Get inspired to create a wildlife pond in your backyard, and while you’re outside, there are beginner’s tips for raising pigs, keeping a milking cow, tending a flock of ducks and even choosing a hive to keep a colony of honey bees.

The organic culinary ideas are simply written and very practical. The recipes are scattered throughout the book, and are all very basic and user-friendly. My favorites are the simple recipes for sauerkraut, strawberry jam, flavored oils, and goat’s cheese from scratch.

This is a fantastic book for sparking ideas, although it’s very much in a magazine style. By this, I mean that the ideas are generally first thoughts on a subject. For example, the section on bee keeping is a beginner’s guide in six pages. If you truly want to keep bees, you’ll need a whole book dedicated to the subject before you’re ready to get started.

Overall, this is a great gift book for someone who loves all things organic. Good clean design coupled with nice modern photos, it’s a good book from a good publisher.