Color Me Vegan: Maximize Your Nutrient Intake And Optimize Your Health By Eating Antioxidant-Rich, Fiber-Packed, Color-Intense Meals That Taste Great (2010)
About book Color Me Vegan: Maximize Your Nutrient Intake And Optimize Your Health By Eating Antioxidant-Rich, Fiber-Packed, Color-Intense Meals That Taste Great (2010)
How could I not love a book with a whole section of recipes for purple foods??!Although I'm not vegan, I picked up the book because of its vegetable focus (what other way could you have a whole-foods focused vegan cookbook based in colour?), and am very excited about many of the recipes inside. I've mostly ignored the health advice about the benefits offered by different colours, as I don't really care. The recipes, though... oh, the recipes! I just placed this book in the easiest to reach place of all the cookbooks in my kitchen. It’s definitely made it into my informal top 10 cookbooks section.Unless you are a masochist, don’t read this book on an empty stomach or even if you’re even a little bit hungry, not unless you have enough ingredients on hand and the time to make at least one of the included recipes.At the end of the book she thanks her testers. I know they work hard at giving her useful feedback but THEY SHOULD BE THANKING HER!!! It sounds like the best volunteer job ever!I’m trying to lose a bunch of at least some of the weight I gained 6 ½ years ago, and cookbooks such as this inspire me even more, because they show that healthy eating can be so very delicious and not too difficult to achieve re food preparation.This is another gorgeous book from this author! Truly! It has a beautiful layout, wonderful color, including colorful rainbow pages and page edges for finding contents more easily.I love that the focus is not just on the green orange, and yellow we all hear about incessantly, but covered is the entire spectrum of color: red, orange, yellow, green, blue/purple, white/tan, black/brown, and the rainbow, and each color has its own section which includes: starters and salads, soups and stews, sides, main dishes, and desserts. At the end of every color section, there’s a Ways to increase (whatever color) foods.As with her other cookbook(s), each recipe indicates if oil-, wheat-, or soy-free for those who have dietary restrictions, and also included is if additional ahead of time preparation is required. Nutritional information is given for every recipe for amount of calories, fat, percentage calories from fat, protein, carbohydrate, dietary fiber, cholesterol (none, of course, since every recipe is vegan) and sodium. The helpful blurb boxes in her other cookbook(s) also reappear: compassionate cooks’ tip, food lore, and Did you know? There are also entire page sections with all sorts of “extra” informative material. In each color’s section she also gives some information about why that color food is so important for our health.This author recommends eating whole foods that are low in oil and sodium. Some of the recipes do contain oil and salt, but alternatives are suggested. For those who don’t cook with oil but when fat is helpful in certain dishes for absorption of nutrients purposes, nuts and seeds and avocado are mentioned as foods that can be added instead of oil, and many recipes already are given that way. I am confused though as on one page she mentions that the recipe is fat free but it includes flax seeds (they do have fat) and non-dairy milk (most have some fat.)She does use quite a few foods I don’t like: vinegar, mustard, tempeh, coconut, non-dairy yogurt, etc. but for many dishes, I like all the ingredients and for those that have foods I don’t enjoy, it would be easy to leave them out or make substitutions.She has 2 indexes at the back of the book and both are very useful. The first one is an ingredients index and the second one is a recipe index, listed by color. She has a resources section that is very helpful, although it is short and not comprehensive.Dishes I particularly want to try (and oh did I have difficulty limiting these to just a few per color; there are many, many more) are: from red: Six-Shades-of-Red-Soup; Beet Burgers; Stuffed Shells with Marinara Saucefrom orange: Peanut Pumpkin Soup; Sweet Potato Tacos; Persimmon Tea Cakefrom yellow: Grapefruit, Yellow Pepper, and Avocado Salad; Corn Chowder; Hot Tamale Pie; Caramelized Bananasfrom green: Sweet Pea “Guacamole”; Spinach Soup with Basil and Dill; Garlicky Greens with Pasta; Three-Greens Ribollita Soupfrom blue/purple: Purple Cauliflower Soup; Purple Kale and White Bean Soup; Linguini with Purple Cabbage; Potatoes and Eggplant (Aloo Baingan); Blackberry Breakfast Barsfrom white/tan: Parsnip Soup; Roasted Garlic Soup; Cashew and Red Lentil Burgers (but no eggless mayonnaise for me as I don’t like it); Oat Breadfrom brown/black: Spicy Black Bean and Olive “Hummus”; Mushroom Barley Soup; Brown Lentil Soup; Mushroom-Topped Baked Potatoesfrom the rainbow: Minestrone with Kale; Indian-Style Black Bean and Veggie Burgers; “Sloppy Col” Sandwich; Chocolate, Banana, and Almond Butter PaninisOh, but there are so many more recipes in here that also appeal to me. This book earns 5 incredibly bright stars.I will add that I don’t have the kitchen, various cooking implements or the money to buy them or the space for them, and definitely not the cooking skills the author possesses, but many of these recipes seem doable for me.
Do You like book Color Me Vegan: Maximize Your Nutrient Intake And Optimize Your Health By Eating Antioxidant-Rich, Fiber-Packed, Color-Intense Meals That Taste Great (2010)?
Inspires you to get more color in your meals - and out of food ruts! Great nutrition info too.
—hannah
Another great cookbook by Ms. Patrick-Goudreau! This is on my to buy ASAP list!
—mfalireas
Great info and layout. Too bad there is so much sugar in the recipes.
—beccyboo
