The Best Life Diet Cookbook: More than 175 Delicious, Convenient, Family-Friendly Recipes
July 10, 2010 · Posted in Bestselling Cooking Books
Product Description
A good meal is one of life’s great pleasures, but we all know that it can be difficult to choose foods that make us happy and keep us healthy. In his New York Times bestselling book The Best Life Diet, Bob Greene showed more than a million people that you can lose weight and eat delicious food. Now, in The Best Life Diet Cookbook he provides more than 175 recipes that taste as good as they are good for you.With recipes like Flank Steak with Potatoes and Garlic and S… More >>
The Best Life Diet Cookbook: More than 175 Delicious, Convenient, Family-Friendly Recipes
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5 Responses to “The Best Life Diet Cookbook: More than 175 Delicious, Convenient, Family-Friendly Recipes”
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Best-life advocate Bob Greene positions the ideas in this cookbook as a “gift that you give to yourself and your loved ones.” Home-cooked meals made from fresh, natural ingredients will make you feel better, live longer and bond with your family and friends. Makes sense to me. And if you just want to cook yummy foods, these dishes are delicious.
They are also nutritious, and all the details for each serving are at the end of each recipe: calories, protein, carbohydrate, dietary fiber, sugar, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, calcium and sodium.
Easy-to-follow meal plans are broken down into three sections. Quick and Easy meals take no more than 20 minutes to prepare, Kitchen Connoisseur choices are a little more adventurous, and Family-Friendly meals offer healthy versions of family favorites. Each meal plan has six calorie levels: 1,500, 1,600, 1,700, 1,800, 2,000 and 2,500 calories a day.
Although most of the recipes are geared to busy families with little time to spend in the kitchen, there is a whole chapter of wonderful, healthy dishes from accomplished chefs. These recipes may take a little longer than the 30 minutes or so the other recipes require to prepare. Some of the chefs participating include Mollie Ahlstrand of Trattoria Mollie, Dan Barber of Blue Hill, Sarma Melngailis of Pure Food and Wine, Charlie Trotter of Charlie Trotter’s and Roy Yamaguchi of the 35 Roy’s Restaurants around the world. Ahlstrand’s Zuppa di Pomodoro is a flavorful take on tomato soup that uses garlic, brandy, rosemary and orange juice.
In the back is a handy Techniques tutorial showing how to roast garlic, toast nuts, section citrus, clarify butter and the like.
Other good choices for healthy cookbooks include Deceptively Delicious, Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the Real World and The Most Decadent Diet Ever.
The Eat This Not That! series is also excellent.
Here’s the chapter list:
1. Introduction
2. Recipes
3. Breakfast
4. Soups
5. Salads
6. Sandwiches, Wraps and Crispbreads
7. Entrees: Meat, Poultry, Seafood, Vegetarian
8. Side Dishes: Grains, Vegetables
9. Calcium-Rich Snacks
10. Desserts
11. Best-Life Recipes from World-Class Chefs
12. Meal Plans
13. Basic Recipes
14. Techniques
Rating: 5 / 5
Buffalo with Blackberries, anyone? Quinoa Granola? How about Salad of Riesling-Poached Tokyo Turnips with Brussels Sprouts, Pickled French Laundry Garden Onion, and Toasted Mustard Seed Emulsion? Bob Greene’s “The Best Life Diet Cookbook”, designed to be used in tandem with his wildly popular “The Best Life Diet” has the best and healthiest of intentions, but isn’t a terribly great resource for anyone short on time or money or with a family of potentially picky little ones–in other words, a good portion of the population. Greene’s philosophy of cooking and eating is a solid one; he firmly believes that “eating is meant to be one of life’s great pleasures,” and that “many of us have lost that special connection with the experience of eating….” The purpose of this books is to help readers “reclaim the experience of eating as a celebration by sitting down to enjoy these high-quality, delicious dishes without overdoing it.” So far, so good.
The recipes, however, split into ten different categories that include Breakfast, Entrees, Side Dishes, and Desserts, overwhelmingly seem geared towards the young, the hip, and the unencumbered, not the average workaday American with 2.5 kids. While there may be a silent majority of working families who are beside themselves with joy to come home from a hard day at work to partake of Tofu Mushroom Scramble on a Whole Wheat Tortilla or Baked Eggplant with Ground Beef, they certainly keep themselves well hidden. And, even if Duck with Plums or Broiled Mahimahi with Grapes and Leeks seems like a winner, the price of the ingredients can often prove prohibitive in these days of the not-so-great economy.
Greene does acknowledge that different Best Life Dieters have different needs, and two of the three two-week full meal plans he includes in the back of the book, the Quick and Easy Meal Plan and the Family-Friendly Plan (the third is the Kitchen Connoisseur plan), are geared for the busy and the child-overwhelmed. The Family-Friendly Plan incorporates favorites like Sloppy Joes and Shepherd’s Pie, but leaves the reader wondering why a person would purchase a book containing chiefly recipes of the Cauliflower Curry with Red Lentils variety if they are planning on cooking the Chicken Noodle soup.
That said, there is no doubt that Greene’s recipes are nutritious, low-calorie, palate-expanding, and a real find for devoted food enthusiasts looking to expand their kitchen repertoire.
Rating: 3 / 5
As other reviewers have mentioned, many of these recipes contain ingredients that are costly and fit a more exotic palate. His book, The Best Life Diet, contains many more “family-friendly” recipes and snack ideas. In my opinion, that book is a much better resource for planning and preparing meals to fit Bob’s Best Life Diet plan.
Rating: 2 / 5
I truly appreciate the wisdom shared by Bob & his recipes are really very tasty. The disappointment is that most of the recipes are similar to the first version. I would have hoped that there would be more diversity in his second edition … you really have to join the website club to get that I guess.
Rating: 3 / 5
The problem I have with the book is with all of the referenced food companies. For example the soy milk he references has a high sugar content. Appears to me his book is more of a book for marketing certain brands of food along with his connection to Oprah. Wonder how much these companies supported his book and its marketing and publication? Can’t believe its true nutritional value with the marketing of so many companies.
Rating: 2 / 5