Christina Cooks by Christina Pirello
This isn’t a complete review of this book, mainly because I have yet to try any of the recipes. I just got it yesterday and spent a good deal of time looking through it, and I do like what I’ve seen.
If you’ve seen Christina’s TV show on PBS, “Christina Cooks”, you know what to expect from this book. She follows a vegan diet, which means that she consumes no animal products at all, not even dairy or eggs.
I don’t really want to convert to veganism, or even vegetarianism. But after having watched several episodes of the show, I thought that the recipes looked good enough to try…nothing like the bland, boring “health food” that you may be used to. Christina really wants to see people get back into the kitchen and do some serious cooking…and to do that, the food has to look and taste good.
My goal here is to start eating meatless meals at least once or twice a week. Mike is a die-hard carnivore, though, claims he can’t live without his meat. But Christina offers some useful tips for getting your family to eat meatless…at least some of the time. She says that she’d love nothing more than for everyone to go vegan, but she is also a realist, knows that some of us will continue to consume meat, fish, and dairy products. All she asks is that we try to at least take some steps in that direction. And the advice she gives is good, very informative, yet without being preachy.
The first step, she says, is to start slow when trying to introduce meatless meals. Don’t go to your local health food store and go crazy buying all sorts of “weird” foods, such as tofu, tempeh, miso, etc. Start by picking recipes that contain ingredients that your family already knows and likes.
So, before we went shopping today, I looked through the book and selected a couple of recipes for our first meatless meal….a spicy lentil soup, and roasted red bell peppers stuffed with brown rice, corn, and other savory ingredients. Mike likes lentil soup, and he also likes stuffed peppers…even though he’s always had them stuffed with a mixture of ground meat and rice. I thought that since the peppers contain no meat, that I needed to add some kind of bean dish, to make the meal more substantial. I want to make it so that he won’t miss the meat.
Some of the recipes do call for “weird” ingredients”, that you may not find in a regular supermarket. For this first attempte, I avoided any of those recipes, and chose ones with common, familiar, easy-to-find ingredients. The only unusual thing on my list was miso, which I thought would be easier to find than it was. They didn’t have any at Shaw’s, even though they have a decent enough health food section. I did find some at Stop & Shop, though…they have a larger selection of Asian foods than Shaw’s does. I’ve never had this before, it’s supposed to be there to add an interesting flavor to the lentil soup. And many recipes in this book call for it, so it’s good to have it on hand.
Just a heads-up, though…this is NOT a low-fat, low-carb diet book. She does use a lot of carbohydrates, such as pasta and rice. And, although she doesn’t use butter, she does cook with a lot of olive and other good oils. But you really do need all of that stuff for flavor, and yes, you DO need carbs as well for nutritional purposes. So, if you’re looking to lose weight, you might be better off looking for another book, as well as checking out some of the top diet pills that are available. Yeah, you may lose some weight if you give up eating meat, but that is not the primary goal of this book.
Once I cook the recipes that i selected and Mike and I have tried them, I’ll post back here as to how they turned out.
