The cookbook reading pile

If you are a reader you always have a pile of "to be read books"  and there is usually a book that lands at the bottom of the pile.  It doesn't matter how you obtained the book, it just does not seem to sound as exciting as the other ones you have in the pile.  There could be many reasons - it is a long book and you don't have the time to devote to such a book,  maybe it is a really intense topic and you want something lighter.  Maybe you missed the book club meeting and have already started the next book! Eventual the book ends up on a book shelf and forgotten about.

I suspect anyone who likes cookbooks and reads them like book, also has a similar pile only this time it is a "to be made" pile.

That is my featured cookbook this week "500 best Healthy Recipes" by Lynn Roblin MSc, RD Nutrition Editor.

Published in 2004 it provides quick healthy recipes, unfortunately up until now I have never prepared anything out of the cookbook.   Not even sure how it became part of my collection.  It might have been a door prize at an education session.  😀

It has a good introduction to healthy eating, a variety of easy to follow recipes.  One thing that I did find unusual was in the dessert section,  a number of the recipes used fructose as an ingredient.  Now I have a wide variety of baking ingredients, including a number of different types of sugars but fructose is not one of them.  Unless you are in a speciality food shop, it is not something that is readily available on the grocery shelf.

There is reference to glycemic index of foods in the introductory chapter of the book, but not a direct mention or explanation as to why fructose was used as opposed to regular white sugar, and it was in enough recipes so that you know it was a deliberate choice.   I think this would be an important explanation for the average home cook.

I did pick a dessert recipe that was made with fructose because I wanted to see what it would be like.  Even though restrictions due to the Covid 19 pandemic are easing I am still limiting my time in stores.  I do most of my grocery shopping online and they did not have fructose.  You can also do online shopping at my local bulk food store,  but they did not have fructose either.  Fructose ia a fruit sugar but most of the "instant dissolving fruit sugar" you may find is regular granulated sugar that has gone through a special process to make it super fine and quick to dissolve when added to food.

So I ended up making the Key Lime dessert with regular white sugar.  I love citrus based desserts, the tarter the better.  I could sit down and eat almost a whole container of Lemon Curd as is.

I was disappointed in the this recipe  It just lacked depth of flavour.  I am not sure if it was because I didn't use fructose - I did substitute 1 for 1 because that is what I figured most people would do even though fructose is much sweeter than regular sugar and the ration is 1 1/3 white sugar for every cup of fructose,  but it was more than it just not being sweet enough the dish overall tasted flat.  I also made the Lemon poppyseed bread which called for regular sugar, it was also disappointing (sorry there is no picture)

Even though dessert was a bit disappointing the rest of the meal was good. I started with the Avocado and Tomato Salsa.  It was nice change up on regular salsa.  It is something that has to be eaten shortly after it is made.










From there we had Polenta Pizza with Mushrooms, Olives and Goat Cheese and a side salad of Sweet Pepper Salad with Red Pepper Dressing

I will definitely make the pizza again,  I forgot to get the black olives but I felt it worked fine with out them.

The salad was a nice change from your typical leafy green salad.  Colourful with lots of crunch, it would hold up well as a potluck salad.






I am a little on the fence with the book, the recipes that I made out of the dessert section were disappointing.  The savoury recipes were much better and since there is 500 recipes in the book and I only made 5 you really can't provide a definite opinion.  There is still a number of recipes that look interesting so I guess I will put the book back in the "to be made" pile and try again.  I will let you know how I made out.  Until next time.