Leslie Bilderback CMB

Leslie Bilderback, CMB, explores Biblical dietary laws in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Good Food from the Good Book. She includes recipes both ancient and modern, most of which are aimed at introducing you to a wide array of vegetables, whole grains, and non-refined sugars. Breads and crackers, burgers, fish, stuffed vegetables, soups... it's all in here.

The recipes that we tried came out wonderfully. A broccoli dish with cheese sauce and crunchy cracker topping was delicious. A recipe for ratatouille was my favorite of the book. A Texas bean bake produced something that my husband found perfect for cold lunches at work.

I have only two reservations about this book. One is that the recipes don't seem quite as dedicated to the principles the author espouses as the text does. For all that she warns us off of refined flours and sweeteners, you'll find plenty of them in dishes such as cranberry sorbet, pound cake, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, angel food cake, and so on.

My other reservation is the side notes. Each recipe comes with a little box in which are noted prep time and cooking time. Often other notes appear above or below a recipe. I'm guessing that someone mixed these up while laying out the book, because many of them seem utterly irrelevant to the recipe they're paired with. An opening note on the Texas bean bake says it would make a lovely vegetarian dish if paired with rice, but there's a pound of ground beef in it. Similarly, the box next to the baked broccoli dish states a cooking time of 10 minutes, while the recipe itself says "bake for 20 minutes." And these are just a couple of examples out of many.

For a longer version of this review, visit Errant Dreams… (altro)