Williams-Sonoma New Healthy Kitchen: Main Dishes Book

With New Healthy Kitchen Main Dishes, you can improve your diet while enjoying recipes such as Honey-Glazed Lamb Chops with Apricot Salsa, Quail with Roasted Fresh Figs, or Tabbouleh with Lemony Scallops. This colorful series of healthy cookbooks takes a commonsense approach to eating right. Food fads and trendy diets may come and go, but your family doctor can tell you that you will never go wrong eating a wide variety of fresh vegetables and fruits, whole grains, and legumes.

We all know that we're supposed to be eating several servings of each of these foods every day. But you might not know that we're also supposed to be eating as many different colors of fruit and vegetable as possible. The naturally occurring pigments that give vibrant colors to fruits and vegetables also offer an array of unique health benefits, boosting your immune system and fighting common diseases and conditions as you age. These pigments and other plant compounds — known as antioxidants and phytochemicals — work in tandem with vitamins, minerals, and fiber to keep our bodies strong and well.

The amazing benefits of colorful foods, whole grains, legumes, seeds, and nuts are being studied in labs across the country and touted by government experts on nutrition. But all the good advice in the world won't help you put a healthy dinner on the table. The books of the New Healthy Kitchen series — Starters, Main Dishes, and Desserts — will do just that.

The 60 recipes in these pages, grouped by the color of a key ingredient, offer dozens of appealing and easy ways to bring a rainbow of fruits, vegetables, and grains into your daily meals. Even better, 24 "FreshIdeas" suggest simple ways of enjoying fresh produce as a snack or side dish.

With New Healthy Kitchen Main Dishes, eating right won't be a sacrifice or a chore. In these books, healthy food means good food, simply prepared and a pleasure to eat.

Publishers Weekly

Fitting in squarely between Starters and Desserts, the two other volumes to date in the New Healthy Kitchen series edited by Chuck Williams, this richly illustrated volume proposes the rainbow approach to dining. It's not about calories or carbs, it's about reds and greens and browns; for each color has its own "phytochemicals," a word that appears as often in these pages as "butter" slides across the works of Julia Child. The organizing principle, which acknowledges its roots in the work of the Produce for Better Health Foundation, keys each recipe to the color of its principal ingredient. Otherwise the book is not particularly distinguished from others serving up new California cuisine-light, bright, herb-strewn and agreeably complex without being truly complicated. This is mostly scratch cooking, with exceptions for the likes of prepared horseradish and chicken stock. The one notable deviation is the Chickpea, Corn & Cilantro Salad, which calls for canned chickpeas; here taste and texture were apparently sacrificed to minimize the aggregate prep and cooking time. What the recipes don't mention is how much shopping time is required and how critical it is that the cook have access to specialty grocers in order to whip up a quick dish with purple asparagus or Puy lentils. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.