The Dreaded Broccoli Cookbook : A Good Natured Guide to Healthful Eating with 100 Recipes - Hardcover

Haspel, Barbara; Haspel, Tamar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684854546 ISBN 13: 9780684854540

Publisher: Scribner, 1999

Synopsis

Provides accurate and simple nutritional guidelines and offers low-fat, improvisational cooking techniques to use with either featured recipes or personal family favorites

About this title

About the Author

Maintaining their own separate busy kitchens and lifestyles, Barbara and Tamar Haspel still manage to talk about food every day. The press has recognized the newsletter that resulted from these conversations as "witty and substantial" (Chicago Sun Times) and "whimsical and encouraging" (Los Angeles Times). USA Today especially admired its sense of humor. Both mother and daughter live, cook, and write in New York City.

From the Back Cover

Deborah Madison, author of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone:
"That health has finally been coupled with humor is a healthy sign indeed, but Dreaded Broccoli is also an immensely practical, down-to-earth cookbook for very real people who may be feeling a bit lost in the world of healthful eating, especially those who have found it something that's been forced unwittingly upon them by life. And there's nothing to dread about the food, so chuckle through your quinoa."

Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of the nationally broadcast public radio show, "The Splendid Table with Lynne Rossetto Kasper:
"The Dreaded Broccoli Cookbook is a find for everyone who loves good food, loves to laugh and wants to be healthy. This mother and daughter team is feisty, fun and smart. This book is a winner."

Jim Peterson, author of Sauces and Vegetables:
"Barbara and Tamar Haspel capture not only many of the myriad essentials of cooking, they also grasp the spirit of the kitchen and the rich spontaneity that comes when we let down our guard and cook with our noses and our hearts. Their book is a mouthwatering charmer."

Martha Rose Shulman, author of Light Basics Cookbook and Mediterranean Light:
"...[Y]ou will find two new friends in Barbara and Tamar Haspel. No extremes here, no "don'ts" -- just good sense, good recipes and lots of empathy."

David Rosengarten, host of the nationally televised cooking show "Taste":
"Barbara and Tamar Haspel are real people, real writers, who have fascinating stories to tell about vegetables and other minor forms of life.... [T]hey have brought me closer to nutritional correctness than I've ever been before."

Reviews

The claim that healthy eating can be delicious isn't a new one, but since Americans eat about one hamburger patty's worth of lentils in a year, it's pretty clear we're a tough bunch to convince. Undaunted, this mother-daughter team, also responsible for "The Dreaded Broccoli" newsletter, keeps hope alive in a cookbook that's part recipe collection, part dietary intervention. The elder Haspel, Barbara, starts the ball rolling by describing how she came to healthy eating, namely her husband's heart attack. Influenced by Dean Ornish's diet plan, she realized she would have to make some modifications to get her family to stick with his stringent guidelines for the long term. And her approach workedAher husband lost weight, lowered his cholesterol and, most amazing of all, the food she was serving was so tasty she got her family to change its eating habits. Tamar, whose narratives alternate with her mother's, admits that she tends to think of french fries while eating her quinoa, but she makes her own delicious contributions. Keeping in mind that some people like meat, the authors include suggestions for fat-free beef stock and lots of recipes featuring such hearty meat substitutes as mushrooms (Potato and Mushroom Pie with Polenta Crust). There are imaginative dishes using grains, including Spicy Couscous with Leeks, Chickpeas and Peppers. Improvisation, fun and satisfaction are high on the list for the Haspels in this combination of techniques and recipes for healthy eating. This book is just what the cookAespecially the one in the kitchen every dayAordered.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After her husband had a heart attack ten years ago, Haspel changed the way she cooked, reading everything about diet and health she could find. Her explorations eventually led to Dreaded Broccoli, a quarterly newsletter she and daughter Tamar have been writing for seven years, and then to this book. The dreaded broccoli refers not only to the drab gray overcooked stalks served up by some restaurants as the vegetable of the day but to any boring, tasteless health food, and the Haspels were determined from the start to avoid it. Barbara, author of most of the text, has a straightforward, no-nonsense style and a sharp-edged sense of humor; Tamars contributions include Whats with All the French? (in the stock chapter) and other essays in a similar vein, as well as a good number of the recipes. There are 100 or so of these, including The Mother of All Soups and All-Purpose Garlic Sauce, but the books greatest appeal will be for those who enjoy reading about food as well as cooking it. For most collections.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: Dreaded Broccoli Explained

In 1989, every restaurateur in Manhattan felt duty bound to offer a vegetable of the day. But it was the menu's stepchild. No one gave it much thought, and when some eccentric, nutrition-obsessed patron ordered it, the lowest of the sous chefs, already overwhelmed with other duties, was given the job of readying it for the table.

"Watch out," I'd hiss to my husband, "it's Dreaded Broccoli," and Chuck would cast up his eyes in mock despair as the waiter placed the plate in front of him. There it was: a dull-green, sullen-looking object resembling a small tree. Chuck was trying to adhere to his low-fat, high-vegetable diet when he ate in restaurants. It wasn't easy. It didn't help that the vegetable of the day every day in every restaurant seemed to be broccoli.

From a restaurateur's point of view, broccoli makes an almost perfect vegetable of the day. It's available year-round, keeps well, looks substantial (VERY substantial) on a plate, and back then could usually be palmed off in any condition from nearly raw to gray and limp.

These days, at least in New York, vegetables have attained higher status. Meals are likely to be conceived with special attention to the vegetables on the plate. Vegetarian entrés are staples of mainstream restaurants. Broccoli, when it appears, is usually at its bright green best, steamed to crisp-tenderness. The dark, sullen tree, except in second-class establishments, has pretty much disappeared. But not before it bore fruit: our title.

The broccoli of the title isn't the actual broccoli of our old marital joke. It's stuff that's good for you, that you know you should be eating, and that you haven't a clue how to get into your diet. It's all those vegetables and whole grains you keep hearing about.

It's hard to enjoy your morning chocolate doughnut with the Angel of Death smirking hideously at you over your coffee cup. "Lots of fat in that," he croaks, "not much fiber. Guess YOU won't be getting your five servings of fruits and vegetables today." The Broccoli may not be real, but the Dread certainly is.

The kitchen seems to have become the least-frequented room in a lot of homes in recent years. Of course, that's partly due to the rise of the two-career family, but I think the profusion of confusing -- not to mention scary -- dietary advice also plays a role. Cooking, for many of us, has always meant producing the old standbys: macaroni and cheese, meat loaf, pot roast. These things taste good, and our families, if they're not into nutritional correctness, applaud when they appear on the table. Unfortunately, even a cursory glance at the nutrition news is enough to convince you this stuff is terrible for you. Don't even bother to eat it. Just pack it right into your coronary arteries. Few of us are comfortable serving food that we know doesn't do our bodies any good. Feeding ourselves and others implies more than lust satisfying the appetite. When we cook we want to increase both the short- and long-term well-being of our near and dear, not sentence them to an early grave.

But as soon as we look around for something different to cook, we run right into another major intimidator: the gourmet trend. The American culinary scene has become a minefield of strange ingredients and elaborate preparations. The country teems with super-chefs, all of whom seem to have written recipe books designed to make the average home cook feel inferior.

Many of their recipes work well for serious weekend chefs, hobbyists who want to truly master the culinary arts, and for whom complex and painstaking preparation is a taken-for-granted part of the cooking experience. There are many such people. We recently ate a Chinese banquet, meticulously prepared by our editor's husband, that absolutely blew us away. Clearly, the art of fine cooking is in no danger, but the craft of everyday home cooking may be. After you look in a few gourmet cookbooks, and eat in a top-tier restaurant or at the home of a talented amateur, you're ready to throve in the towel, if you don't have all day to cook, and there's no lemongrass or porcini mushrooms at your local A&P, you figure you might as well run down to McDonald's.

We're convinced, though, that you don't have to let either the dietitians or the chefs -- or even your busy lifestyle -- keep you out of your kitchen. Dreaded Broccoli won't make you into an expert nutritionist or an awesome gourmet chef. Nor will you find in its index references to every food you might ever want to prepare, if it's something Tamar or don't cook and eat fairly regularly, it s not in here. This is a shamelessly quirky book full of our food enthusiasms. We think it will help you produce good-tasting healthful meals you can share happily with your family and friends -- all without spending endless hours in front of the stove.

When Tamar and I began to cook low-fat/high-veggie meals, we learned that just tweaking our old favorites wasn't the way to go. Most of our traditional menus and favorite dishes had been designed to capitalize on the flavors and textures of meats and on the emulsions and liaisons created by saturated fats. Learning to appreciate a lot of new foods was the only way we could make significant, lasting changes in the way we ate. Obviously we needed new preparation methods for the new foods. We experimented, working from a foundation of stocks and basic flavors. We found recipes that helped us make these changes, but we also discovered that a lot of discrete recipes weren't all that useful as a guide for everyday cooking.

You too, if you turn out meals on a regular basis, have general strategies, even if your menus are an unvarying meat-potato-2 veg. You visualize dinner. You know what foods belong in it. You know which of these foods are essential and which are incidental, which should be cooked and which can remain raw. You have a few cooking techniques that you use over and over again. To cook and eat more healthfully you need to examine and evaluate the foods you prepare and the way you prepare them, and then make fundamental alterations, beginning with your basic concept of what constitutes dinner. No way are you going to do that because a dietitian hands you a few recipes.

You will, however, find recipes in this book. Every time I write one, I hear a still, small voice whisper that there are already too many recipes in the world. I answer that all I'm doing is telling people that this is how i cooked something one day. I'm just letting them know, by providing instructions organized into a familiar pattern, that they can cook it, or something like it, too. I hope you'll treat no recipe in this book as a sacred text. Imagine us mucking around in our tiny kitchens wondering what to do with whatever's in the refrigerator or the pantry. When you make something that this book has inspired, it won't be mine and it won't be Tamar's -- it will be your own.

This book is about taking back your kitchen from the guys in white, whether they're wearing chefs' toques or lab coats. It's about recipe independence; it's about cooking as a craft for every day; it's about improvisation; it's about making one meal segue into the next; and it's about techniques for making healthful food palatable. It's also about Tamar and me, our family and friends, and the foods we love.

Copyright © 1999 by Barbara and Tamar Haspel

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684854546
• ISBN 13: 9780684854540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320