Super Natural Cooking - Kiss Your Processed Foods Goodbye

With the slow food movement and numerous farmers' markets dotting the American culinary map, still there are folks out there that think healthy eating equates to tasteless, bland food with dense textures. Thanks to Heidi Swanson's new book, Super Natural Cooking: Five Ways To Incorporate Whole & Natural Ingredients Into Your Cooking, she helps demystify this unfounded assumption.

It's not as hard as you think to swap out the processed foods lurking in your pantry. Utilizing five ways to encourage a whole foods diet, Swanson explains in great detail on how to buy the right flours, fats and spices, baking with 'alternative' grains like teff and quinoa, choosing color-rich vegetables, working with antioxidant-laden superfoods, and using natural sugars for desserts.

With eighty easy recipes to experiment with, you can try everyday dishes like the Clemenquat Salad, Black Tea Spring Rolls with Mushrooms and Mango Chutney Dipping Sauce, Sprouted Garbanzo Burgers, and Ginger-Amaranth Shortbread. Accompanied by Swanson's absolutely gorgeous photography, one might be immediately compelled to run to the kitchen and try their hand at re-creating her dishes. With such delicious flavors, you will soon kiss the refined grains and sugars goodbye.

Spring Minestrone with Brown Rice

Serves 4.

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 shallots, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
3/4 cup medium-grain brown basmati rice, rinsed
6 cups vegetable stock
1 cup sugar snap or snow peas, trimmed and cut in half diagonally
8 spears asparagus, trimmed and diagonally sliced into 1-inch pieces
1/2 cup green peas, fresh or frozen
Fine-grain sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat, then add the shallots and garlic and saute for a couple of minutes until soft. Add the rice and cook, stirring for 1 minute, then add the stock and bring to a boil. Cover, lower the heat, and simmer until the rice is just tender, 35 to 45 minutes.

Add the sugar snap peas, asparagus, and green peas, and season with a few healthy pinches of salt and a few grinds of black pepper. Simmer for another 2 or 3 minutes and serve immediately; this way the vegetables stay crisp and bright.

Reprinted with permission from Super Natural Cooking: Five Ways to Incorporate Whole & Natural Ingredients Into Your Cooking by Heidi Swanson. Photographs by Heidi Swanson. Copyright 2007. Published by Celestial Arts.