Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Fix It and Enjoy It Healthy Cookbook

We've been trying for a long while to improve our eating habits and overall health. We have good times and bad times with that, as I'm sure a lot of people do. The things I find are most helpful for me are recipes that are fast and/or can be prepared in advance, and recipes that supply nutritional information. For me not only does having the nutritional information stop me from making poor choices (sometimes), but it also guides me towards trying recipes I might not normally.

If you wonder if Fix It and Enjoy It Healthy Cookbook delivers, take a look at the back of the book - "Yes, it is possible to combine tasty, quick and healthy!". And it does. 400 recipes. All relatively fast (5 minutes to 2 hours cooking time), all with nutritional information, and more variety than I could have expected. 55 salad recipes. 24 appetizer/snacks. 56 soups.

Each recipe includes full nutritional information, prep and cooking times, and a graphic showing how the dish fares on the Mayo Clinic Healthy Weight Pyramid. There are no photos in the book but the dishes are all solid familiar meals that don't inspire fear without photos.

I tried a variety of recipes from the Main Dishes, Vegetables, Breakfast and Snacks/Appetizers. All of them came out very well and all of them were prepared/cooked within the time frame given in the recipe, something I often find doesn't happen. I enjoyed everything I made and I've got to tell you, this book is worth buying for the baked sweet potato fries (pg 136 - and 56 calories per serving!) and the fat free strawberry yogurt dip (pg 243) alone.