Foreword
This book will put you at “the head of the class” in safe and healthy food preparation. We would have a healthier world if Easy Cooking for Special Diets were a required course for high school seniors or college freshmen – or maybe even for graduate students and young professionals who need ideas that can be incorporated into their time-pressured lives!
You will enjoy the glimpses into Nickie’s family and will sense her love of wholesome food that nourishes body and soul. Be sure to read about Nickie’s husband and sugar on page 18 – a life enhancing gem of a lesson!
“Nutrition 105” is quite detailed and you might be tempted to skip over it, but this chapter will motivate you to eat a wide variety of foods and to cook as much from scratch as possible so you can load up on health-providing nutrients, assuring you the energy to pursue your active life.
If you’ve been cooking for years, you will still find new knowledge and recipes in this book and will enjoy the challenge of using alternative grains such as spelt and sweeteners other than sugar. Start your new cooking adventure with the easy recipes which will simplify your life in the first several recipe chapters. Then after you have had some practice, enjoy making the fun recipes in “Recipes to Impress” for guests.
Do you need help cooking for a special diet? Would you like to be more alert and full of vibrant energy? To avoid “flu” symptoms by using better food handling practices and making wise choices when eating out? To entertain with ease? Then don’t underestimate the messages in this book. This book belongs in the hands of as many graduates, brides, friends, and family members as possible. Give it to your friends and then get together with them and motivate each other to make improvements in your and your family’s health.
Ann Fisk, B.S., R.N.
Founder of “An Ounce of Prevention”
Cooking 101
In years gone by, learning to cook was as natural as learning to walk. Mothers spent much of their time in the kitchen, and children “helped” them cook from an early age. It was fun to sprinkle flour into the mixing bowl as a cake was made, watch the frosting grow fluffy under the spell of the mixer, and then lick the beaters. As the children grew older, their help became real and they began to take over some of the cooking chores.
Now our lives are much busier and parents do not spend as much time cooking. Take-out is what’s for dinner, or frozen entrees heated in the microwave make lunch. When adults do cook, it is often in such a rush that “help” from the children cannot be permitted to slow them down. Busy families barely have time for dinner, let alone for cooking lessons before dinner! Learning to cook nowadays often means learning to microwave foods prepared by other people.
However, in the interests of maximum health and saving money, homemade food is still best. It also tastes better than most things you can buy pre-made! Many a desperate allergy patient has called me and said, “I just found out I’m allergic to several foods. My doctor told me there are substitute foods I can use, but I have no idea of how to cook anything from scratch!”
Older people develop high blood pressure or heart problems and have to follow a special diet, and find themselves in a similar predicament. Everyone should know how to cook! However, a Gallup Poll showed that in the year 2005, one-third of the U.S. population knew nothing about cooking.
My children grew up helping in the kitchen but gradually outgrew the “fun” of it. The need for cooking education in our family became obvious when my older son Joel attended an engineering institute at a nearby college during the summer before his senior year in high school. The first evening he called home to tell us that he was O.K. and about what they had done. He said that for dinner the students had been served, “something they called spaghetti, but I don’t see how anyone could think it was really spaghetti.” I reminded him that he is half Italian and therefore has higher standards for pasta than most of his fellow students. However, I could tell that dormitory food might be his least favorite part of the college experience, so that very evening I began writing this book.
Most young people today enter college well educated in mathematics and science, history and language, computers and the arts, but knowing little or nothing about cooking. In college they eat dorm food, fast food, and junk food. Those who have microwave ovens and small refrigerators in their dormitory rooms use them for trans-fat-laden microwave popcorn and sodas. By eating this way, they deprive their bodies of much-needed nutrients and starve their spirits of the pleasures of good food. This physical and psychological deprivation may lead them to eat more food than they need. The high-fat foods they consume also contribute to the notorious “freshman fifteen” – the fifteen pounds which most students gain during their first year of college.
Some students have health challenges such as food allergies or diabetes. For them, control of their diets is more than just a way to stay slim, trim, and energetic; it is absolutely essential medically. If they are to survive college in good health, they will have to eat the dormitory cafeteria offerings very selectively and supplement them with good food from their rooms, or they may need to live in an apartment where they can do their own cooking.
My desire is that this book will help people of every age learn to cook so that they will be able to feed themselves healthily and easily. I hope it will help those on special diets stay on those diets for good health, help all college students get the real nutrition they need to keep up their active lives while retaining their trim high school figures, and help young adults (or anyone on their own for the first time) easily and healthily use the kitchens in their first apartments.
Good cooking and good nutrition are the best ways to take good care of yourself. Learning to cook is an investment in your health that will pay off for the rest of your life.
Recommended by Experts:
In over 29 years of medical practice, I have dealt with many patients with food allergies and intolerances. It has been readily apparent that the majority of individuals with these sensitivities have no idea how to prepare a “real and healthy” meal. As one patient told me, “I don’t really cook. I thaw!”
Even the experienced cook can benefit from the various topics covered in Easy Cooking for Special Diets. The primer on nutrition is not only helpful to the novice, but also to the seasoned food preparer who might not have a solid foundation on nutrition in healthy cooking. All of the topics covered in the book have information that adds to the enjoyment of cooking.
Certainly the book is a must for cooks at any level to develop both the art and the chemistry of healthy food preparation. A healthy lifestyle requires a healthy, nourishing diet. The variety of wonderfully organized recipes and menus displayed in the book counters the “monotony” of the average American diet.
Nicholas G. Nonas, M.D.
Allergy and Environmental Medicine
Littleton, Colorado
Easy Cooking for Special Diets amounts to a dose of confidence for novice cooks of any age. It would make a wonderful, totally appropriate gift to high school graduates heading to college, newlyweds, young people going into their first apartment – or anyone else learning to cook healthily or to cook “from scratch” for the first time. Her clear directions virtually assure first-time success!
Marjorie Hurt Jones, R.N.
Author of The Allergy Self-Help Cookbook
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