Paleo and friends

Anti-inflammatory eating for a happy, healthy brain: 75 recipes for alleviating depression, anxiety, and memory loss by Michelle Babb.  "Anti-inflammatory" in this book is defined as a Mediterranean-style diet.  The author talks a very little and rather generally about recent research into the connection between the brain and the gut, and mentions a few studies that show patients more frequently co-presenting with both a mood disorder and a food sensitivity.  She's not trying to convince anyone, though: the introductory information in this book is for people who already think this eating style will benefit them.

Again, this food plan-- high in fresh vegetables, no gluten, no dairy-- would be feasible and heathy for most people.  Very few recipes are useful for me, as they tend to rely heavily on beans and leafy greens.  There's very little health information here aside from "eat more whole foods," so not recommended except for those few people who already know about the Mediterranean diet, know it works for them, and just need more recipes.

Paleo lunches and breakfasts on the go: The solution to gluten-free eating all day long with delicious, easy and portable primal meals by Diana Rodgers.  This book has some pretty delicious-looking recipes.  The lunch options seem both easy and unique.

The author does a good job of making this way of eating seem approachable-- she explains her work history and her current family situation, so it does seem like she's a "real person" and not some independently wealthy individual who can spend 6 hours a day on cooking.  She contradicts herself, however, in trying to make the book the one-stop-shop for too many different kinds of Paleo eaters: she talks about people who are 100% Paleo, people who eat clean for health reasons but can "cheat" up to a certain percent with few ill effects, people who can't cheat because of inflammatory reasons, people going Paleo as a whole family with kids, people going Paleo for about 6 other reasons...  If most people are cheating up to one meal a week, why spend so much time and effort making sure your restaurant meal is perfectly Paleo?  Eat the sauce that might have a whole tablespoon of flour in as a thickener, call it your cheat day, and be done.  If your advice is for people who need to eat this way all the time, why spend pages talking about "acceptable" types of cheat meals?  She's also trying to fill space: many pages have more text in the little blurb about the food than devoted to the actual recipe or instruction; most are fairly simple, so a whole page for each is unnecessarily generous.  Better use of given space could have made a more compactly-sized book, or doubled the amount of actual content.

The bulk of the book is lunch-type meals, then breakfasts, then other sides and small items.  Worth it for libraries to have for the recipe variety, not worth owning personally.

The ancestral table: Traditional recipes for a paleo lifestyle by Russ Crandall.  This is a very useful book.  The author approaches Paleo from the anti-inflammatory side, having dealt with autoimmune problems.  After using Paleo to let the inflammation heal, he does incorporate some dairy into many recipes.  Health information in the front of the book is geared toward anti-inflammatory information and toxic load, and has footnotes!  Instructional information in the beginning is geared for people who may be new to cooking, and a complete table at the end gives amendments for each recipe to sub out the "non-Paleo" foods he uses (dairy, rice, potatoes, and peas).  Each recipe is accompanied by an informational paragraph, but each paragraph is almost exclusively about the origin and history of the food.

This will be a cookbook I want to check out again in a few months, when (if?) I'm able to introduce a wider array of vegetables.  The variety of cooked vegetables is the most useful part for me.  Most of the main dish recipes tend toward the time-intensive (2 hours or more is not uncommon), and tend to require many ingredients: not really something I can handle right now.  Canned tomatoes and tomato products seem to feature heavily.  Many of the meat dishes and also the fruits and desserts call for a dizzying array of different types of flours: chestnut flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, rice flour, arrowroot starch... there are a few other exotic ingredients (sweet potato noodles?!) that make quite a few of the main dishes not so do-able for weeknight dinners and would probably require online shopping.

Not something I'd ever probably buy mysef-- in addition to canned goods and dairy, coconut oil is very common in the recipes-- but I'm glad it's available at my public library.

The nourished kitchen: Farm-to-table recipes for the traditional foods lifestyle by Jennifer McGruther.  I don't know what the "traditional foods lifestyle" may be, but the library catalog returned this when searching for fermented foods cookbooks-- fermented foods feature heavily in level 2 of the Wahl's diet spectrum and my doctor has been encouraging me to try to incorporate them.  Difficulties include (1) my family never ate any fermented foods growing up*, so I'm starting from scratch, and (2) all the fermented foods that immediately spring to mind are outside my ability to tolerate: can't have tea of any sort, so kombucha is out; not having any dairy, so no yogurt; have not yet tried to reintroduce non-dairy substitutes, so non-dairy yogurt isn't a given; have never liked pickles.  I don't like even the smell of sauerkraut, but so far eating a little cabbage has been ok, so that may be my first experiment.

There is nothing useful in this book.  The only fermentation recipe that appealed to me was unappealingly time-consuming, requiring additions every day.  None of the recipes in the other sections seem particularly unique; they don't stand out from all the other books and websites focused on using locally-produced vegetables.

The writing, however, tips the book from "nothing special" into "actively avoid" status.  Each recipe is preceded by a paragraph from the author, which is usually longer than the recipe and instructions together.  The author's favorite words are "I," "me,"  and "my;" while there is information about nutrition, local food production, benefits, etc., they are far outweighed by the "I like to," "I prefer to buy," and "I typically use," along with paragraphs about "my garden" and "my CSA."  The author talks about herself so much I'm forced to assume she's some kind of TV or online personallity with a following of fans interested in her life, a la the Pioneer Woman.  She's certainly not a "regular person" and I have to give her credit that she doesn't pretend to be.  I can't imagine anyone I know being able to make their family's yogurt, butter, bread, pickles, and everything else from scratch.  She apparently makes bone broth every week (a 12-hour project minimum) and many of the recipes are too time-consuming or fiddly to be common menu additions in most homes.  I know precisely three people who don't work outside the home-- the stay-at-home home-schooling mother of 7, and my retired dad and step-mom, who shuttle and baby sit their 5 local grandkids, care for elderly family, and try to visit their 4 non-local grandkids as much as possible.  I imagine any "regular" working/busy person who wanted to embrace a closer-to-the-earth eating style would be depressed by this book-- it would be almost impossible to actually implement.

*my Swedish grandma makes a point of going to a Sons of Norway gathering once a year so she can eat lutefisk.  I get the impression she doesn't even like lutefisk, and she complains about having to spend time with all those Norse.  She never eats it at home, and it was never offered to us.

Fresh food from small spaces: The square inch gardener's guide to year-round growing, fermenting, and sprouting by R.J. Ruppenthal.  We didn't sign up for a community garden space this year, and, although we had meant to, we didn't get raised beds installed in the back yard.  But, in addition to enjoying gardening just for fun, I was interested in trying to get some kind of gardening done this year, since younger produce often has lower nickel content.  So I collected up all my various pots and sent the boys to the hardware store for potting soil.

I was hoping for tips to maximize the output from my container garden.  Surprisingly, that's not really what's in this book.  Most of the space that's dedicated to vegetable gardening is really just basic gardening advice, appropriate for people who have never gardened before.  Sections for fruit and vegetable gardening in containers are vague and not helpful.  Other chapters are about bees, chickens, worms, mushrooms, bean sprouts, and the author's views and strategies for resource shortages in the event of drought, earthquake, or fuel shortage.  There's nothing in here that isn't covered better in other resources.