Book Review | The Food You Crave

My work life and blog life are not the best of friends. They fight all the time and, being the bully that he is, work life almost always wins. Work life has been especially active over the past month as we grow and make exciting changes to our business. I have managed to sneak in some tv time (I’ve got to unwind somehow!) and my most recent find is a show on the Food Network called Healthy Appetite with Ellie Krieger. Rantings and complaints about Food Network programming aside (there are enough other blogs that handle that), I really enjoy this show and think that it’s a great addition to their line-up. The accompanying book, The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life, has quickly become one of my favorites.

Ellie Krieger is a nutritionist who has combined her nutritional know-how with her cooking skills to create a fabulous collection of recipes that are good for you and actually taste good, too. She follows a “usually–sometimes–rarely” philosophy when it comes to choosing food. Nothing is off limits, as long as it’s in the rarely category, and she tries to incorporate usually foods – fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean meat – into every meal. She takes classic recipes that can typically be fat- and calorie-laden and updates them to be lighter, leaner and healthier. She has a l0t of interesting and inventive tricks up her sleeve for making successful healthy recipes. For instance, her Macaroni and Four Cheeses uses pureed squash as a surprise ingredient – it bumps up the nutritional value, adds a wonderful sweet and creamy flavor, and imparts that signature yellow-orange color that identifies a classic mac ’n’ cheese.

I recently tried her revamped version of Sloppy Joes. Her recipe adds kidney beans for an extra boost of fiber, diced red pepper for flavor and Vitamin C and uses ground sirloin to replace higher-fat ground beef. The flavor was spot-on Sloppy Joe and really hit the spot.

Every recipe in The Food You Crave supplies nutrition information, including “excellent and good sources” of vitamins and minerals. If there was one down-side to the recipes, it would be their lack of seasoning. If you’re on a sodium-restricted diet, this is the book for you. If you’re like me and like your food well-seasoned, you can simply add salt to taste and the recipes will be perfect.

Click here to download and print a pdf of this recipe:

Sloppy Joes