Cooking Without: All recipes free from added gluten, sugar, dairy produce, yeast, salt and saturated fat

by Barbara Cousins

‘Cooking Without’ written by nutritional therapist Barbara Cousins is not only a collection of delicious and easy to make recipes but is also a book about health – how to gain it and how to keep it. The recipes in ‘Cooking Without’ obtain their flavour from ingredients that are health promoting rather than high levels of salt, fat or sugar. Ingredients such as gluten, dairy produce and yeast, which cause many individuals to have health problems, have also been excluded. As well as being linked to food intolerances these ingredients can also be an underlying factor in more serious health problems. The regime in ‘Cooking Without’ aims to give the body sufficient amounts of the nutrients it needs, thus producing extra energy which can be then be used for elimination and healing. The art of detoxification is explained in an easy to understand formula as are some of the reasons for health problems such as migraines, chronic fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1997

Reviews

[Lane · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first forty-nine pages of this book are a primer on health issues and the role foods can play in treating them, which is important for cookbooks that are introducing ingredients and cooking techniques outside of what one might learn in a basic home-economics class. That was not my problem with this book. My problem was with some of what she was saying in those pages. First, I have to admit that I am rather prickly about the word cure, and her talk about her particular diet being the answer for so many conditions (hypoglycemia, irritable bowel, chronic fatigue, addiction, migraines, candida, leaky gut syndrome, allergies, anorexia and bulimia, obesity) bothered me. That said, she had some things to say about the common approaches to candida and IBS (and how they fail people) that I’ve been thinking for a long time. Enough of what she said could very easily seem off the wall to someone with no background and/or experience in alternative health practices that I wanted a better understanding of how she came to her conclusions as well as more information, either from her or in the form of a list of additional readings and resources. She gets points for saying that it will be easier to follow this diet if people introduce it gradually (as opposed to the cold turkey method), and the recipes look pretty decent (I didn’t get a chance to try any, but I did get some ideas; for the most part she uses too much soy and corn for me to eat this way without some major modifications). She does a pretty good job of recognizing that some folks are going to have to make additional modifications to her recipes depending on individual allergies/intolerances and makes some suggestions for ways to do that and still maintain the integrity of the recipe. The fact that she calls for almost no processed foods makes this much easier. She also includes recipes for things like almond milk. I wouldn’t mind having this book around as a resource (for the recipes, not the info) but I would shy away from recommending it to people as their introduction to this kind of diet.

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gift from relative.