Top-selling cookbooks this week…guess what category?

Every once in a great while, I enjoy putting down my silicone spatula, closing whatever brand-new, promising cookbook I’m reviewing this week, and having a look to see what everyone else is cooking from.  

It’s especially fun doing it at this time of year.  Because although the excesses of holiday eating seem awful to contemplate in retrospect, one can’t stop eating altogether.  Which may explains why this week’s #1 cookbook is [drumroll please]…Raw Energy, by Stephanie Tourles.

It’s not even a new book (2010 publication date).  But its message of rejuvenation and re-charging seems to really hit home during the dry-skinned, immune-compromised, staticky-hair, stressed-and-tired month of January.  Is it really a cookbook if no heat is applied and the only cooking implement involved is  a blender?  I’m not sure.  But nobody seems to mind.

#2 is The Wheat Belly Cookbook.  Poor Triticum aestivum!  It’s the grain that can’t catch a break, vilified for everything from low energy to muffin tops.  And #3 is Forks Over Knives – a book advocating plant-based eating for all.

There you have it–three ways to get your body back in business:  raw food, no wheat, and plants.

The funny thing is that #4 is The Italian Slow Cooker – which is to say: “To h*ll with dieting!  Give me some meat and canned tomatoes cooked for 8 hours! because there’s 4 inches of snow on the ground and I want my comfort foods now!”

And #5 is the book from self-improvement guru Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Chef, which to me is simply funny.  If you’re not familiar with Ferriss, his approach to life is that you can compress all sorts of time-consuming goals into short intervals of concentrated effort – a 70-hour workweek into 4 hours, for example.  From what I understand, The 4-Hour Chef is really a book about learning how to learn.  But I can’t help thinking every time I see that title: “Well, obviously!  In 4 hours anybody can make a really, really awesome dinner!”

After the top 5 books, we start to get into more familiar territory: Smitten Kitchen, Barefoot Contessa and the rest.

If this representative top 5 sampling is anything like previous ones, I’m going to guess that very few EYB members are cooking from these books.  But go ahead!  Prove me wrong!