Eat well and enjoy every bite

Nettie Cronish is a natural and organic foods chef, culinary instructor and cookbook writer. She is the author of several vegetarian cookbooks, and for the past 25 years has also been a culinary instructor teaching cooking classes  throughout Toronto and Ontario, Canada. Nettie also teaches corporate cooking classes and works with dieticians.

When working with one of those registered dieticians, Cara Rosenbloom, Nettie discovered that they had a mutual love for beans. This shared interest eventually led to the pair creating a new cookbook, Nourish, which is based on the premise that eating healthily and well isn’t about a pinch of calcium here and dose of Vitamin C there, it’s about eating whole foods that are rich in nutrients. (Enter our contest for your chance to win a copy of the book.)

Nettie and Cara firmly believe that by using flexible, nutritious, inexpensive, and tasty legumes, everyone – not just vegetarians – will benefit from the nutritional impact of these small wonders.  We asked the authors to elaborate more about their book, and this is what Cara had to say:

Adding more legumes, nuts and seeds to the diet is the goal of Nourish, so we’ve used these nutrient-dense plant foods in every recipe in the book. However, it’s not only a vegetarian cookbook! To please many palates, we’ve added beans, nuts and seeds to familiar foods that people enjoy every day – like chicken, fish, grains, vegetables and fruit. It’s our way of highlighting that you don’t need to drastically alter your diet to add more plant foods – and we have 100 recipes to prove it!

From sesame-crusted salmon, to Asian vegetable noodle soup, to sweet peanut butter-cocoa bliss bites, the book has recipes to please everyone. Nourish offers chef-inspired recipes and dietitian-driven insights, which are combined for an educational, delicious read.

The concept for Nourish began as a way to capitalize on our mutual love for beans, nuts and seeds, in the hopes of encouraging others to include more of these versatile ingredients in their diet, and get into the kitchen to cook! Underutilized and uber-healthy, they are the most overlooked foods in the kitchen – often because few people know how to add these ingredients to their meals. We’ve infused the goodness of beans, nuts or seeds into easy-to-use recipes to make it easy for you.  

Eat more whole food

While processed foods abound, research shows that it is healthiest to cook with fresh, whole ingredients and shy away from processed foods. Nourish is based on recipes for real, whole foods, while minimizing the reliance on processed foods. The title ingredients of seeds, nuts and beans are paired with whole foods like vegetables, fruit, whole grains, meat, fish, poultry and dairy to create tantalizing recipes.

Back in the 1950s, we didn’t know the harm that processed foods could potentially have, especially if we ate too many of them. We now know that the combination of excess salt, cheap fats, refined flour, sugar, food colouring and preservatives is a very unhealthy mix. The shift is to cook from scratch more often, skipping the processed foods. These 100 recipes can help inspire the cooking process!

The good news is that trend spotters say that cooking at home is one of the big food trends for 2016. Instead of remaining fixated on convenient alternatives like fast food, processed products and ready-made items, people are discovering that they would be better served by spending more of their energy on learning how to prepare healthful whole foods at home!

Nourish can inspire you to cook and eat well, and enjoy every bite.