Book Review

Easy Everyday Keto

In my quest for interesting cookbooks, I became intrigued earlier this year when America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) released a cookbook around the Keto diet. When mine arrived, I was happily surprised to find more than two dozen recipes I’d like to try.

Ketogenic eating has roots that are 100 years old. If you’re looking for ways to reduce carbohydrates in your home cooking, a book like this can be a welcome addition to a shelf full of books that lean toward heavy carb diets.

All mealtimes are covered here with a lot of interesting twists being used to stay away from all-purpose flours, sugar, and processed foods. Blueberry muffins get a blend of almond and coconut flour, pancakes utilize erythritol instead of sugar, zoodles instead of noodles, and then there’s that almond-crusted pork chop!

And most of the ingredients are probably already in your kitchen. To make the Indian Butter Chicken, all I had to go out and get was a serrano chile, cilantro, and fresh ginger. The other 13 ingredients we’re already in my kitchen. If you have a basic herb garden on the patio or in the backyard, you’re pretty well stocked in that department as well.

As ATK often does when they are creating a specialty cookbook, the brought in an outside source to consult with their chefs as they built up the agenda of recipes. Nutritionist Alicia Romana brings a wealth of knowledge to the book and wrote the first chapter to help users better understand what the real food pyramid should look like and how you can amp up the nutrition in your cooking.

What I didn’t know would be in the book was a full outline, including a suggested four-week grid of recipes to move your body into full keto mode. That is where your body in no longer reliant on carbohydrates, instead unlocking energy reserves stored in fatty acids to provide energy to the body. In my current lifestyle, I can’t go there, but it’s nice to be making meals that are reducing the volume of glucose in my body.

As someone who has made a long journey getting to eating clean, the book fell a little short in that department though. There’s no mention about using clean ingredients like organic produce, grass fed beef, pastured chicken etc. But if that’s where you want to take your shopping cart, you probably already know those ingredients are superior to anything else in terms of both health and flavor.

Another letdown was the use of vegetable oil as well as grapeseed and canola oils, all of which are highly toxic to the human body and should be outlawed by the FDA sooner rather than later. But that will never happen since the corn lobbyists would explode!

TM/October 2020