Cooking for a New Earth: A New Approach to Home Cooking That Promotes Wholesome Eating and Healthy Living

Drawing on both American and Japanese dietary guidelines, Chef Jerome gives us ten culinary principles that provide a map for healthy, ecologically aware cooking and eating. To create a balanced diet, he suggests we eat two slices of bread with every meal and two servings of cereals or grains, three or four different vegetables, and two fruits every day. He recommends modest amounts of animal protein, little or no fat or salt, and, whenever possible, foods with minimal or no chemical additives. He wants us to think seasonally when we buy food and to understand the food we buy. And, equally important, he urges us to make every meal a celebration, or, as the Japanese say, to treasure home cooking and make all our activities pertaining to food and eating pleasurable ones.
This is a tall order in our hurry-up society, but Chef Jerome makes a good case for this old yet new way of thinking, and then makes it easy for us by giving us unusually creative recipes so that we can enjoy a rich variety of good-tasting, healthful food. He enlarges our repertoire of vegetables, beans, and grains with recipes like Emerald Spinach with Hidden Herbs, Rice with Black-eyed Peas and Tomatoes, and Whole Wheat Couscous with Wild Mushrooms. He offers Brown Basmati Rice with Cinnamon Sugar or Bread Pudding with Currants for breakfast and a variety of complex, satisfying soups for all times of the day. He extols the virtues of making bread, and the recipes in the bread chapter constitute a minicourse in bread making. There are deeply flavorful recipes for meat dishes and desserts - to be enjoyed in moderation.