Rating: WORTHY!
This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Clean Enough from someone with the most intriguing author name I've seen in a while, promises to get you back to basics and still leave room for desert, and I think it achieves its aim. It's equally divided into two parts, the first titled 'Clean'. I'll let you guess what the second is titled! Clean is comprised of several sections, the first of which is Drink to your Health, featuring drinks to get you up and moving in one way or another, and including Designer Cashew Milk, Runner's Juice, and the Indiana Jones-sounding Holy Coconut Matcha Elixir.
Next up is Harmony Bowls, comprised of suggestions for breakfast which consist mostly of granola, eggs and oatmeal concoctions. There's a section on augmenting a common breakfast item by adding healthful foods such as avocado, mushrooms, tomatoes, and such to toast to taste! This idea works with the oatmeal too: start with something simple and basic and augment it to your own personal taste. After this comes a very full section on salads including some items you may not think of when you think of a salad. This is followed by prepared veggies including broccolini, onion, green bean, carrot, and eggplant, even though some of those aren't really vegetables.
Following this is a section on 'good starch' which covers rice, sweet potatoes, lentils, and quinoa, which I personally think we should call kwin-o-ah. Who can seriously get with keenwah? Really?! Keenwah sounds like a karate punch that will make you howl. I do not want that in my stomach. LOL! Remember starches (aka carbohydrates) are a required food for your body to function. It's not actually eating them that's the problem. Like everything else in your diet, it's the overeating of the wrong stuff that causes problems! After this section comes a short one on soups, which offers squash, tomato, beet, and coconut. The 'Clean' section finishes up with some suggestions for sauces and dressings.
The 'Enough' part covers a shocking array of desert items that will put weight on you just from looking through the pages. It features cookies (chocolate, molasses, raisin, coconut), cakes (the banana whiskey torte sounded really interesting!) and pies. That latter includes a Wimbledon pie which I'd never heard of, and which yes, contains strawberries, and which looks disgustingly irresistible from the photograph, although I cannot claim I've tried this!
Does anyone else find the name Wimbledon amusing? Okay, just me then. I asked around about this pie and it's not a racquet! It turns out that you get four servings and if you ace them all, you win.... The silk road custard tart looked scrumptious to me. It reminded me of such tarts I enjoyed when I lived in Britain (and no you are not allowed to double-entendre that!). Not that these deserts are Britain-based by any means. What you'll find yourself needing to remember in this section is that wholesome isn't the same thing as calorie-free!
Everyone has their own preferences when it comes to what one eats and some of those preferences are decidedly unhealthy. Eating whole foods rather than processed foods is healthier because those kinds of foods are what our bodies have evolved to digest healthily. Our problem is that we've been primed to gobble down fatty, salty, and sweet foods from when such things were scarce, but our bodies, which naturally sought out these things for perfectly healthy reasons in prehistory, cannot cope with this stuff now it's so very easy to come by.
Any eating plan (let's not talk about diets which rarely work) that gets you partaking healthily of good food, and which you can stick with is the plan to adopt for you, and while this book may not appeal to everyone, no book can! That's why my recommendation is to check it out and see if it fits your lifestyle if it does, you're on the gravy train! Or something like that.... I commend this as a worthy title.
