Good recipes but a poorly designed book featuring bad colour contrast and an unhelpful Table of Contents.
Lyndi Cohen’s colourful book contains a series of healthy recipes but is more about recognising our relationship with food so we can develop healthier, sustainable habits.
Her views take up the first 140 pages of the book, beginning with her own story that went from an obsession with body image and emotional eating through to her present understanding of and attitude towards food. There’s an essential chapter on recoginising diets, including those not labelled as such, and Cohen complements her views throughout the book with worksheets, a sample diary and other quick reference tools and guides.
The terrible colour contrast of the text uses a lot of faded pastel colours that potentially making it inaccessible to many of the more than half a million Australians with a vision impairment. In today’s age of greater awareness of accessibility issues, it’s an inexcusable colour design, particularly coming out of Murdoch Books who are usually so reliable in the quality of their releases.
The guilt-free recipes in the latter third of the book are broken down into adequate sections, but the Table of Contents simply lumps them all under the useless heading of ‘recipes’ with no further information other than the page they start on. All the recipes include a separated ingredients list and simple instructions, along with useful additional tips, prep & cooking times, and the number of servings.
A colleague, Righjot, had great success with two of the recipes in the book and provided the following feedback on her experience:
Big Breakfast Bowl (page 146)
- Very easy to follow instructions
- A simple recipe
- Easy to find ingredients
- You won’t be guilty after finishing full plate of food.
- Prep time was about 20 mins, not just 3 minutes as the recipe states
- I also threw in grilled mushrooms
Zucchini Noodle Pad Thai (page 172)
- Prep time/cooking time was more than 30 minutes, not just 15 minutes as stated, but it is totally worth it
- The best guilt free/healthy dish to try out
- The ingredients were easy to be found in one’s kitchen
- The Pad Thai sauce was the hero of the dish which was sweet with the peanut butter and honey in it but providing a good kick with all the chillies it
Reviewed by Rod Lewis (with Righjot as the cook!)
Twitter: @StrtegicRetweet
Distributed by: Murdoch Books
Released: January 2019
RRP: $35
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