Cooking With Rachel - by Rachel Albert

Creative vegetarian macrobiotic recipes to entertain guests, dazzle friends, and excite the most discerning palates.

This book is a compilation of recipes which appeal to a wide range of tastes and food preferences. While some of these recipes are strictly macrobiotic, others are intended to be used as fun foods, party foods, and transitional foods. My purpose in writing this book has been to share new recipes, many of which people suggested or had cravings for, as well as to include many favorite recipes from my first book Gourmet Whole Foods, no longer in print. And, I wanted to make adaptations of American and ethnic favorites that are like your old favorites but with higher-quality, lower-fat ingredients and without meat, sugar, or dairy products.
For some people these recipes may need to be adjusted. If you have a special dietary need or health condition you may have to skip over certain recipes. The purpose of having healing foods and fun foods in one volume is primarily to lend variety and inspiration to the experience of cooking, presenting, and enjoying the foods that are available within a broad macrobiotic framework. It is hoped that you will share these recipes and dishes with your family and friends, many of whom may not be macrobiotic but will likely enjoy these richer dishes and be inspired to try cooking with some of these new ingredients. It is much easier for people to make the transition to a macrobiotic or whole-foods diet when they are able to see, taste, and create dishes that are familiar to them and are similar to foods which they have enjoyed in the past.
The macrobiotic diet offers a wide array of tastes, textures, colors, and foods. This can be overwhelming to newcomers and can be a stumbling block to people who don't know what to do when they remove meat, sugar, eggs, dairy foods, and pre-packaged, processed foods from their diets. Most people don't realize how wide a selection of foods is available beyond the standard American diet.
This book will show you how to make healthier sandwiches, grain, noodle, or vegetable salads, casseroles, soups, stews, cookies, cakes, pancakes, puddings, pates, dips, snack foods, party foods, and ethnic favorites. This can make the journey to a healthier diet less rocky and overwhelming, and can make it easier to share your new way of eating with friends and family.
In my experiences teaching cooking classes, giving macrobiotic dinners, operating a restaurant, catering, and doing cooking demonstrations, bridging the gap between the standard American diet and macrobiotics has been facilitated by cooking a slightly wider macrobiotic diet and by making more familiar foods and dishes with macrobiotic quality ingredients. In this way we can make macrobiotics more accessible and less intimidating to the curious onlooker, friend, or family member.

328 pages
Published: 1989
Dimensions: 6" by 9"
Price: $6.48
ISBN: 0-918860-49-0
Publisher, GOMF

Chef  Rachel Albert -Matesz earned a bachelor's degree in sociology and communications from the University of Washington (Seattle). She has been a cooking instructor, consultant, healthy cooking coach, and food and health writer for 18 years. In 1988 Rachel started and ran Rachel's Natural Foods Cafe in Seattle, Washington. She has led more than 650 cooking classes in Ohio, Michigan, California, Washington, and Arizona.

Her books include Gourmet Wholefoods, Cooking with Rachel , and The Nourishment for Life Cookbook. All but Cooking with Rachel are out of print. More than 200 of Rachel's articles have appeared in national magazines, including Natural Home, Living Without, The Herb Companion, Herbs for Health, Yoga Journal, Let's Live, Oxygen Women's Fitness Magazine, Muscle & Fitness, Muscle & Fitness Hers, Conscious Choice, Well Being Journal, Veggie Life, Vegetarian Times, Vegetarian Journal, and Macrobiotics Today. Rachel's articles also appeared in Fit, New Body, and Vegetarian Gourmet, which are no longer in print.

Chef Rachel developed 130 recipes for two books by best-selling author Barry Sears, including 90 recipes for Zone Meals in Seconds (Harper-Collins 2004). After moving to Arizona in December of 2002, she began teaching cooking classes in gourmet kitchen shops and private homes in Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Chandler, and became a faculty member of the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts in Tempe, teaching in the nutrition department. trade paperback book.