A Good Food Day: Reboot Your Health with Food that Tastes Great, by Marco Canora with Tammy Walker, foreword by Tim Ferriss, (Clarkson Potter), 272 pages, release date 30 December 2014
Marco Canora’s A Good Food Day is a great book for anyone hoping to establish healthier—and more delicious—eating habits in 2015. A long-time chef, Canora had to rethink his eating practices after being diagnosed with type two diabetes. His kind of good food day is one that works well, not just for diabetics, but for people looking to add plant-based foods to their diets. There is a “Fish” chapter and a “Meat and Poultry” chapter, but my favorites were “Salads,” “Vegetables,” “Beans and Lentils,” and “Great Grains.”
These dishes have enough going on to make them interesting without demanding unreasonable prep and cooking time. We recently had Roasted Carrots with Millet and Mint-Pistachio Pesto for dinner (we often cook vegetable sides for four, then split them between the two of us as a full meal). The millet is toasted, which adds both flavor and texture. The mint-pistachio pesto is worth working up on its own, as well as using as part of this dish. If you don’t have millet, try wild or brown rice instead.
Tonight’s dinner was Spinach Salad with Roasted Fennel, Oil-Cured Olives, and Grapefruit. The roasted fennel is mixed warm into the rest of the ingredients, so the dish provides a variety of temperatures, as well as varieties of flavors and textures. As a general rule, I am not a subtle cook, so if I prepared this dish again, I might well double the amounts of fennel and grapefruit to push the flavor contrasts a bit more—but the fact that I’m thinking about variations doesn’t mean we were unsatisfied with the original recipe. It was a delight!
The one drawback to this book (at least from my perspective as one of Canora’s fellow type two diabetics) is that it doesn’t provide nutritional information for each dish. These are definitely healthy dishes, but I would like to know the crabs-to-protein ratios, if only to see which dishes I might pair up together.
If you’re trying to improve your eating habits in 2015, this is definitely a book you’ll want to check out.