Paleo Comfort Foods

Score 5.5/10

 

This cookbook tries to bring homestyle cooking into the paleo world. The problem is, ingredients get pretty expensive when you are trying to mimic this style of cooking. Coconut butter, coconut oil, almond flour, pecans, macadamia nuts, and the list of expensive food items goes on and on. There are some good recipes in here and the pictures of the food are sure to make your mouth water (the problem is to get your creations to look like theirs!). We enjoyed several of the items we cooked from this book, of which you'll read more about in week three's post.

Katy cooked out of this book for several recipes and had this to say: Pros of the cookbook are that the pictures are excellent, the ingredient notes about lesser known items were very helpful, and it was fun to see some traditional recipes done with a paleo spin. A big negative of the cookbook was that they don't list the number of servings their recipes make, so it was sometimes hard to plan out our meals when cooking for ourselves and trying to decide whether to half the recipe, or cooking for friends and trying to figure out how much to make. Some of the recipes were also hard to follow, which was frustrating.

My biggest issue with the cookbook was the long narrative at the beginning that detail the authors journeys. They do make some excellent points, and I found myself at times nodding my head in agreement with what they were saying. At other times I found myself shaking my head because I am already getting tired of the arrogant tone that seems to be characteristic of a lot of paleo authors and bloggers. Multiple times they refer to paleo as eating "real" food and talk condescendingly about non-paleo foods. They mention that some people can do good on a vegan diet and that's great, but for them paleo is a lifestyle. Well, I have news for these authors, for plenty of people being vegan isn't a diet, its a lifestyle as well. I think paleo can be a wonderful diet for the right people...but it is not for everyone. That doesn't mean that people not following paleo can not pursue or even attain optimal health. As a nutrition student I am a firm believer in our food choices being a very personal and individual decision with more than just good health playing a role in these choices. Everything from religion to culture to emotion and to just sheer enjoyment plays a role in what we choose to eat. I want people who write books about food and diet to remember this, but it seems often they are narrow minded in their food perspective.

I gave this a lower score than the last book because it had less recipes and some of the recipes it did have I later found almost identical recipes for free online. I loved the idea of taking a style of cooking (homestyle) and putting a paleo twist on it, and the pictures were excellent. So, in my unscientific rating scale, I gave the book a slightly higher than average score of 5.5.