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Healthy and Delicious

It’s all very well telling us that we should eat 5 fruits or veggies each day but that sometimes seems difficult to achieve. Crisps and red wine don’t seem to count and I am not even sure that a stuffed olive is equal to two portions; and is Marmite part of the equation? Perhaps not. There has always been confusion about what constitutes a portion of vegetables anyway. Healthy and Delicious offers us all the information, so now I know that I’ll need half a large courgette and two tomatoes, but ten radishes seem quite a lot to munch through.

Reader’s Digest has produced Healthy and Delicious and it’s a mine of information about vegetables and how to eat a healthy diet. It’s a large format volume with a picture for each recipe. There are lots of cooking tips and even notes on ingredients. There is an A-Z Guide to Vegetables and a freezing chart. Fresh is good but be practical and use frozen veggies rather than no veggies at all. I have no qualms about using frozen peas and frozen sweet corn, although I do think that frozen mashed potatoes is a freeze too far.

Each recipe has cooking and preparation times as well as nutrition information. Spicy Swede and Potatoes offers 3 of your 5 portions of veg and it only takes 10 minutes to make and 24 minutes to cook. Satay-roasted Roots gives you 4 of those 5 so I guess I’ll be eating that and half a large courgette every day!

A sneaky way of getting an extra portion of vegetable is via a dessert. I had not, I confess, even considered that carrot cake would be included. OK, so most of the sweet treats here will only have a value of, say, ½ a portion but there are little gems that are a full portion. Sweet Potato Pie with Cranberry-Pecan Marmalade is one of your 5 a day.

Healthy and Delicious has lovely recipes but its strength lies in its portion information. You will be able to look at all your other cookbooks through more educated eyes. We all need to make good food choices but we need know about that food in order to make informed choices. Healthy and Delicious is a broad-based recipe book but also a kitchen tool. Use it and find easy and tasty ways of eating those 5 a day. It’s one of the best value books around.

Healthy and Delicious
Authors: Reader’s Digest.
Published by: Reader’s Digest (Available from March)
Price: £12.99
ISBN 978-0-276-44502-6