Forks Over Knives: The Cookbook (4 page)

BEANS
, showing their amazing versatility in dishes like Judy Micklewright’s
Cuban-Style Black Beans with Cilantro Rice

GRAINS
, with enticing recipes featuring rice, corn, polenta, millet, quinoa, bulgur, barley, and more

CASSEROLES
, providing recipes for everything from
Mac and “Cheese”
to
Moroccan-Style Shepherd’s Pie

And last but not least, Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s
DESSERTS
chapter, proving that low-fat, whole-grain, plant-based desserts can taste great without eggs, butter, or any other dairy.

At this point, you might be wondering,
What about vitamins, potassium, or calcium? What about calorie counts and carbohydrates, fat, and protein?
If you’ve seen the film or read the first
Forks Over Knives
book, you may remember that good health can only be achieved by focusing on adopting an overall healthful dietary pattern: a low-fat, plant-based diet composed of whole foods. Don’t worry about eating particular foods in order to get enough of certain nutrients. Focus instead on eating (and enjoying!) the wide variety of fruits, vegetables, beans and legumes, whole grains, and other ingredients used in our recipes, over the course of
each day, each week, each month, and each year. These foods combined will naturally steer you on your way toward optimal health.

We have included desserts in this book, which we are sure you will find delicious! Keep in mind that most of the desserts contain some amount of added sugar (although the recipes in this book are lower in sugar than many you will find). The added sugar is a source of concentrated calories without the fiber that helps regulate blood sugar and makes you feel full. So it is important to remember that desserts are treats—something you eat on a special occasion, but not every day.

We have elected not to include nutrient data for recipes to avoid encouraging the tendency to get hung up on nutrient tallying or calorie counting. Forget about the numbers! Just pay attention to your body’s natural hunger signals and eat the low-fat, nutrient-rich, plant-based recipes presented here, and you will reap the myriad benefits that come with doing so.

Just what are those benefits, exactly? If you’re already eating the whole-foods, plant-based way, then you’ve likely already discovered a wide variety of advantages, not only for your personal health but also for animal welfare and for the environment. If not, you might want to check out the “Good for Animals” and “Good for the Environment” sections in Part One of
Forks Over Knives: The Plant-Based Way to Health
. Even if you have read those sections, the social and economic advantages of this eating style are worth highlighting again here:

If you consume a typical Western diet, most likely you live in a country like the United States, a country with the most expensive health care in the world and some of the
least
healthy people. Sadly, as the costs of health care continue to rise and the health of the population continues to decline, we face a growing economic and social crisis. This, however, is a crisis that need not grow any more. Once we wake up to the problem, we can regain control of our own health care, starting at our family’s breakfast table.

We can make a significant dent in both our own and our society’s health care expenses by paying attention to the foods we eat. Any number of diseases—cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and more—can be not only prevented, but in many cases
reversed
with the right diet: a whole-foods, plant-based diet. By eating this way, you can cut down on increasingly expensive medical bills and insurance costs. As a bonus, you’ll even likely slash your weekly grocery bills, because the healthiest foods, like beans, grains, fruits, and vegetables, also tend to be less expensive than the highly processed foods that are currently making us sick. The whole-plant foods that feature in these recipes are readily available in most places and—while they haven’t been spared the price increases that have affected all kinds of food in the last several years—they remain far more affordable than most red meat, poultry, dairy items, and processed foods, products on which consumers pay a premium for not only manufacturing and production, but for research and development, packaging, and shipping.

Being sick not only comes with the out-of-pocket expenses for increasingly expensive medical bills and insurance (and the hidden, behind-the-scenes expenses that insurance companies handle), but also negatively impacts the things that matter most in your life,
whether it’s spending time with family and friends; achieving your physical, mental, and personal goals; making a difference in your community; or just
living
. The costs of disease are not just high for you—they’re high for everyone around you, too.

Preparing foods from scratch is far less expensive than buying foods already prepared—and for those who are in the habit of doing so, it’s often a pleasure to see raw ingredients transformed into nourishing foods for themselves, their family, and their friends. Consider, for example, that canned beans cost 3 to 4 times as much as dried beans that you cook yourself. Not only will you be saving money by cooking your own, you can feel confident that the meals you prepare with those beans won’t contain all the extra preservatives and sodium that standard canned beans can bring to a meal.

Sometimes, though, buying butternut squash or other vegetables already prepped is a time-saving option for when you want to cook with such ingredients but just can’t find the time to do the prep work. Buying such vegetables already prepped will cost you more than if you buy a whole squash and peel it, seed it, clean it, and cut it up yourself—but even though it will be more expensive, it’s better to take a shortcut than to not cook with healthy, whole-food ingredients. The key point is this: The more cooking (and prepping) you are willing and able to do, the cheaper your food bill will be. Sure, it’s fine to buy canned vegetables and pre-prepped foods for when you need to get a healthy meal ready in a hurry, but the more you do on your own, the more money you will save. (Also check out the
Time-Saving Tips
.)

Buying dried beans is less expensive than buying canned ones, but buying dried beans in bulk can be even less expensive. Many supermarket chains—and nearly all food co-ops and health food stores—sell dry goods in bulk, so you can buy as much or as little as you need of any number of foods, particularly beans, grains, pastas, seeds, dried fruits, and the like. Depending on where you live, you can also start a buying club, which is similar to a food co-op but without the overhead of a permanent location. In buying clubs (often predecessors to food co-ops), members order directly from a distributor and have food delivered in bulk quantities to a designated drop-off location.

In most locales, not only are fresh strawberries less tasty in the middle of winter, but paying for out-of-season produce to be shipped thousands of miles is costly to you and to the environment. Seek out the freshest seasonal produce you can find. There are now over 7,000 farmers’ markets, large and small, across the United States, and their popularity continues
to grow. By buying produce at farmers’ markets, you’re not only going home with seasonal, fresh produce, you’re also helping to sustain small-scale farmers, whom we all owe a big thank-you for doing the incredibly hard work of growing our food without commercial pesticides. Buying from farmers’ markets also promotes crop diversity, since small farmers are able to (and must) grow a wider variety of foods than large-scale growers, whose livelihood depends on mass-producing just one or two crops, such as corn or soybeans.

The more home cooking you do with whole-plant foods, the less garbage your kitchen will generate from plastic and paper packaging. Plus, more of the refuse you do generate will be green waste, which can go right into the compost bin. The majority of any waste generated from making the recipes in this cookbook will be safe for your compost bin—fresh fruit and vegetable skins, the sodden mush of vegetables leftover after you make homemade
Vegetable Stock
, tough outer lettuce leaves, and so much more. Some municipalities give away bins at no or very low cost, and once it’s set up, a working compost bin can turn fruit and vegetable waste into nutrient-rich compost in a matter of weeks. If you’re not able to set up a compost bin, but you’d like to compost your green waste, it’s worth investigating to see if a local neighborhood or community garden will accept such waste—many will.