Excerpts

* Ready! --introduction-- I'm so glad you're here! Because there's something I'm bursting with excitement to share with you: Home-cooked, healthy food is the solution to our physical, emotional--and I'd even wager spiritual--problems. As if that wasn't enough, it's also a key to bringing pure goodness, vitality, and fun into our lives. It's as simple as that. With our easy and quick recipes and a basket of healthy ingredients, you will discover how truly life-changing, loving, easy, and delicious home-cooked food can be. It all started for me about five years ago, when I woke up with an irrepressible longing to channel my inner homesteader. To this day, I am not sure where this came from, having grown up on Long Island and lived most of my adult life in Los Angeles. Trust me, farming was not even on my radar as a hobby, let alone as a vocation. As a longtime advocate for environmental causes, I kept my protest sign, but moved aside my pumps to make room for a pair of green muck boots (much to the horror of my fashion- conscious daughters). I tossed my Teflon (which I learned was fuming cancer- causing chemicals into my kitchen!) and bought a now-beloved and well- seasoned cast-iron skillet. I stuck my hands deep into the earth, planted seeds, pulled up carrots, then stuffed them back down when they looked too small (turns out that is upsetting to a carrot). I figured out how to weed sitting down (much easier on the back) and gave up on manicures, my nails requiring such vigorous scrubbing it was a lost cause. My hair went from blow-dry to something crazy only a rubber band and a hat could control. Then, to really seal the deal, I married a blue-eyed farmer down in the field. He taught me how to herd cows (oy, they are so much bigger up close!), to squish bugs (little freeloaders munching on our green beans), and to leave the baby vegetables alone. He is still trying to teach me how to plant a straight row (won't happen). Together, our garden grew, our homegrown dinners got better, and we started organizing Sunday potlucks for friends and family. I had decided to make some healthy changes in my life, which inevitably led me to improving the food my family and I ate. The more I learned about how real food is grown, the more clearly I saw how messed up our industrialized food system has become. Already deeply concerned about the environmental challenges plaguing us, I found myself pushed to the edge by daily reports of salmonella and E. coli poisoning, antibiotic overuse in livestock, rampant food allergies, and links between food dyes and behavioral problems. All these food scares hit way too close to home--you're talking about what I feed my kids! I also started to notice an increase in media coverage about the rapid rise of childhood obesity and diabetes. Today, a shocking one in three American children is overweight or obese. As is one in two adults. At home, we stopped eating hamburgers and made our first kale salad. We stopped buying packaged foods containing high-fructose corn syrup and soybean oil. We swapped "natural flavors" for truly natural, whole food ingredients. We tossed (into the recycler!) the BPA-lined plastic bottles and cans. We've been growing and eating a lot of our own food ever since, and now we crave kale the way some people crave sweets. The Family Cooks is a clear, uncomplicated cookbook written to get you and your family craving and cooking the right stuff, too: food that is prepared with love and care and infused with good intentions. You absolutely cannot buy this food ready-made in your supermarket or favorite takeout place. This is food you can only make in your very own home, in the room trol of your family's health and retrain their palates. Cooking and eating your meals together and making what you eat a priority is the antidote to so many of the issues families are struggling with today. This book will help you and your kids cook from scratch (by the way, the butter has been churned, the eggs already laid and collected, so you're way ahead of your great-great-grandmother) and bust the myth that cooking is too hard and takes too much time. Nonsense. That is what prepared food marketers want you to believe, but it really isn't true. For the same amount of time required to call in a takeout order, get in your car to pick it up, and bring it home, you can have a more delicious and much healthier home-cooked meal. Study after study has shown that if kids understand where their food comes from (if they can shell peas from an actual pod, rather than just encountering squishy green lumps on their plate) and are regularly exposed to real food, they will eat healthier. Who doesn't have time for that?! Teaching your kids and yourself how to cook a few simple "recipes by heart," whether it be a tossed salad, a quick tomato sauce, or a pot of soup, will set them up for a lifetime of confident cooking and good eating no matter where in the world they end up. My own recent experience proves this to be true. Both of where everyone already loves to hang out: your kitchen. "You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces--just good food from fresh ingredients." --JULIA CHILD Whether you are a new cook, a young cook, or an "I can't cook" cook, everyone can--and really must--give it a try. The more you learn about what your loved ones are eating, what artificial colors are pumped into their favorite yogurt, how much sugar is lurking in their drinks and snacks, and what chemicals are used to preserve their cereals, the more upset you will get. It's exactly what happened to me. But you have the power in your hands to retake con-my grown-up daughters cook, eat, and prefer home-cooked dinners over anything else. My college freshman, who for years never voluntarily participated in the making of dinner (she always helped eat it though), was so horrified by the low quality of dorm food, she begged to move to an apartment. "Mom, I can't eat this stuff--it's not food!" she said. "I need a stove." I nearly fell off my chair! This year she and a roommate are sharing a kitchen and regularly texting photos of the great dishes they are cooking. She has tested many of the recipes in this book, and if she can do it, you can, too! The baton (wooden spoon) successfully passed. Amen. Between you and me, I really need this book, too, because every time I go to cook, I end up having to Google a recipe. Here's my confession: My brain has trouble retaining information. I need easy-to-follow recipes right in front of me so I can refer to the instructions over and over. I can't tell you how many times I look at a recipe while cooking. It's embarrassing. What I want are simple, delicious dishes with a few accessible, healthy ingredients and clear instructions. I want family food, not restaurant food. I want to serve one meal for everyone, with plenty of leftovers for another meal tomorrow. And, of course, like everyone else, I need quick recipes for busy days. Enter my Danish friend Kirstin, who grew up on a fruit farm, was taught how to cook by her mom and grammy, and spends her days happily whipping up irresistibly delicious and healthy family food. This is our second cookbook together. If you've read The Family Dinner, you know that Kirstin and I make a good team. She drafts the recipe, then we test it on our friends and family. If it's a hit, she writes it down. I cook it on my own, and remove all the cilantro. She puts it back. I cut sweet potatoes into "matchsticks." She calls them "wedges." I forget to add the baking powder (fail!); she shows me once again how to line up all the ingredients on the counter before I start to cook. I secretly inspect the garbage to make sure she hasn't "accidentally" tossed away anything compostable. (Busted!) Well, you get the picture. It's actually a great collaboration, because between Kirstin's professionalism and my amateurism, we end up creating recipes that are delicious, easy, and foolproof, too. Perfect for me, you, our college students, singles, newlyweds, new moms and dads, our budding teen chefs ... everyone! It's our sincere hope that these recipes will help you channel your own inner homesteader, because self-reliance is one of the most precious tools you can give yourself in the daily battle against unhealthy, fattening, and downright sickening food. It's bad enough that prefab pseudo-foods don't nourish our bodies, but even worse, they're actually killing us, driving an unprecedented rise in diet-related diseases. I believe that the case for making home-cooked food is one of the clarion calls of our time. You could even call it a civic duty: If we all embraced healthy home cooking, we could save hundreds of billions of dollars in health-care costs, lost productivity, and all the other unfortunate side effects of our industrialized food chain. This simple fact has so captivated me that my friend Katie Couric and I recently made a documentary about how our children are bearing the brunt of our unhealthy food system. We decided to call it Fed Up. We are fed up with obesity, diabetes, and allergies. We are fed up with depression, hyperactivity, sleeplessness, stomachaches, and headaches (all side effects of the packaged food we are eating). We are fed up with industrial food lobbyists who keep the price of unhealthy processed food so low, and fight fairness in labeling, regulation of sugar, and marketing to kids at every turn. Why entrust one of the most intimate daily acts in our lives--the food we put into our bodies to nourish our brains, our organs, our hearts, and our souls--to a handful of multinational conglomerates? No matter your skills, you are a much better cook than they are, even if you just stick some sweet potatoes in the oven (see page 206) and toss a green salad (add some chickpeas and sunflower seeds for a healthy crunch!). That is a better meal than anything you can buy containing dozens of unpronounceable ingredients. You do have the time, because it really doesn't take that long. If your kitchen is stocked with some basics, and you are just a little organized, you can have a healthy meal on the table in no time. Kirstin and I invite you to join us in taking back the responsibility of feeding our loved ones and ourselves in a way that is easy, emotionally fulfilling, and nutritionally satisfying. Now is the time to restake the claim to your home on the (kitchen) range! Excerpted from The Family Cooks: 100+ Recipes to Get Your Family Craving Food That's Simple, Tasty, and Incredibl y Good for You by Laurie David All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.