Heart Association Useful Guideline

Recently purchased to cook some meals for a neighbor who’s wife passed away on Jan. 10, 2008. Was a huge help as he is diabetic and has heart disease.

Great cookbook, especially if you are on a restrictive diet due to medical or health related circumstances. We have tried many of the dishes and have found them to be (well, almost to be) very excellent and both flavor, texture and taste. For the health benefits derived it is totally worth the effort.

I am an excellent cook and prepare a homecooked meal every evening and entertain often. The recipes I have tried…probably 12 …have been generally excellent. We like a lot of seasoning. When the recipe has contained small amounts of hot sauce or jalapeno peppers, it has been plenty flavorful. Some of the other have required more garlic or other seasoning for our liking which is easy to adjust. Have tried a cucumber relish over baked salmon (I grilled it) which surprised me by being fabulous, a pineapple soy sauce over sesame tuna (and I had no sesame so it was grilled tuna) also excellent. Everything has been flavorful (esp once I ramp up the garlic) and excellent and easy to make. I made a pounded chicken breast with a lemon sauce…however the lemon sauce, made with the chicken bits in the pan only called for a couple of tablespoons of water and maybe one of lemon to cook down for 60 seconds to thicken. I did find that for me…it evaporated before it cooked down. Next time I am going to add a lot more seasoning to the chicken and then add more liquid to the sauce…but a higher percentage of lemon…and then will add fat free yogurt to bulk up the sauce.

I also have given this, and AHA Meals in Minutes and Olive Oil Cookbook as gifts. The recipients have also given rave reviews.

There are several great recipes in this book. I bought this, and the AHA Meals in Minutes cookbook, at the same time. The disappointing aspect of the book is that many of the recipes rely on already prepard/processed foods (i.e. canned cream soup, etc…) True, the recipes call for the ‘lower-sodium’ version of the soups, but, to try and be healthy, eating all the chemical crud that’s in these soups seems like a dumb idea. So, while there are many recipes that I’ll make (modifying the recipes to use non-prepared/processed foods), I probably won’t buy any more of the AHA cookbooks.

This book is based on stopping you from using anything but the American Heart one-size fits all diet. The AHA has always been strong on what it doesn’t like but a little weak on what it does like. It is low fat diet despite the fact that the AHA has quietly removed its official recommendation against total fat. The recent review by Ron Krauss showing that the recommendation against saturated fat is also not based on evidence was greeted with the response from Robert Eckel (likely major author of this book) that the data don’t change anything. The book is characterized by an absence of scientific references, no data or even anecdotal evidence that the diet works, and has a literary style analogous to the low-fat milk that it consistently recommends. Best is the recommendation of animal crackers as a snack. (It has probably changed but at the time the book was written animal crackers contained trans-fats). This book contains the diet recommended for the past forty years during the epidemic of obesity and diabetes for which the proponents have been able to blame the patient.