A Beautiful Heart Cookbook
Heart-Healthy Recipes for a Long, Happy Life
by
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A Beautiful Heart is a cookbook that belongs next to your favorite wooden spoon. If you don't yet have a favorite wooden spoon, if your kitchen is currently empty, overshadowed by alternative dining options that forego its use, this book will colonize the countertop and lead the way. Because this is your new canvas for that accidental splatter of vibrant vegetable soup or incidental cloud of runaway cocoa powder. This is your invitation to paint your very own culinary Jackson Pollock! Because healthy eating and cooking can be messy—but it's a practice of art to work at every day. This cookbook is about being creative, being brave, and learning how to translate healthy dietary principles into beautiful, delicious food that you can make with common, inexpensive ingredients. It's not about trendy ingredients or diet fads, not about flavonoids or polyphenols or medical mumbo-jumbo, not about what you can't eat and what you can, pitting the evil unhealthy vs. healthy. It's about the big picture: choosing an eating pattern that will promote your long-term health—and rejoicing and taking pride in that choice. It’s about nourishing your body with high quality, real food that you make at home. And its content and format are guided by the most recent scientific literature and the USDA and American Heart Association recommendations. You don't have to be a chef, you don't have to be a nutritionist, and your food doesn't have to be perfect—that's why it's called a practice. All you have to do is decide if this is something that is important to you, and if so, find the strength inside (strength you might not even know is there) to choose to try. Pay attention, focus, and as you proceed, notice what goes well and what could improve, be honest, listen to your body, appreciate your progress, and always try for better. Keep moving forward, from wherever you stand. Enjoy.
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About the Book
A Beautiful Heart Cookbook is a collection of heart-healthy recipes filled with simple, wholesome, inexpensive ingredients. But the recipes are not just healthy--they are beautiful, delicious creations to be enjoyed both alone and together with loved ones. They are inspired, and meant to inspire. They are all of those things, and somehow they are still achievable in day-to-day life. Each recipe has been simplified, simplified, simplified--just one bowl, just one pot, just add and stir, or just add and blend--and as a result, each recipe leads its maker through a relaxing cooking experience. The directions seem to translate to "enjoy the moment" and seem to subtly suggest a deep breath in: life is good. But perhaps not so subtly, the recipes demonstrate the truth about healthy eating: it is feasible in day-to-day life, inexpensive, and nourishing on a physical, mental, and spiritual level. It is a commitment to take pride in and a worthwhile lifelong priority. But best of all? Healthy food actually tastes amazing.
About the Author
Elizabeth grew up in Thousand Oaks, California, where she learned that happiness lies in simple pleasures enjoyed with those you love: hiking the Santa Monica Moutains, picnicking on the front lawn, making seasonal paper garlands, baking cookies, and enjoying a cup of tea in the afternoon. She graduated from La Reina High School armed with an equal sense of self-confidence and humbleness thanks to the Sisters of Notre Dame and their keen insight into what is important in life. From there, she headed off to Berkeley in search of inspiration and diversity of ideas and found her perfect major: integrative biology. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude, she ventured to Ireland, the land of her grandfather, where she worked as a florist and waitress at Ballymaloe House and Cookery School. She was inspired by their treatment of food as art--as something sacred--and by the use of simple, wholesome ingredients to create something extraordinary and give guests an incredible experience. The act of giving that meal to a guest seemed to her to echo beyond the Irish countryside, to promote world peace in some small way. When she returned to medical school at UC San Diego, her interest in the culinary world and the integrative medicine world collided, and she set out to write a research-based, heart-healthy cookbook based on the American Heart Association guidelines for a healthy diet. She called it A Beautiful Heart after the beautiful metaphorical heart, the spirit within all of us that she sought to nourish, the physical heart she hoped to heal, and the heart of Ireland that inspired her.