It was recently brought to my attention that I haven’t posted a new favorite recipe for a while so here you go.
This is more of a new FAVORITE cook book than just a single recipe. The cook book is titled Well Fed. The author is Melissa Joulwan. You can read more about Melissa and check out a ton of her other recipes over at her blog The Clothes Make The Girl.
I have made two recipes from this book so far. I made the Shepard’s Pie on Wednesday morning and I just made the Jicama Home Fries for our Saturday morning breakfast.
The Shepard’s Pie was fantastic. It is made with lamb. I usually use ground beef when I make Shepard’s Pie so the lamb was a nice surprise. LOVED the ground lamb. I’m not sure I’ll go back to ground beef.
I’m not seeing the Shepard’s Pie recipe or the Jicama Home Fries recipe on Melissa’s blog. It appears that they may be recipes that you can only get in her new cook book, Well Fed. For this reason, I don’t feel comfortable putting the recipe(s) up here. I will give you a little bit of an over view of the Jicama Home Fries recipe but not the actual recipe.
First of all, DELICIOUS! I love home fries so I was really excited when I saw this recipe as I was flipping through the book. As I mentioned above, the recipe is made with Jicama. The only time consuming part of this recipe is preparing the jicama. You have to submerge the jicama in salted water in the crockpot and cook on high for 12 to 24 hours. Once that is done you can put it in the fridge and save it until you are ready to make the home fries. I cooked the jicama earlier in the week, knowing I was going to save it for a big Saturday morning breakfast. Cooking it in the crock pot, knowing you are going to use it at a later date is SUPER EASY and takes all the “time consuming” aspects of the recipe out.
This brings me to my favorite part of this cook book and what I believe makes this cook book stand head and shoulders above my other cook books. Melissa spends a lot of time at the beginning of the book talking about her weekly “Cookup”. Basically she does all her prep work on Sunday which allows her the ability to throw together “hot plates” for quick delicious dinners and “cool plates” for ready to go lunches. She’s not suggesting that we cook all our meals for the week (that takes all day), she’s merely suggesting we do all the prep so all ingredients are in the fridge ready to get mixed and seasoned. She actually timed her “cookup”. She did the whole thing in 61 minutes. Isn’t that awesome! One hour and you’re good to go for the week.
She doesn’t just talk about prepping, she actually gives a list of the foods she prepares during her “cookup”, types and amounts. She then gives bunches of “hot & cool plate” suggestions (how to mix and cook the prepped ingredients) using all kinds of different spices so you get the chance to eat flavors from around the globe. For example, her “hot plates” are categorized by country: American, Chinese, Central & Eastern European, French, Greek, Indian, Italian, Middle Eastern, Moroccan and Thai.
On top of the hot & cool plate recipes/ideas she has a bunch of regular (a bit more time consuming) recipes. The kind of recipes that we all normally make for dinner. The Shepard’s Pie is an example of one of the “regular” recipes. A couple of the others that I’m going to make very soon are: Pad Thai, Chocolate Chili, Ginger-Lime Grilled Shrimp, Cumin-Roasted Carrots and BBQ Pork Fried Rice. I’m sure I’ll end up making most of the recipes in the book, but this is my “short” list.
Oh, one last thing that I think is great about the recipes. At the end of each recipes Melissa includes a section called “You Know How You Could Do That” and give several alternative ideas for the recipe. For example, for the home fries recipe she suggest making hash by adding diced bell pepper, onion and some of the garlic-browned ground beef you have in the fridge from the “Cookup” earlier in the week. Yum!
By the way, I did link to the Amazon page for Well Fed. I did that just to make it easy to find. I don’t get any “kick backs” from Amazon (bummer).
Eat Well, Feel Good, Have Fun!
I’m Amy a board certified holistic nutritionist, certified functional nutritionist and lifestyle practitioner and certified Life Coach. I help women in midlife understand the changing needs of their body so that they can stop dieting and lose weight permanently. At 56 I live what I teach. Don’t believe the story that your best years are behind you. They are not. Your best years are just starting!