Farm-to-Table recipes for the Traditional Foods Lifestyle by Jennifer McGruther

The Nourished Kitchen is a cookbook full of educational material. Or it’s a learning tool with lots of wonderful recipes. It could also be described as a timeless tome of eating, at once very old-fashioned but also cutting-edge. However you want to describe it, The Nourished Kitchen meets several needs and wants.

Ms. McGuther has designed her book around the philosophy of Weston A. Price. Some of you may wholeheartedly buy-in to his approach of eating a traditional diet of animal fats, fermented veggies, and sourdough breads. Some of you may feel that his approach goes a little too far. Either way, eating simpler foods (or maybe we should just call this eating real foods) is probably something we can all agree upon, especially if you are reading this blog.

As a vegetarian, I personally don’t completely follow the Price philosophy. To me, there probably was no such thing as a traditional diet. Or, one man’s traditional diet was another man’s luxurious dinner. Plus everyone is different and individual bodies require different things. But I digress.

Despite my less than all-in approach to the Price philosophy, I love this book. It is divided into eight sections, each one highlighting foods from a specific “family.” The first section, from the garden, includes recipes for a Cucumber Salad with Dill and Kefir, Root Cellar Soup, and New Potatoes with Chive Blossoms and Sour Cream. I bet your mouth is watering just thinking about them. There is a full page about simple salads using fresh weeds for salad  – one of my current interests – and how to find good olive oil. There are several full color photos and some excellent nutrition information about serving your veggies with fat. And that is just the first section. Other sections include information and recipes from the pasture, the range, the waters, the fields, the wild, the orchard and the larder.

Usually, when a cookbook has this many meat oriented recipes I pass on it. After all, as a vegetarian whose digestive system doesn’t like animal fats, I usually stick to cookbooks that are mostly meatless and/or Mediterranean in nature. But what sold me on this book is the variety. I see lots of cookbooks. I own lots of cookbooks. I borrow even more from the library. I use many for research purposes and write reviews for many others. After a while it is difficult to find one that is full of truly different recipes. The Nourished Kitchen is one of those books. I can’t wait to make molasses -glazed black bread, herbed sourdough rye noodles, fennel, kohlrabi and green apple relish or roasted sweet cherry fool. Plus, the extra nutrition information is so good I no doubt need a copy to use as a reference book -at least that is how I will justify it to myself and the IRS.

You can learn more about Ms. McGruther, the Weston A. Price philosophy, and purchase your own copy of The Nourished Kitchen over on her Nourished Kitchen blog.