THE NATURAL GOURMET: Delicious Recipes for Healthy, Balanced Eating

Mostly"" vegetarian since childhood, ""basically"" macrobiotic since the early 60's, instructor at her own Natural Gourmet Cooking School since 1977, and converted in the early 80's to a five-phase food theory derived from Chinese medicine, the author of Food and Healing and The Book of Whole Meals presents more sugar, free, mostly meatless and dairy-free dishes with a global range (Argentine vegetable stew, Italian bean soup with arugula, Middle Eastern stuffed grape leaves) and a decided Japanese accent. (Her introduction recommends basing one's diet on the whole foods consumed on the continent of one's ancestors--a practice that will limit anyone's use of her book, whatever the ancestral continent.) In themselves, Colbin's recipes represent a fairly sophisticated repertoire of uncomplicated dishes for the ""natural gourmet."" For those who go in for prescriptive formulas based on Asian principles, she assigns to each dish a major and a minor ""phase"" (a further refinement on yin and yang) and prescribes a diet balancing the five--but doesn't give the uninitiated much reason for doing so.