View source for Good Clean Food: Plant-Based Recipes That Will Help You Look and Feel Your Best by Lily Kunin

{{infobox1
|title=Good Clean Food; Plant-Based Recipes That Will Help You Look and Feel Your Best
|author=Lily Kunin
|reviewer=Sue Magee
|genre=Cookery
|summary=I don't buy into the gluten-free ethos but some of the recipes in this book are outstanding: healthy and totally delicious.
|rating=4
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=224
|publisher=Abrams Books
|date=March 2017
|isbn=978-1419723902
|website=http://www.cleanfooddirtycity.com/
|cover=Kunin_Good
|aznuk=1419723901
|aznus=1419723901
}}

I've got to begin by outlining a bias:  I don't like food fads.  There's a very good reason for avoiding gluten if you are coeliac, but if it's simply a food choice then you make life more difficult for people who ''must'' avoid gluten.  The same point applies to a lot of other food 'intolerances'.  I believe in eating a balanced diet but will happily admit that I have my own no-go areas: I don't eat processed sugars because they're empty calories and after a couple of weeks without them, I discovered that I don't actually like the taste.  I don't touch caffeine and haven't done so since I discovered what it did to my blood pressure.  Having said all this, I'm quite happy to read books which ''do'' advocate avoiding certain food groups, simply because (a) there ''might'' be something in it and (b) people who've had to the inventive to create a varied diet with restricted ingredients often come up with some excellent recipes.  And that was how I came to ''Good Clean Food''.

Lily Kunin is a health coach and creator of [http://www.cleanfooddirtycity.com/ clean food dirty city site] and [https://www.instagram.com/cleanfooddirtycity/?hl=en instagram account].  She'd always been a food lover but her attitude to the food she was eating changed when she began to suffer from migraines.  A long (and bad) time later she tried avoiding gluten and her symptoms were alleviated within 48 hours.  From this, she developed her food philosophy of seeing an intolerance to gluten as a creative opportunity.  I liked that she has ''a constant dialogue'' with her body rather than sticking to a restrictive regime.  That I can empathise with.

There are good tips for eating well whilst living in a big city and excellent advice on the sort of equipment which you'll require and basic foodstuffs which you'll need to find in your kitchen.  As someone who's lived on the edge of this type of eating for quite a while, there's nothing which you're going to find too strange and I'd concur with the idea that a decent food processor is an essential.  There are a few basic recipes to get you started and I was delighted to see one of my permanent standbys - roasted vegetables - and cauli-rice is an excellent substitute for rice.  When you use the recipes in the 'basics' section you can then use the chart to build your food bowls with the base + protein + greens + toppings + extras + dressings formula.  It's a delicious way of making an excellent meal - and you can build it around whatever you have in the kitchen.

I guess that the principle of having set meals at certain times of the day is a little tired now and Kunin looks instead at the aim of her recipes: ''awaken'', ''nourish'', ''detox'', ''restore'', ''sustain'' and ''savour'' are largely self-explanatory and there are some delicious recipes.  Chia pudding with seasonal fruits makes for a good breakfast - I have used it as a dessert at other times too.  Another pudding  - blueberry buckwheat pancakes - sounds a lot more decadent than it actually is!  One of my favourite recipes is for zucchini lasagne (in case you need a translation in the UK, zucchini are courgettes and the eggplants which are also used are better known as aubergines), which has the cheesiness of the original but none of the drawbacks.

Back in the days when I ate red meat, I loved meatballs - and spaghetti squash and mushroom meatballs comes about as close as possible to the original.  You don't need any special equipment to make the spaghetti as a fork will do the job and the mushrooms have a distinctly meaty flavour.  Turn the page and you have another of my favourites from the bad old days - a weeknight chilli - and it compares well in taste to the original.

If you'd like a summer dessert which is good for you and your skin, try peaches and raw brazil nut crumble.  It was the addition of Medjool dates which made this for me.  Thinking of your skin - there's even a 'recipe' for coconut coffee body scrub, which made me slightly sad that I no longer drink coffee!  You'll also find out how to hair treatments and face masks too.  

I could go on for a long time detailing recipes which I've tried or others which look interesting: with most recipe books you're lucky if you get half a dozen dishes which you'll actually cook more than once.  There are lots more than that for me in ''Good Clean Food'': I might not buy into the concept completely, but I'm certainly enjoying the food and I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy of this beautifully-presented book to the Bookbag. 

We can also recommend [[Cook. Nourish. Glow. by Amelia Freer]] and [[Deliciously Ella: Awesome Ingredients, Incredible Food That You and Your Body Will Love by Ella Woodward]].  You might also enjoy [[Ani's Raw Food Desserts by Ani Phyo]] and [[Pure & Simple: A Natural Food Way of Life by Pascale Naessens]].

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