Good for You by Akhtar Nawab is a beautiful cookbook, in the subset of cookbooks I call "Whole Foods Cookbooks." Which is to say, big and beautiful and full of sumptuous recipes, often with obscure ingredients and/or complicated, lengthy preparations, billed as healthy. But the term healthy in books like these is nebulous, a sort of Whole Foods healthy, wherein meat and fish are still consumed (despite the misleading subtitle about vegetarian and vegan diets, most main dishes are meat or fish centric), and olive oil by the cupfuls, and eggs are frequently praised. But there's no gluten or dairy, and the author recommends bison instead of beef and cashew-based sauces as replacement for dairy. Occasional mentions are made of environmental benefit from choosing certain ingredients, but only for those ingredients which are environmentally friendly. No mention of the other, more environmentally harmful aspects of other frequent ingredients. This is not an environmentally friendly cookbook overall, nor, by my definitions, is it particularly healthy. More healthy than McDonalds or frieds foods at the county fair? OK, sure. But ingredients like acai juice and a lack of decadent dessert recipes does not necessarily qualify food as healthy.

Does this mean that I hated the cookbook? No, actually, not at all. I bookmarked many recipes in hopes of trying them before my digital advanced copy expired. There are some lovely soups and sides, for instance, and a number of sauces and other staples that sound quite promising. Everything seems a little fussier than my preferred every day recipes (The Butternut Squash Soup with Ginger and Chile, for instance, has 16 ingredients listed!), but the recipes I did bookmark seem worth giving a try on my days off. Ginger Blueberry Smoothie sounds delightful, as do Black Bean and Sweet Potato Burger, Black Chickpeas and Lentils with Spinach, Lentil Hummus, and Cardamom Almond Milk, as well as basics like Cremini Mushroom Sauce, Mojo de Ajo, Romesco Sauce, and homemade Tomato Paste, not to mention the Vegan Soubise that is central to so many recipes in this book. Oddly enough some of the recipes I am not interested in trying are the very gluten free ones I came here looking for--the texture of his gluten free breads, pastas, and crackers, as described, sound very unappealing and not worth the extra work.

I also appreciated all the little informational asides throughout the book, explaining the benefits of toasting spices prior to use or of soaking meat in brine or marinade, for instance, or how to make the best basic marinade, or the benefits of coconut flour, as well as a handy key at the beginning of the book for labeling recipes as Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Vegetarian, or Vegan (Those keys are used not only on each qualifying recipe's page, but also by the recipes listed under each chapter heading, which certainly makes locating applicable recipes more efficient.) and a thorough index at the back. As mentioned before, the book is just lovely too, full of gorgeous food photography and sweet photos of Akhtar with his daughter Ela, or of a fit and healthy-looking Akhtar by himself.

Akhtar, as you might guess from his name, is of Muslim Northern Indian-American heritage, and he devotes a lot of space to talking about that, mostly about how it influenced his cuisine, and other aspects of his background, from his childhood as an overweight brown-skinned boy growing up in a mostly white rural southern area of the USA, as well as his experiences working at restaurants around the county, starting and running restaurants of his own and visits to rural areas in Mexico and Italy to learn about their cuisine. The resulting cuisine of the book is a sort of Northern Indian-Mexican-Italian fusion that sounds tempting. Sometimes his stories start to feel like name-dropping, when he mentions yet again the chefs with whom he's worked and restaurants at which he's worked or which he's run. He also seems to exist in that Whole Foods economic bracket wherein running to places like Whole Foods for koji or a bottle of acai juice or a jar of ready-made fig paste is realistic logistically and economically. Alas, we don't all live in that bubble. My husband and I probably spend too much of our income on food, and even we don't keep the kind of expensive and somewhat obscure ingredients he often calls for (I love trying new spice blends, but even I'd never heard of Tajin seasoning.).

Overall a nice aspirational cookbook, pretty to look at and full of interesting ideas, but maybe not practical for everyday cooking for the non-chef working adult on a limited food budget. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it and looking at the photography, and appreciate #NetGalley and Chronicle Books lending me a free digital advanced copy of #goodforyoucookbook . This is my honest review.