Cookbook Giveaway: Deliciously Organic

If you made a New Year’s resolution to avoid white flour, white sugar and other processed foods, Deliciously Organic is the cookbook for you.

Modeled after Carrie Vitt’s blog of the same name, with pretty photographs by blogger Helene Dujardin, her book shows you how to prepare healthy, wholesome dishes without sacrificing taste.

Carrie asked me to edit the recipes for the book. At first, I was dubious about organic recipes, thinking that they wouldn’t be too different from regular ones, except the ingredients would all say “organic.”

But that misconception downplays the mouthwatering recipes and new (to me) cooking techniques and ingredients in the book. Even though I buy mostly organic products, I learned new things, such as using organic coconut oil to saute chicken, substituting stevia in place of sugar, and presoaking grains overnight to aid digestion.

Sometimes I took a break from editing to try recipes that sounded good, such as the Roasted Red Onion and Pear Salad. It never occurred to me to roast onion for a salad, and doing so heightened its sweetness.

The hardcover book is beautifully produced in full color with heavy, glossy paper, and a feminine script for recipe titles. It’s the first cookbook from International Focus Press. If you buy it through the publisher, you will be entered in a drawing for a Kitchen-Aid mixer or Cusinart food processor. IFP also hosts Source Notes on its website so Vitt can provide links to studies and articles.

Vitt (find out more about her in this feature article) was committed to a professional product. Testers who work for her mother’s catering business made every recipe and submitted comments. The recipes using whole grains were a challenge, as she found that straight substitutions didn’t work. She writes, “As my husband likes to say, we ate a lot of terrible pancakes during the transition.” To help readers along, she includes a section on why she made the change (she suffered from debilitating migraines), a glossary explaining unprocessed ingredients, and a realistic guide on how to make the change (discard one item and replace it with one new organic/unprocessed item in your pantry once a week.)

So if you’d like to win the signed copy Vitt sent me for this giveaway, leave a comment below by midnight, February 13, 2011. I’ll choose a winner through Random.org. Sorry, this contest is open to US residents only.

Update: The winner is Damaris of Kitchen Corners. Congratulations!

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Tagged as: cookbook giveaway, free cookbook, organic cooking, writing a cookbook