.
Made By Hand: Natural foods to nourish and delight by Julie Le Clerc

Julie Le Clerc is well known for creating innovative flavours and trusted recipes that you can rely on. As a former café owner, caterer and chef, Julie was able to develop and express her own recipe style before turning her talents to food writing. This award-winning writer is now dedicated to the pursuit of good food. Her cookbooks reflect her background and influences but are filled with uncomplicated yet clever recipes that encourage keen home cooks.

The book starts off with some handy conversion charts and essential natural ingredients to have in your pantry, before going through a glossary of terms to make it easier for those relatively new to cooking or to some of the ingredients used.

Each recipe starts with a note from Julie about the dish then gives the amount of people it serves, and the coding for the particular dietary requirements before giving you the ingredients and method. Unfortunately the dietary requirements part I don’t like as until you become familiar with the book you have to keep flicking back to the contents page to see what they mean. Maybe that is why the back cover flips over, so you can fold it onto the recipe you are reading while you look up the terms you don’t know and the key.

The book starts with Break of Day, which of course is breakfast, then goes to Kitchen Garden including how to make a kitchen garden, Market Fresh including a section on recycling, Go With The Grain including being organic savvy, Light and Fragrant including a piece on oils, Natural Baking and Happy Family Food before finishing with Pure Puddings and a section on eco-cleaning. You will notice that the pages are rather stiff and the book has a tendency to close prematurely when you first get it which is another reason for the unusual back cover no doubt. Also the page numbers are a bit small and being at the top of the page, not the bottom can be a bit hard to find. These minor problems should not detract from wonderful recipes however.

The recipes are simply set out with easy to follow steps and are illustrated with Julie’s own photographs. The recipes use fresh, healthy ingredients. Julie says the book is all about flavour not sacrifice, it is about having your cake and eating it too. The recipes show that healthy meals can be easy to create and delicious to taste.

RRP $52.00
Published and distributed by Penguin Group
 

>> Back to Book Search <<