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There are three kinds of “healthy” cookbooks:

  • The bad ones
  • The very bad ones
  • The handful of thoughtfully written ones with recipes you can actually enjoy and possibly relish

Jim Peyton is one of those very thoughtful writers who has researched and written cookbooks, a half dozen now, we can all enjoy. This book has a subtitle: Authentic Recipes for Dieters, Diabetic, & All Food Lovers. Naturally Healthy Mexican Cooking is a book for all of us and for some of us it’s a double down. Jim himself has the usual middle aged health issues, has a lifelong love for Mexican food, and wants us all to enjoy Mexican dishes with gusto and without worry.

In Naturally Healthy, Jim succeeds page after page. This book is carefully crafted and intensely plotted to meet the goals of his food philosophy. Jim states that we eat for many reasons, hunger of course, but also because food helps us relieve the stress of life. That can be why we eat a tad too much. We have a tad too much stress, or maybe two tads.

In many “healthy” recipes, a standard dish is stripped down of salt, sugar, and other flavor enhancers. As a result, the dish becomes insipid and when we eat it, to get the satisfaction we crave, we eat a lot of the dish. Too much. Weight gain becomes a problem.

Jim talks about the French paradox. They eat rich foods but as a society have far less issues with weight and cholesterol. What’s happening? Jim explains:

  • The French eat smaller portions: 30% to 70% less
  • They eat their calories early, 60% by 2PM instead of the 40% in America
  • The French eat more slowly
  • The French eat healthy, avoiding processed foods and they simply eat without obsessing over calories, carbs, sugar, salt, and fat the way Americans do persistently do.

The secret seems to be good food eaten sensibly. And, if the food is good, you will automatically eat more sensibly.

Now, mention Mexican food and “healthy” or “sensible” are not the words to spring to mind. We think of lard-based dishes, complete with cheese, and topped with sour cream. We think Taco Bell or an oozing chimichanga. Inherently, Mexican food cannot be healthy.

And that conclusion is simply not true. The Mexican food that we are so familiar with, often the Tex-Mex style, is not representative of the full spectrum of Mexican cuisine. For this book, Jim has spent years scouring for recipes that are healthy and wonderful to eat.

Why the bad reputation for Mexican food? A hundred years ago, the Mexican Revolution drove many refugees north of the border. They stayed — what a surprise — but lived in or near poverty. They created restaurants and food outlets using the ingredients they could afford. Low cost ingredients generated low end food that became the “standard” we associate with Mexican cuisine. But in Mexico itself, and the Mexican influenced regions north of the border, there is another cuisine, a much better cuisine. And that is the cuisine depicted in this book.

Naturally Healthy has sixteen chapters, ranging from drinks to desserts. There are the usual suspects, like Salsa & Relishes, but also chapters on Botanas [Appetizers] and Antojitos [Whimsical dishes]. What are whimsical dishes? The tacos and burritos and other street food that we associate as “core” Mexican. They aren’t the core. That is why you’ll find chapters here for poultry, beef, pork, lamb, seafood, and vegetarian dishes.

What are these other recipes like? First, they can be long. Yesterday I reviewed a book on Spanish cuisine and noted it is Italian-like: a typical recipe has a half dozen ingredients. Here, in these traditional Mexican recipes, you find recipe lists that number 12 or 16 or 20 or more. Rural Mexican food reflects centuries and centuries of refinement. Good food can be simple, ala Spain or Italy. Or it can be complex and complexity is on display here.

Multiple soups are offered. Black bean, of course, but also a chicken soup with onion, garlic, carrots, garbanzo beans, zucchini, green peas, chipotle, lime juice, avocado, and cotija. There’s a second chicken soup with carrots, celery, onion, jalapeno, garlic, tomato paste, bay leaves, thyme, oregano, marjoram, cumin, sage, pepper, squash, zucchini, cilantro, and lime juice. Reading these recipes for “mere” soup, you begin to see that not all Mexican is “fast.”

There is a Caesar Salad recipe here where, again, the ingredients list is wonderfully long. You’ll find recipes for this historic salad often with some subset of these ingredients, but here you’ll find everything ever considered tossed into the bowl.

Caesar Salad Dressing

Yield: Enough for ½ pound of romaine

Ingredients;

  • 5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
  • 3 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
  • 1 large egg
  • ¼ teaspoon anchovy paste, or to taste
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
  • ½ teaspoon Dijon mustard
  • ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
  • ¼ teaspoon Tabasco sauce
  • 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lime juice

Preparation:

Make an infused olive oil. No more than 3 hours before preparing the salad, combine the olive oil and garlic and leave at room temperature.

Make the dressing. To coddle, the egg, immerse it in boiling water for 30 seconds, remove it immediately and break it into the salad bowl before it overcooks.

Add the anchovy paste, salt, pepper, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, Tobasco, and lime juice. Whisk until thoroughly combine. Remove the garlic from the oil and slowly whisk 4 tablespoons of the oil into the other dressing ingredients.

Save 1 tablespoon of the oil for making croutons.

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Like all cuisines, Mexican has advocates who seek new and more exotic dishes. It’s called alta cucina Mexicana. Examples here include a salsa made with smoked salmon, avocados, and truffle oil, and sour cream. Once made this salsa or sauce or filling, can be used in tacos on salads or just eat and enjoyed by itself.

And if the truffles are not your style, there is a similar filling made with mushrooms and shallots. That makes a taco you will not find at your local fast food joint. Speaking of those fast food places, you know how you walk down the line and have them spoon different ingredients onto tacos or burritos? Glop, glop, glop. Here you find real food. Shredded turkey or chicken is actually cooked with jalapeno, bell pepper, garlic, tomato, chipotle, cum, oregano, bay leaves and cilantro. You get a mixture that is a true food, not a muddled rainbow of separate layers.

Meat dishes here include Grilled Pork in Fruit Mole and Salmon with Mango-Avocado Salsa. For the salmon, the 20+ ingredients include tequila, sherry vinegar, orange juice, soy sauce, and a half shelf of your spice collections. Jim says that we should eat more salmon, but that we all can become a tad bored with “conventional” salmon. This recipe is not conventional, but it is Jim’s riff on Mexican-Asian trendy cooking. It will excite your imagination and your mouth.

Excitement is, I believe, the way to greet this book into your kitchen. Naturally Healthy Mexican Cooking is natural and is healthy, but more importantly it is enjoyable and an education in the higher dimensions of Mexican cuisine.