Still not falling for The Book of Whole Meals

Now that fall is well underway, let's return to The Book of Whole Meals (Annemarie Colbin, 1983, but feels like it's from the '70s!) to see what culinary equivalents of Earth Shoes are on offer.

Part of the book's appeal is supposed to be reduced preparation time. That's a big deal in old health food cookbooks, as recipes often required hours of boiling dried beans and brown rice. Well, these menus still require all that, but in this particular book, cooks are just supposed to make extra for leftovers. (It's early-'80s meal prep!) In fact, the dinner menu is listed first, and then leftovers are supposed to be used to make the next day's lunch and sometimes breakfast. While this sounds helpful in theory, the changes between menus are often so slight that the food would quickly get monotonous. One fall menu calls for aduki beans (now usually spelled adzuki beans) seasoned with just a bit of shoyu to be served over plain brown rice for dinner. The next day calls for some of the leftover brown rice to be boiled with extra water into a "soft rice" (probably because most of the book's audience wouldn't know the term congee back then) for breakfast and for more of it to be stir-fried with leftover vegetables and served with an aduki bean soup (essentially, the leftover beans from the previous night simmered in extra water with some rolled oats). I'm not opposed to repurposing leftovers, but if they're bland to start out with and then they're served again in barely altered form-- mostly just more watered-down-- I can't imagine anybody being too excited. Plus, Colbin's instructions on storing rice make the next day's meals an excellent vector for food poisoning, as she recommends keeping cooked rice "in a covered bowl or pot near a window at room temperature for a day or two, making sure that air circulates in the container so the rice will not mold." Sounds like a great recipe for giving everyone a nasty Bacillus cereus infection!

The recipes in that menu were so basic and unremarkable that I decided to showcase another super-repetitive menu instead. Let's go for spaghetti night! This is a healthy cookbook, so we'll start with whole wheat spaghetti.

I'm not really sure why we needed a recipe to boil spaghetti, as few cookbooks at the time would bother with this step and just say to serve the meal with cooked spaghetti. Maybe Colbin wanted to make sure it was cooked to mush by advising 25 minutes of boiling, or maybe she was afraid cooks would stir with a spaghetti spoon instead of her recommended chopstick?

Let's get to the good part: the sauce!

Oh, yeah. I forgot that her idea of a sauce is usually just some vegetables in thickened water flavored slightly with shoyu. Still, the veggies are more exciting than plain overcooked spaghetti.

Now, how are they transformed into the next day's lunch? Well, it all starts with a béchamel. 

Colbin firmly believes that people have no business eating dairy, though, so her idea of the sauce replaces the milk with water and the butter with corn oil. Yum! Plus, it uses whole wheat pastry flour for the usual refined white flour, just to make sure you know that this is health food. And what is that "béchamel" used for?

It's the sauce used to bind up last night's leftover spaghetti with the leftover root vegetables in kuzu sauce and leftover kale. (If you're hoping that the kale might be seasoned enough to add a bit more spark, it was only steamed with a pinch of sea salt and showered with a few sunflower seeds.) So, uh, yeah. This is mostly just last night's leftovers baked in a sadder version of a sauce most people aren't too enthused about in the first place.

Well, maybe we can ease our disappointment with a few cookies.

They're sweetened mostly with raisins, packed with sunflower seeds, use corn oil instead of butter, and likely to be dense as hockey pucks since they have no leavening, though, so don't get your hopes up too high. At least they don't have whole wheat spaghetti or root vegetables in the ingredients, so they're a change of pace if nothing else. Take any small victory you can in a book like this one....