Cookbook of the Week: I Quit Sugar
Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week: I Quit Sugar: Your Complete 8-Week Detox Program & Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2013)
The Team: Australian journalist and health coach Sarah Wilson; food and fashion photographer Marija Ivkovic; Melbourne-based illustrator Kat Chadwick.
Noteworthy: Wilson calls herself a sugar addict, and she doesn’t use that word lightly. In her early adulthood, she took to eating pies and cakes—whole pies and cakes—dealing with what she calls the “horrible roller coaster of sugar highs and lows” that followed, and developing an autoimmune disease as a result of her erratic diet. (A conservative day would see her consume more than 25 teaspoons of sugar a day; the recommended amount is 6 to 9 teaspoons.) Since cutting out the sweet stuff, she’s become a healthier, happier person.
The Cuisine: Eclectic sugar-free breakfasts, lunches, dinners, desserts, snacks, and kids’ meals, from smoothies and salads to cheesecake and chicken meatballs. Wilson interviewed dozens of experts around the world to assemble cooking techniques to match her sugar-free practice, developing 108 simple, everyday recipes. Most of them are gluten- and grain-free, too, “because I think starches from grains can feed the sugar addiction and are best minimized if you have issues with sugar,” she writes in the book.
Who Should Buy It: Those who have toyed with the idea of eliminating sugar from their diets and need a helping hand. This cookbook is really a guide to ridding your body of sugar and equipping yourself with the tools to live sugar-free, all in eight weeks. And you don’t have to be an “addict” to benefit from the first-hand work Wilson has done: Around the world, experts are decreasing their recommended daily sugar quantities, she writes, so we can all take some notes on how to be our healthiest selves.
Who Shouldn’t: Those who have no interest on cutting back on sugar. Plain and simple.
Must-Make Recipes: Bacon and Egg “Cupcakes,” Almond Butter Bark, Cooling Avocado Soup, Coconut Butter.
Check out more of our Cookbooks of the Week:
Music maven Angie Martinez’s Health Latin Eating
In Her Kitchen, stories and recipes from grandmothers around the world
San Francisco chef Charles Phan’s Slanted Door cookbook
What’s your best trick for avoiding excess sugar?
