I didn't want the Kindle version for $9, nor the paperback for $13. I went all out and bought the hard covered book for $26. If I'm going to use it much, the paperback will have a hard time surviving 5 years, and I find it hard to just flip through e-books and read them, especially cookbooks, where I want to flip back and forth. Just give me a real book and a pad of post-its, thank you.
So I got this last Wednesday, and spent about 6 hours reading it. This is a huge cookbook, at around 700 pages. Maybe 450 to 500 pages are recipes, and the rest is verbiage about healthy eating and so forth. It's nearly twice the size of the earlier version which I have, with many more recipes, but it does lack some very vital information which was in the earlier version, such as how saturated fats translate into cholesterol in the body, and recipes for things like lowfat mayonnaise, and how to replace staples of life with healthier alternatives. This book, for example, instead of telling you that you can beat nonfat evaporated milk for a good whipped cream substitute, tells you to use the nonfat whipped topping from the freezer case at the supermarket (which tastes like vaseline to me). These are some serious flaws.
The recipes seem to rely upon really amping up the spices to make up for the missing salt; also, many, many, many of their recipes call for bell peppers, to which I am allergic. If lots of peppers are vital for flavor, I'm kind of sunk. However, I have tried a couple of their recipes, and those were pretty good. If you're not a fan of spicy hot food, be very careful with the use of red pepper flakes, which also seem to be a staple of this cookbook.
Overall, this cookbook does a pretty good job of telling you how to cook heart healthy meals. Long and short of it: Good, but not great.
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