Give your cooking a makeover!

I was talking with my husband one day while browsing Amazon for titles of organic baking cookbooks. I commented on what I found to be a surprising lack of books on the topic, adding that maybe this was a niche that needed filling (perhaps by me?) "The reason there aren't any organic baking books is because there's no need for them," my husband explained patiently. "You don't need a recipe to make organic food--you just need organic ingredients. Any recipe can be organic." I sulked for a moment, not wanting to give up so soon on my newly discovered road to authorship, but I knew what he said made perfect sense. I had been preparing my favorite recipes organically (mostly) for a few months now, without the aid of any special cookbooks. There is virtually no recipe that can't be made "organic" simply by substituting organic ingredients for the conventional ones. Okay, I suppose that the recipes found in The Twinkies Cookbook: an Inventive and Unexpected Recipe Collection from Hostess can not be made organic no matter how hard one tries (I do not even want to know what is in a "Twinkie Burrito"), but any other recipe calling for normal ingredients can be converted easily. In fact, recipes for baked goods--cookies, bread, brownies, cakes--are great candidates for organic makeovers because organic butter, flour, sugar, eggs, chocolate, oats, dried fruit, and other common baking ingredients are readily available. For example, I recently made the infamous Neiman-Marcus cookies using organic ingredients with the exception of the vanilla and the pecans (a word of caution here: if you make these cookies, you probably only want to make half of the recipe, unless you are not like me and you have the will power not to eat all of the 144 cookies the full recipe makes. As it was, I got 90 cookies out of the half recipe and yes, I ate most of them). Substituting organic ingredients for their conventional counterparts guarantees a healthier dish; not so much from a fat-and-calorie standpoint, although there is some debate about whether the fats in organic foods are better for you than those in non-organic foods, but more from a what-I'm-eating-will-not-harm-my-body standpoint. And as I've mentioned before, they usually taste better, especially when it comes to organic produce.

Eating organic does not have to be difficult; in fact, it can be as easy as making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or your grandmother's macaroni and cheese. Give your favorite recipe an organic makeover, and I'm sure your family (and your body) will thank you.

GO PATS! (Sorry, I couldn't help myself--we're all a little Patriots-crazed here in New England these days.)

Kate
The Ordinary Organic