Gizzi's Healthy Appetite: Food to nourish the body and feed the soul Paperback – 28 Dec. 2017

I was really excited for this book and I wasn't disappointed!I can't help but give Gizzi 5 stars, the hard work and passion that's gone into this book is incredible. I might be a little bias though as I have had the pleasure of meeting this lovely lady...But still.I am a huge fan of healthy eating and eating really good tasty food...And I admire people who really know what they're talking about.I've read countless contradicting information along my journey to get fit about what we should be eating to lose the extra padding. So many recipes are bland and just sound really unappealing. Apologies, but eating a big bowl of boiled kale just isn't going to excite me!The recipes within this book are beautiful, well written and easy to understand. Yes some of the ingredients are a little odd and not widely available where I live (deepest darkest Cornwall) and certainly won't be sold at my local ASDA.This is where I go online and hunt them down. I've already got Sriracha and Gochujang from this very site and they are incredible products worth having in your fridge if you like to, dare I say it, spice up your life! (Spice Girl reference - Check!)Amazon is my go to place for sourcing ingredients difficult to find in shops where I live. If I can't find it on here (which is a rare occurrence!) I'll look elsewhere.I love the write-ups on the macros - carbs, proteins and fats. For anyone unsure of the better options, these help a lot!There are such things as healthy fats and these recipes include them!It takes real guts for chefs to try and make people see they can eat good food without over indulging and books like this one really hit the nail on the head!You just know that each recipe is super-charged with flavours to make you happy - The Korean Fried Chicken with the spicy chilli sauce is a winner for me every time.In a world with ever expanding waist lines it's time for us to take care of ourselves and eat bloody good food whilst doing it!

This is the 3rd book from Gizzi Erskine that I have bought, and I have to say I think it's her best to date. With the current trends of exclusion diets and vilification of ingredients such as wheat and dairy, this book is a breath of fresh air. Great recipes to try, some classics (the chicken kiev looks amazing, I can't wait to try it!) and some with lots of interesting influences (Asian, Spanish, Polish). I like the way this book includes the trends everyone seems to be talking about like spiralising and cauliflower rice, but amazing looking salads and more 'health food' dishes appear alongside shepherds pie and banana waffles. I know that some of the other reviews here have mentioned certain ingredients may be hard to find, but the big branches of the main supermarkets seem to stock a wide range of international ingredients now, plus there are so many recipes where the ingredients can be found easily. Chatty introductions to each recipe make this book a great bed time read for me too!

Gizzi's latest cookbook arrived this afternoon so I haven't as yet cooked from it, but the recipes are interesting, appealing and different. Yes, some of the ingredients are difficult to source and a list of suppliers would have been useful. However, a quick Google search found several alternatives for yuzu sauce (lemon and lime juice and rice wine vinegar in a ratio of 45:45:10 - bottle and add strips of lemon and lime zest) and no doubt I'll find local suppliers or alternatives for the other esoteric ingredients. But this does mean that a lot of the recipes can't be made at short notice from pantry stocks, but rather you need to plan in advance and make sure you can get all the ingredients.The photography is great and the illustrations are lovely. What I don't like is the text - the introduction for each recipe is in a font that looks like it was typed on an old manual typewriter with dirty keys and a fabric ribbon. The recipes are printed in a very fine serif font in pale grey - difficult for these old eyes to read - and to make it worse, the list of ingredients is in the same font but an even smaller size!! Looks great - but impractical to read from any distance. It's a trend I often see in cookbooks nowdays, and it's a trend I wish would quickly go out of fashion!! I'm a cookbook addict so it really hurts when I have to reluctantly decide not to purchase a book because it is difficult to read and use.Overall, I like the book and recipes (just as I have enjoyed Gizzi's earlier cookbooks), but spontaneous cooking is out and planning is required for many of the recipes in this one. But I'm looking forward to the challenge of sourcing the ingredients.......

Beautiful book; the content is very will written, inventive and what I have cooked has been very tasty and worth the effort. However, (bit of a rant coming) there are too many recipes which require hard to source and/or expensive ingredients. Living in a small town on the South Coast, I don't have access to some of things outside of the online market.In addition to getting the ingredients, the other bug bear is the quantities you are needing. It seems like you either use loads of it making your meal a costly venture, or you use a tiny amount which makes it hardly worth purchasing. Examples being Korean Chili Paste or Burrata cheese to name two off the top of my head.In addition to the ingredients which you have to make, there is a labor of love required for making up the various stocks. I'm sure they taste lovely, but I unfortunately, don't have the time to spend three hours making large quantities to chicken stock, especially when the instructions simply tell you to make sure the water covers the all the ingredients; of which there are several on top of the two chicken carcasses. Even my largest stock pot, gives me 1 litre of stock after I have shoved everything in it called for.If you live in a city, have plenty of free time and you aren't limited on larder space or access to ingredients then I think this would be a fablous book for you.

Very good book

as I thought the recipes would be! Nevertheless, I'm sure I will enjoy a lot of them ;)The Meatballs and Courgetti already were a hit!