Sally Bee. Homecook: The Secret Ingredient [Paperback]

This is an excelent book of recipes for a healthier diet. we use it all the time now. Well recomended.

This is a must have book, what a brave lady, good recipes for hearty types, and if it's good enough for President O'Bahma (apologies for spelling) it's good enough for me .

Before I'd been given this cookery book I'd never heard of Sally Bee and her dramatic, and devastating, illness that converted her to promoting healthy eating. Whilst you have to admire the sheer strength of will to recover and to go onto live a full and active life, as well as become a charity ambassador and healthy eating advisor, this first edition of her cookery book is definitely not one I'd recommend for everyone.

The good points: If you're interested in finding out about healthier eating, and have rarely cooked before, then potentially this book could be a real help. The text is easy to read, the recipes are varied enough that a novice home cook can find something new or different to try that they (and family and friends) might all enjoy. Sally Bee makes the valid point that almost anyone can learn to cook and that having more control over what you eat is a good aim for a healthier and balanced diet. There are plenty of basic and familiar recipes to try.

The less good points: If you're a more experienced home cook the importance of healthy eating is one that you probably already know about, and there is little here that you wouldn't already have in other books, magazines or free recipe cards. Omelette, burgers, lasagne, chilli, roasted vegetables, sardines on toast, mozzarella on toast - all are common enough recipes these days. There are more adventurous-sounding recipes, marinated sea bass or scallops with butternut squash, but these can be quite expensive for their main ingredients. I find it hard to imagine that most families would be tucking into a plate of scallops on a regular basis.

Whether experienced or a beginner; a massive oversight in this book is there is absolutely no information on the recipes' nutritional value. It gives you no idea how much saturated and unsaturated fat, sugar, salt (and there will be trace amounts in some ingredients) or carbohydrates are in each meal. This may have been remedied in the second edition but for a diet/healthy eating book that is a surprisingly obvious thing to leave out.

The other problems with this book, for me, is really a matter of personal taste. The gimmick of the book, which strangely doesn't seem to have been mentioned in other reviews, is that a lot of the recipes seem to be based on "A to Z-list celebrities mention their favourite foods". So you have things like Jeffrey Archer's Shepherd's Pie recipe (slightly modified), Simon Cowell saying how he likes to cook occasionally and loves pasta, Bruce Forsyth (or more likely his agent or manager) passing on a recipe for Steak Dijon that was served at his favourite club. This is all fine if you enjoy the idea you're cooking a meal that the ex-Mrs. Chris Tarrant might enjoy, but there are a lot more interesting things about food and cooking than that.

The final failing is that, as well-intentioned as Sally Bee so clearly is, she is not really speaking from an experienced cook's viewpoint. You don't need to be some Gordon Ramsey super-chef to do home cooking but it helps if you do understand ingredients, their flavours and how they work together. You can see this in recipes like the Mega Meatballs with Spicy Tomato and Vegetable Sauce. The meatballs are aromatically spiced (similar to the taste you get with North African or Middle Eastern food), which are then added to a vegetable and tomato sauce which is heavy on Worcestershire sauce and balsamic vinegar. This is not a very happy flavour combination. An alternative suggestion would be to make the sauce for using with pasta and the meatballs to go into pitta breads with red onion, lettuce, cucumber, red pepper etc., a spoonful of plain yoghurt and a bit of lemon juice or you could serve them with couscous.

In the end, I feel obliged to give it three stars because I'm sure that Sally Bee really wants to help in improving people's healthy eating. That's a very good intention to have and I hope that she will continue to learn and develop her own way of doing so.