Product Description

Good for the body doesn’t mean bad for the soul. From the top-rated spa, Conscious Cuisine is bold new methods fused with vibrant fresh tastes to create extraordinary food.

"Chef Cary Neff’s passion for purity utterly oozes from the pages. His recipes are extremely healthy--better still, they explode with bold flavor. I would recommend this innovative work to anyone who wants to eat well."
--Charlie Trotter, Chef and Owner of Charlie Trotter’s Restaurant

Voted #1 spa diet/cuisine in a 2002 Condé Nast reader’s poll
Voted #1 destination spa in a 2002 Zagat Survey Miraval Life in Balance Resort and Spa

From Chef Cary Neff
"Cooking is one of the most memorable, creative, romantic and caring gestures you can make for another or for yourself. Whether it’s a simple bowl of cereal for breakfast or a several-course feast to celebrate a special occasion, great food created with love and care nourishes the heart.

The goal of Conscious Cuisine is to encourage you to become more conscious and mindful of the food you eat and prepare. It is a simple act of noticing and embracing the unique flavors, textures, aromas, presentation and healthy benefits that food provides.

Conscious Cuisine provides you with recipes and techniques that will help you discover new healthful foods, cooking methods and nutritional awareness. Cooking terminology is explained to help you better understand how professional chefs adapt new recipes with ease. You too will learn to cook with confidence, creating sinfully delicious foods without the use of excessive fats and calories.

I have also included a full nutritional analysis of each recipe to illustrate the benefits of Conscious Cuisine. I’m certain you will enjoy the descriptive and colorful photos that come alive within the pages, demonstrating to you that Conscious Cuisine is as visually appealing as it is delicious.

I also have included information on: how to shop seasonally for food; how to outfit your kitchen with healthful foods; how to procure hard-to-find natural ingredients; choosing the foods that are the least processed; learning some of the countless ways of preparing vegetables and whole grains; complementing meals with animal proteins rather than having them as the main ingredient.
It is my hope that Conscious Cuisine will unleash for you new approaches to cooking and eating every day and that it will open your senses to new possibilities."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #158446 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The very phrase "spa cuisine" holds the promise of luxurious food (at empyrean prices), dazzlingly presented and of course, more nutritious and healthful than you could ever imagine. To his credit, Neff, chef at Chicago's Miraval Life in Balance Resort, makes good on most of these superlatives in his book, which is as much a manifesto for a beautiful way of life-wholesome, elegant, flavorful-as it is a cookbook. Earnest and articulate, Neff is an able culinary innovator. In an entire chapter on low-fat sauces he coaxes strange bedfellows into happy marriages: carrot-cardamom sauce, saffron-chive sauce, beet-ginger sauce. All the recipes are low-fat, just daring any home cook to try sauteing a pound of protein in 1/4 teaspoon of olive oil. There is, of course, a catch in this too-good-to-be-true formulation: these are not simple dishes to prepare. Easy-sounding "Vegetable Casserole" calls upon four separate recipes dispersed throughout the book. And that's child's play compared to the side dish Layered Spinach, Wild Mushroom, and Carrot Mousse. Neff trained as a traditional chef, which may explain his assumption that readers have an army of prep staff and dishwashers awaiting orders. In any case, it seems clear that this is not a cookbook for the average weekday night-unless one commits to living with the "conscious cuisine" ethos ("to become more conscious or mindful of food") for weeks at a time, in which case one might have Toasted Fennel and Tomato Sauce, or Beet, Cranberry and Jicama Relish on hand at any hour of the day or night.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"Conscious cuisine" is what Neff calls the food he cooks at Miraval Spa near Tucson, AZ, among the top spa resorts in the country. Here he presents dozens of recipes for the sophisticated but healthful food he serves-one of the major reasons for the spa's popularity. Dozens of color photographs, many of them full page, show off the gorgeous presentations that add to the appeal of Neff's boldly flavored dishes. For diet collections and others where spa cookbooks like Jeanne Jones's Canyon Ranch Cooking or Michael Stroot's Golden Door Cookbook have been popular.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Opposite these books designed to get food on the table and appetites quickly satisfied lies the deeply caring Cary Neff's Conscious Cuisine. Neff thinks about every ingredient he puts on the plate. Not only must each item be high quality, it must meet the chef's exacting nutritional standards. Based on his experience in spa cookery, Neff strives for a menu of little fat, and every recipe inventories the dish's nutritional benefit. Although not exclusively vegetarian, Neff's cuisine uses meat sparingly and emphasizes fresh vegetables of the highest quality. A few examples of tofu and tempeh-based dishes appear, but they are only supplementary. His Dauphinoise potatoes achieve a semblance of the original's creaminess by using rice milk, almonds, and roasted garlic to sauce thin potato slices. Expert home cooks will enjoy the challenges here while they decrease their families' intake of saturated fats. Large-format photographs increase the foods' appeal. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Original!!! Not your usual low-fat cooking
I own about 120 cookbooks and I peruse several cookbooks a week at libraries and bookstores. This cookbook is outstanding and ORIGINAL!!! Chef Neff goes far beyond routine, low-fat techniques. Every recipe has both complete nutritional information and a beautiful photograph demonstrating how to present the dish to its best advantage.

Chef Neff is truly a master of his craft.

Excellent book for foodies trying to eat well
I should first preface this by saying I love food. I love reading about it, cooking it at home, eating it in restaurants, etc. However, I've recognized that since I have graduated from college and now have a more sedentary lifestyle that I can no longer eat the rich foods and large portion sizes that I used to. Thus, I have started looking to "Cooking Light" and other healthy cooking resources to help guide my menus. My biggest frustration with most healthy cookbooks is that the dishes lack flavor and feel like your standard Betty Crocker fare, rather than something you would expect to see in a nice restaurant. This book is exactly the opposite. What I love about it is that in opening it up almost every recipe appealled to me, and yet I was shocked by how healthful it all could be! It's great if you want to make something restaurant quality at home but don't want all the extra fat and calories. Everything I have made so far has been very tasty and of a quality that I would present to dinner guests. There is also a good variety so you can get a lot of interesting meals out of this book. The only downside for me is the portion sizes on the salad dressings and condiments. Many of these sound absolutely delicious and would be amazing to use, but they make 2 or so cups of dressing that only lasts for 2 to 3 days in the fridge. Unfortunately, some of the recipes do not half well so they aren't the smartest option for a single woman like me who doesn't want food to go bad. I do, however, like that he indicates which items freeze well since there are a lot of delicious sauces I plan to make and then freeze in an ice cube tray to use for later. Overall this is a great book. I checked it out from the library thinking I would only like 1 or 2 recipes and now am planning to buy it for myself.

This book is AMAZING, don't skip this one
I love this book so much that I don't know where to start.

To put this review into perspective for you, it is written by an amateur cook that has been seriously studying cooking on her own for 25 years. My favorite cookbook is "The Professional Chef", this book ties for second place with "Healthy Techniques by the CIA".

Anyone can make a dish taste better by adding cream, butter, eggs or sugar. But when someone can take most of things away and still come up with food that you want to eat, all I can say is WOW. If I could nominate this man for sainthood I would.

First, I love that the chef gives you nutritional information on every recipe. If you are a numbers geek like me, you just need to know the calories, fat, saturated fat, etc. in each recipe.

Second, anyone that can come up with a Caesar salad dressing with 25 calories in 2 tablespoons, and make it take good, is a genius in my book.

There has not been a single recipe from this book that wasn't at least good. And given the numbers (nutritional information) that is really saying something. If you want to really be blown away there is a Chilled Chocolate Souffle with a Berry Consomme (230 calories) that is mind blowing.

On the down side, some of the recipes in this book are a little labor intensive. If you don't get pleasure from cooking this might not be the book for you. However, if you relax by cooking and love to learn new techniques I highly recommend this book. I would have given it more than 5 stars if that were an option. This book is definitely at least an 11 on a 10 scale.