Super natural cooking: five ways to incorporate whole and natural ingredients into your cooking

I chose my favorite everyday-type recipes to share in this book. They were selected with the aim of showing you how versatile, delicious, and unintimidating a diet of natural and whole foods can be.

Swanson has created a beautiful, chic cookbook, perfect for a Christmas gift this year. The recipes are geared for the intermediate cook--complicated enough to scare off a kitchen novice, but with an introduction to all the ingredients to explain the reasons behind choosing these unconventional flours, sweeteners and supplements.

While I've been enjoying paging through this for the past few weeks, I haven't yet been inspired enough to try out a recipe. Therein lies its strongest asset and its problem--it's beautiful and invites browsing, yet the stylish format and artsy pictures (of patterns and people, less so of food) dissuade one from actually trying out the recipes. However, the introduction is incredibly useful, explaining the properties of and differences between conventional ingredients (such as high fructose corn syrup) and the natural ingredients (such as agave nectar).

When I do get around to testing some recipes, I've marked such worthy dishes as the roasted tomato and paprika soup, the giant crusty and creamy white beans, the thin mint cookies and the spiced caramel corn. I hope they're as good as my imagination makes them out to be.