The Wholefood Catalog: A Complete Guide to Natural Foods

This helpful guide explores purchasing, storage, nutritive values of and cooking suggestions for a number of foods. Some items like peaches, pecans, rye flour and yogurt are grocery-store staples. Others, including amaranth flour, carob, dulse and mung beans, are more easily located in health-food stores. For cooks who are enticed but baffled by whole-food store selections, Atlas dishes up buckwheat noodles with asparagus and a sweet-and-sour sauce, and tells readers how to open a coconut, what quinoa flour is and how to pronounce kefir. Much of the cooking information comes as brief hints: substitute peanut butter for some of the fat in piecrusts; or, toss chopped figs into a spice cake. Readers will appreciate the sampling of meatless recipes, such as chilled potato-buttermilk soup, whole-wheat pasta with sweet-red-pepper sauce, cheddar-corn muffins and cashew-butter sauce. The tone is encouraging and easygoing; the volume even permits semisweet-chocolate chips, anathema to hard-liners. Atlas is the author of American Harvest, a vegetarian cookbook. Illustrated. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.