Eat Clean: Wok Yourself to Health
For the calorie counter, nutrient tallier, and health conscious spod, Eat Clean sums each recipe per serving with decimals of calories, protein, carbs, sugars, fat, saturated fat, fiber, and sodium.
Huang’s recipes are a lovely fusion of Western and Eastern fast and easy dishes that can be achieved by combining ingredients on a chopping board or cooked with a wok.
The salads look great, like Three Strands Egg & Potato Salad, Raw Chinese Leaf Rainbow Coleslaw, and Fresh Laotian Style Sashimi. Appetizing wok dishes such as the Korean Bibimbap with Quinoa looks appealing and a good idea of Hot and Sour Courgette Noodles with Sichaun Fragrant Oil are definitely on the list of things to cook along with Smoked Tofu with Dinosaur Kale.
There are wonderful inspirations for vegetable dishes. Huang encourages that we should maintain a 80/20 vegetable/meat diet to be healthy, which is good for our wellbeing, body and mind.
Most dishes and pictures throughout the book look nourishing, nutritious, and lustrous, perhaps because the photographs focus on the “eat clean” feel of the dishes. In each recipe, Huang talks about why the ingredients in each dish is good for the body because of the minerals it contains or how it is packed with vitamins. She persists on about super-foods, which is the affluent dieter’s dream, and how you should always buy organic.
In her introduction, Huang tells us about her bowel symptoms because she suffered an allergic reaction to prawns. She then discovered that it is the sulfites that can naturally occur in things like seafood, wine, and nuts but that it is also used as a preservative. She then decided to “cleanse” and tells us all how and why we must eat organic, consume no alcohol, caffeine, or GM products, keep low on sugar and wheat, and not smoke.
Huang discusses the alkaline diet and how certain foods like meat, fish, diary, grains, most nuts, sugar, shellfish, and processed foods are all acid-forming foods that increase the pH of the body. Whole fruits and vegetables are alkalizing, which helps the body heal and re-balance.
She speaks about the yin and yang principles—very interesting in Chinese and South East Asian food and life philosophy—but she doesn’t explain much about it in full detail. Each of the more than 100 recipes have good quantities of vitamins and nutrients, which is great for those obsessed by them.
“Create Your Own Mantras” such as “Health Is Wealth, “Cherish Time,” “Love Life,” “Exercise & Meditate”—all while facing your fears. What Huang recommends are all true, of course, great mantras to stick on the bathroom mirror. Eat clean. Buy organic. She’s right.