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Cookbook review: ‘Mediterranean Diet Cookbook’ a keeper

By Daniel Neman

Source: The Richmond Times Dispatch
Published: March 4, 2009

The cool thing about Mediterranean cuisine is that it incorporates food from so many diverse regions.
Mediterranean cooking encompasses food from Spain, France, Italy (we're going clockwise here), Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, plus the island countries of Cyprus and Malta.
And all of these, or most of them, are represented in Nancy Harmon Jenkins' irresistible "The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook." Jenkins contends that Mediterranean cooking is particularly healthy, which may be a little specious -- the average life expectancy in Syria is less than 71 years.
But with Jenkins' recipes, Mediterranean cooking is particularly delicious. If it's actually healthy, too, so much the better.
You can page through some cookbooks and find only one or two dishes you want to make. In "The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook," I wanted to try them all.
So much Mediterranean cuisine comes from the sea, so we started with a North African Spiced Marinated Fish, a piquant preparation that leads to a superbly moist fish steak. We used swordfish, one of the recommended varieties, and it was perhaps the best swordfish this swordfish skeptic has ever had.
We served that with a Ragout of Fresh Green Beans, a Greek preparation combining the beans with tomatoes, potatoes and onions, served at room temperature. Delicious. Another excellent room-temperature vegetable dish was Turkish Style Oven-Braised Winter Vegetables, a melange of seasonal veggies simmered in the oven and combined with beans.
The only misstep was a Stifado of Lamb -- a Greek (or Cypriot) stew using red wine and red wine vinegar as a braising liquid. It came out tasting a little bit vinegary, but the big problem was the sheer mass of onions. The recipe calls for 3 pounds of onions to 2 pounds of lamb, and that's just too many onions; it makes it more of an onion stew. No other stifado recipe we could find calls for that many onions, and one wonders if Jenkins meant to call for 1 pound of onions.
Fortunately, we made up for that stumble with the Mediterranean Country-Style Bread, an exceptionally crusty loaf with an earthy flavor and a hearty crumb.

I can't wait to use up the loaf we have now so I can make another.

The New

Mediterranean Diet Cookbook
Published by: Bantam Dell
Price: $35 Pages: 496
Recipe worth trying: Orichiette alla Barese, Page 203