Amie Valpone’s Eating Clean: A Cookbook Review

I’ve been on a cookbook binge lately. I rarely ask to review a cookbook since I receive so many pitches from publishers. But one book I DID ask to review was Amie Valpone’s new cookbook, EATING CLEAN: The 21-Day Plan to Detox, Fight inflammation and Reset Your Body. (Amazon Link) If you remember Amie, a Culinary Nutritionist, from this interview, she was on a heartbreaking but amazing health journey to healing her mysterious chronic illness. She added a detox regimen, ate clean foods and took nutritional supplements to finally heal herself. So when I heard she was writing her first cookbook, I had to have a copy because I knew it’d be amazing.

Amie Valpone’s Eating Clean: A Cookbook Review

As a healthy woman in her mid-twenties, Amie’s life turned upside down when she found herself nearly bedridden, suffering from a range of ailments, and utterly without a conclusive diagnosis. And then, with a complete and total detox, Amie healed herself. In her first book, EATING CLEAN, (Amazon Link) Amie shares her incredible success in ridding her body of illness and reclaiming her life. EATING CLEAN includes a 21-day Elimination Diet, a two-week meal plan, more than 200 sumptuous recipes and a guide to cleaning up your home environment for healthier living.

Look at this pretty Bell Pepper Soup, one of the recipes she shares in her book.

21-Day Elimination Diet

With her 21-day Elimination Diet, Amie gives her best tips to kickstart the food and lifestyle transformation that comes from clean eating long-term. By switching from foods that trigger sugar cravings, chronic symptoms, and other imbalances to fresh ingredients that feed good bacteria, reduce inflammation, improve the ability to fight off pathogens, and lose weight, Amie makes the detox experience one of abundance instead of deprivation. While going through the 21-day Elimination Diet, you are encouraged to fill out a journal each day of what they ate, how they felt, and coping techniques they used for a thoughtful and lasting behavioral modification. This is a customized way to really dive into what’s bothering you.

Detox Meal Plans

Amie also includes a two-week detox meal plan to introduce you to the healthy lifestyle without being overwhelmed. Amie said, “This meal plan is filled with nutrient-dense foods to help you see results, remove toxic triggers, and reverse symptoms you may be experiencing such as bloating, gas, arthritis, acne.” Her approach focuses on how much your health can improve when you got your body working for you, not against you, and how detoxing can address and correct the imbalances that may be affecting your system, which medicine might only cover up, or even exacerbate.

Ingredients To Avoid

EATING CLEAN also gives a list of ingredients for you to include or exclude in their diet; hidden names for sugar used in ingredient lists; and what to eat when you’re tempted to reach for the coffee, bread basket, or a sugary cocktail. The book explains the problems ingredients like caffeine, soy, conventional meat, and gluten can cause in your body, and offer the healthiest options for substitutions.

Allergy Friendly

Amie’s provides more than two hundred recipes that are free of gluten, dairy, soy, peanuts, eggs, corn, eggplant, white flour, refined sugar, and any ingredients that come from a can. That’s a HUGE plus for me because many cookbooks these days, recommends canned or boxed ingredients.

Look at this colorful carrot fettuccine using only fresh ingredients. Zoodles is all the rage but these are so much prettier and appetizing! Perfect for spring!

Highlighted recipes from EATING CLEAN include:

• Scrumptious Breakfast options: Sunday Morning Blueberry Pear Oatmeal Bake, Breadless
  Coconut Vanilla French Toast, Millet ‘n’ Veggie Breakfast Tacos, or quick on-the-go no-bake Fuel Up Bars.
• When it comes to snacks, finger foods are the quickest and simplest way to go—Amie’s Small
  Bites chapter contains: Freckled Sesame Almond Clusters, Abundant Mango Cardamom Walnut Bars, and grain-free Lemon Peppered Almond Crackers.
• Appetizers like Herbed Avocados with caramelized lemon drizzle recipe or Sunrise Nori Wraps
  with spicy tahini drizzle that keep readers energized and satisfied until their next meal.
• The Roasted Onion and Sweet Pea Salad with fresh mint and creamy almond dressing, which
  would make a tasty lunch or light dinner.
• Vegetable-based entrees packed with healthy carbohydrates, protein, and healthy fats, including: Raw and Grain-Free Zucchini Pad Thai, Moroccan Chickpea Skillet Pizza, or Carefree Carrot and
  Brussels Sprouts Medley.
• Amie also includes from-scratch sauces to zest up entrees like the peppery Sunflower Pesto, and decadent desserts that are healthy and delicious, like the Lighthearted Raw Grain-Free Fudgy Brownies.

Environmental Detox

Detoxing your body doesn’t mean you’ll be safe. You also have to detox your surroundings. So, Amie takes the time to explore the toxins that are in what we eat and drink, and also in household products and high-end beauty products too, from Teflon-coated nonstick pans to disinfecting wipes and blankets. Not only that, she gives a list of replacement options (LOVE!!) and a list of Do-It-Yourself cleaning products and detoxifying houseplants that can help. By eliminating the toxins from the home and using these simple recipes, readers can reset their body and live a healthier lifestyle.

Medical Resource

Years of research and doctor appointments have supplied Amie with a vast medical knowledge. In her appendix, she shares information on toxin-free products and vendors, and helpful notes on Lyme Disease Testing, Hormone Imbalances, and the MTHFR mutation, which Amie suffers from—along with 35% of the population—that makes it difficult to process and expel toxins from the body.

Sunrise Nori Wraps with Spicy Tahini Drizzle Recipe

Amie was gracious enough to share this simple and elegant snack/lunch recipe with me. And since I always have nori on hand and a plenty of vegetables in the fridge, this was easy peasy to make. If you like California rolls, you’ll love these nori wraps (though personally, I think they’re so much better!). The tahini dressing is truly addictive—you’re going to want to dress everything in it—and the cabbage provides a nice crunch. If possible, use a food processor to slice the cabbage so you can get it super thin. Also, make sure the vegetable strips are all the same width and length so that they don’t hang over the edges of the nori sheets; this will make rolling up the wraps easier. Use leftover tahini drizzle as a dressing for salads or as a dip for crudités.

Sunrise Nori Wrap with Spicy Tahini Dressing

5 from 3 votes

Print

Course: Snack

Cuisine: Vegetarian

Servings: 4

Calories: 189kcal

Author: Dr. Karen from https://www.drkarenslee.com

Ingredients

Sunrise Nori Wraps

• 4 nori seaweed sheets
• ¼ small head red cabbage very thinly sliced
• 1 large carrot peeled and julienned
• 1 small yellow summer squash julienned
• 1 small cucumber julienned
• 1 large ripe avocado pitted, peeled, and sliced
• Spicy Tahini Drizzle see recipe below

Spicy Tahini Drizzle

• 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1 ¼ tablespoons chickpea miso paste
• 1 tablespoon raw tahini
• 2 medjool dates pitted
• 1 garlic clove minced
• ¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• Water as needed to thin the drizzle

US Customary - Metric

Instructions

• Place the nori sheets on a flat surface.
• Divide the cabbage, carrot, squash, cucumber, and avocado among the sheets.
• Top each pile of vegetables with a heaping tablespoon of the Spicy Tahini Drizzle, and then roll up the nori sheets into a tube shape.

Make the tahini:

• Combine all of the ingredients except the water in a blender. Blend, adding water 1 teaspoon at a time as you go, until the mixture becomes a thin sauce.

Nutrition

Calories: 189kcal | Carbohydrates: 25g | Protein: 4g | Fat: 10g | Saturated Fat: 1g | Sodium: 233mg | Potassium: 771mg | Fiber: 7g | Sugar: 13g | Vitamin A: 3545IU | Vitamin C: 50.7mg | Calcium: 69mg | Iron: 1.5mg

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Regardless whether you are eating paleo or vegetarian or flexitarian, the key to staying healthy is to eat what makes you feel good and avoid those that cause inflammation which leads to all kinds of health issues. And even on the paleo or flexitarian diet, eating clean fresh ingredients with a plenty of vegetables and fruits is highly recommended. So this vegetable friendly cookbook would make an important collection of recipes that will balance out anyone’s diet.

So grab a copy today. If you buy a copy of EATING CLEAN from Amazon, I make a small affiliate commission. Your price is the same. The book is available in Kindle or printed versions.

All images used with permission from Eating Clean by Amie Valpone