Healthy Microwave Cooking Cookbook Overview

        I managed to find another cookbook with recipes that do not require the oven or stove. It is Healthy Microwave Cooking by Judith Benn Hurley. Hurley was a food columnist for Prevention magazine and has written for other publications as well. She also has written four other cookbooks, Rodale's Garden-Fresh Cooking, Savoring the Day, The Good Herbs, and The Healing Foods. Hurley was also nominated for the James Beard Award for Focus on Health. Healthy Microwave Cooking was published in 1988 and the recipes in it are more exotic and seem to be fancier. The main audience for the book is busy career focused adults who do not have much time for cooking but want to enjoy what they eat and don;t want to feel like they are eating rushed sub par food. I think there are recipes in this book though that college students would definitely like and some would be very beneficial to them. It is also nice that the book focuses on healthy because it is not always easy for students to eat healthy especially when it comes to the dining hall.

        Hurley's book is a bit similar to Hensperger's in that they both lay out the ground work for microwave cooking. She has a section with some menu ideas for different occasions which list various recipe titles from the book. Next there is a section with the names all of the recipes in the book that take 15 minutes of less to make. After this the actual recipes start and they are broken up into different sections.

       For each item she lists the number of servings the recipe will make, the number of calories per serving (as you can see she is sticking with the healthy theme here), the directions with the ingredients needed in a box on the side of the page and for many of the recipes she includes ideas for how to serve what was made and what to serve it with. The layout of the pages is very nice and the pages are setup in a way that is good for people who need to quickly flip through the book. They would need to do so in order to see what they would like to make and what they actually could make based on what is called for.





 
 There are no pictures accompanying the recipes in this book either. However there are a four
sections each comprised of a few pages of pictures of some of the things that can be made from recipes in the book. The pictures are also the only pages in the cookbook that have color. This makes them pop even more though I do enjoy colored text as well because it gives a more entertaining and fun feel.

Lemon Miso Soup with Vegetable Julienne and Skinny Noodles page 59, recipe can be found on page 75

The pictures that are included though look great and have very vibrantly colored food.     
        Hurley is a big fan of fresh ingredients and on page 19, the first of the under 15 minutes section "Microwave in Minutes" she states that "[i]t's never easy to determine the exact time it will take to prepare a recipe. I may chop faster than you. You may have extra help in the kitchen. Some cooks may even use convenience items like prepared garlic (and shame on them if they do)"(Hurley 19). You can see a bit of Hurley's personality here and it helps to make the book more interesting. You are able to here her voice throughout and especially when she is giving . Such as how on page 126 which has a recipe for Orange Roughy With Tomato, Lemon and Mint she says "[w]hether this Australian fish deserves its name or not, it sure looks like the thug of the sea. In contrast, its flesh is clean and tasty"(Hurley 126). This gives a glimpse of her writing style which is sometimes hard to see in cookbooks due to the limited amount of creative writing in them.