Jamie's Food Revolution

What do we mean by the Food Revolution?

We are talking about the latest book by Chef Jamie Oliver (the Food Network’s Naked Chef ) called Jamie’s Food Revolution: Rediscover how to cook simple, delicious, affordable meals that is at the heart of the Food Revolution.  This time instead of a cookbook that focuses on simply great food, this cookbook has a goal: To reduce high obesity rates and general poor health by cooking from scratch at home. Jamie plans to tackle this goal with a two part plan:

1. First Part: Get cooking!

It is Jamie’s quest to get folks back into their kitchens and cooking on a regular basis. He is serious about changing everyone’s health for the better. He notes that less than 1/3 of Americans cook their dinners from scratch anymore– this book is here to help change that number.

Now we just love this message. I know we are all busy and have to go in about a million places each day, but the idea of taking five minutes to plan, and actually spending time cooking at home and then relaxing at the dinner table and being able to re-connect as a family, to us is just wonderful.

We understand that many readers may not be gourmet chefs, or even confident cooks in the kitchen. Don’t worry…we all had to start from someplace, right?

This book, Food Revolution, is going to help you learn to cook.  Unlike most other cookbooks that just jump right in to each section, this book is different. Food Revolution takes the time to explain kitchen equipment that you will need as well as makes suggestions on items to purchase to stock the cupboard (or panty). Jamie writes that with a well stocked pantry when you purchase a nice piece of fish or chicken for example, you can “take it to Spain, Italy, Morocco or China just by using certain herbs or spices from your cupboards. That’s what’s so exciting about cooking”.  We agree 100% with Jamie. The fact that you can totally change the flavor of a meal from your first thought: “Italian chicken and tomatoes” to a second thought: “Spanish chicken and tomatoes” by switching up the herbs and spices or rice and chickpeas to us is as close to magic as you can get at 5:30pm on a Tuesday night.

2. The second part: Share!

The second goal of this book is just as awesome as the first: To help each other learn to cook better at home. Yep, that’s right, Jamie wants us to share our favorite recipes with one another (once we get a few that is ). He calls this part “Pass It On”.

The Pass It On Pledge

OK so the Pass it on pledge is that everyone has to get involved with changing all of our eating habits and for the better of everyone (Eeks! For the Greater Good?) Anyway, Jamie wants everyone to pledge to learn one recipe from each chapter in this book. Next “Master” the recipe by making it at home a couple of times, and then Pass It On! This happens when you teach the recipe to at least 2 (hopefully 4) friends by having a cooking party. Then hopefully your friends will teach two more and so on, and so on….

It is Jamie’s goal to really start a Food Revolution with people cooking and teaching others to cook on a regular basis.  Now don’t get all overwhelmed and think that you just can’t do this. Jamie is not asking you to cook huge complicated menus for twenty five people on your first night cooking or ever, really. This book is here to help you with nice, clear pictures and simple recipes to help everyone start to cook more at home.

One statistic that was included in the introduction to this cookbook was the fact that Americans spent more on fast food in 2007 than they did on education.  Eeks! We are not sure how to take this, but think this could be a wake-up call to notice how much fast food we are eating and make the effort to include a few more homemade meals into the mix each week. Soon we will be eating more and more meals at home and becoming healthier as a nation as a result. So what do you say? Lets turn our fast food into brain food!

We are going to pledge to help Jamie and his Food Revolution any way we can. We pledge to include more step-by-step recipes here on Living Trader Joe’s.com to help all our readers learn to cook, or learn some new easy recipes.

Please let us know what cooking help you would like us to share, so that we can Pass It On here! You can email us, or leave a comment below. THANKS!