Introduction

T he Good Carbs Cookbook is for everyone who enjoys deliciously wholesome food and loves to cook. It’s packed with recipes using the foods from our fields, farms and gardens that celebrate natural goodness and enrich our experiences of cooking, sharing meals with family and friends, and enjoying life. We have also put some fun facts on the table to get a lively conversation going.

We want to share our enthusiasm for what we call good carbs – the plant foods the natural world has provided for us: fruits, vegetables, beans, peas, lentils, seeds, nuts and grains. These foods and the traditional staples we make from them, such as noodles, pasta and good-quality grainy breads, fill the shelves of our produce stores and markets, and inspire us to head for the kitchen and expand our healthy-eating choices with delicious food every day.

GOOD CARB CHOICES

In times past, the only carb foods to hand for our Paleo forebears were good carbs – fruits, berries, shoots, seeds, beans, roots and tubers. And they ate what they could gather or they went hungry. Their naturally roving eye, however, was always on the lookout for new and tasty experiences to fill a rumbling tummy – greener grass, fatter game, riper fruit, choicer berries, nuts, seeds, tubers, and buzzing bees suggesting honeycomb was not too far away.

Our world of supersized supermarkets with groaning aisles is very different. We still have that roving eye, but it’s almost overwhelmed by a surfeit of choice when it comes to food, much of it highly refined, with ingredient lists that often sound like they really belong in a pharmacy. So we end up with dietary dilemmas and endless advice (often contradictory) on the ‘good things to eat’ and the ‘bad to avoid’.

But sorting the good from the not-so-good (in terms of wellbeing and waistline) is not rocket science – Michael Pollan sums it up in a nutshell: ‘Eat foods made from ingredients you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.’

Putting that into practice, picture what you’re about to put in your shopping trolley growing on a farm, or in a garden, or grazing in a field in the not too distant past. Imagine fruits and nuts on trees, berries on bushes, veggies including beans and peas growing in gardens, cows in cowsheds being milked, and fields of grains being harvested to be milled and made into traditional, minimally processed staples such as breads, porridge, pasta, noodles, couscous, burghul (bulgur), kasha and more.

If it’s a challenge to work out what you are holding in your hands (say, a large tin of ‘protein powder’) is actually made of, let alone visualise its ingredients in their raw state or growing in nature, back on the shelf it goes.

10 THINGS WE LOVE ABOUT GOOD WHOLESOME CARB FOODS

1.	We love the way they power the brain.
2.	We love the way they fuel the muscles.
3.	We love the energy they give.
4.	We love the good stuff (vitamins and minerals) that comes with them.
5.	We love their keep-it-regular fibre habit.
6.	We love preparing meals for family and friends with them.
7.	We love the traditional foods they put on the plate.
8.	We love the variety and pleasure they bring to the table.
9.	We love the way they feed the world.
10.	We love their lighter footprint on the planet.

There’s no need, however, to take the picture principle to the level of obsessive five-star purity. Occasional treats are very much a part of life. And we, like everyone else, find it incredibly easy to picture cacao beans dangling on a branch when we look at a bar of dark chocolate, despite the foil and double wrapping.

Making better choices about the food we eat – where it has come from, how it’s grown and how animals are farmed – matters. It’s not only good for our health, it’s vital for the health of our planet. Our food should not only be sustaining, but sustainable.

We appreciate that we are very fortunate to live in times when it’s possible to be fussy about food sources and choices in this way, which was not generally an option for our forebears and is certainly not for many people in some parts of the world today.

GOOD CARB COOKING

Our regular meals, like the recipes we have created for this book, are mostly plant based and built around seasonal fruit and vegetables, beans, grains and traditional staples. As for other ingredients, we like our dairy foods from contented cows, our eggs from really free-ranging, happy hens, our meats from animals that have been well cared for and lived a good life in fields not feedlots or factory farms, and our seafood from sustainable sources.

Don’t be afraid to get creative with our recipes. A recipe (with, perhaps, the exception of baking) is a starting point, not necessarily a formula. Think of them as being similar to those touristy road maps leading to lovely destinations from which detours can be taken. If you are missing an ingredient, improvise using what you have in your fridge or on your pantry shelf. You may stumble on something unexpected and glorious.

STOCKING THE GOODS

Good food starts with good ingredients. And that means good shopping. Supermarkets are convenient, and most ingredients for the recipes here can be sourced there, but also look in delis, fruit and veg shops, butchers, fishmongers and fresh produce markets.

• Herbs are always freshly picked or purchased. We use spoon measures for small quantities (up to 3 tablespoons chopped, which is about ¼ cup) and after that we move up to handfuls, as we tend to just step out into our gardens and grab one. (1 handful parsley or mint leaves, for example, is about ½ cup loosely packed. Our recipes use lots of fresh herbs, especially parsley. Unless we specify curly leaf, it’s flat-leaf (Italian) parsley.
• Salad greens are also freshly picked or purchased and generally specified in handfuls or cups, which are loosely packed unless otherwise stated.
• Garlic cloves are medium and plump. If you have super-large garlic, use a little less than the recipe specifies. And if they are very small, use a bit more.
• Milk is regular, full-fat cow’s milk. If you use reduced-fat milk because that’s what you have on hand or you prefer to substitute a plant-based ‘milk’, be aware that the end result of the dish may be somewhat different.
• Yoghurt is full-fat natural pot-set yoghurt (preferably Middle Eastern), which never curdles when heated and has that tart edge to it. Using yoghurt in recipes can be tricky when it has added thickeners and fillers, as some tend to split when heated.
• Eggs are free range and medium (59 g/2 oz) unless otherwise stated.
• Chicken is free range, meat is grass fed, fish and seafood are from sustainable sources.
• Oil is mostly regular olive oil. We specify in the ingredients list when extra virgin olive oil will be the better choice. Some recipes call for vegetable oil. In this case, use what you have on hand. A few of our favourites are cold-pressed grapeseed oil, which has a neutral flavour; walnut oil for dressings and accenting winter veggies; avocado oil to add fullness to dishes or whisked with orange juice for a bright dressing, and cold-pressed rapeseed oil with its buttery and slightly grassy flavour.
• Butter is unsalted unless specified.
• Salt is sea salt flakes (kosher salt) as it blends faster and better than granular salt.
• Pepper is freshly ground white pepper in cooking unless otherwise specified.

GOOD MEASURING

Few home cooks in Australia, for example, bother with precise weighing and measuring unless they are baking. For family meals, they pull out their trusty measuring cups and spoons, and that’s all you need for most of these recipes. For those who prefer to weigh things, we have also included the equivalent metric measures. Note that we say ‘equivalent’. Measures are rounded up and down following the standard procedure. All measures are level.

• Spoons: We used the 20 ml Australian tablespoon (4 teaspoons) in our recipes. Tablespoons in the US and UK are 15 ml tablespoons (3 teaspoons). So if using those, just add an extra teaspoon of the ingredient for each tablespoon specified in savoury dishes.
• Cups: We used the 250 ml (9 fl oz) Australian measuring cup in our recipes. Cups in the US and UK are a little smaller, about 235 ml.

Most of the measuring sets we buy today have US or UK measurements. As long as you are consistent with scales or the cup and spoon you are measuring with, then the outcome will be successful.

Too many people become overly concerned about measuring, placing too much emphasis on precise quantities. For the most accurate method of measuring you have to weigh every single ingredient – just as professional cooks do. This becomes more critical in large-scale cooking.

The best measuring equipment in the kitchen will always be your nose, eyes, hands and fingers … and remember, practice makes perfect. The more you cook the more relaxed and confident you’ll become, making it easier to judge weights, amounts and sizes for things you use regularly, such as herbs and salad greens or potatoes and tomatoes so you won’t need to measure and weigh them each and every time you cook.

WHAT’S IN THE GOODS?

We wrote this to be a family-friendly cookbook packed with simple and delicious recipes to get you racing to the kitchen and creating mealtime memories with family and friends. Our overall intention is to equip you with the basics about good carbs and their chums, good fats and lean protein.

We have kept an eye on portion size and kilojoules (calories), and serves of each dish are suitable for a typical adult. Of course, serving sizes are averages, and none of us have standardised families – men and teenage boys generally eat more than women and children.

The foods we have used in The Good Carbs Cookbook are grown under naturally varying conditions, and are not highly processed into pharmaceutical-like uniformity. The nutritional information provided is therefore based on averages, not dissimilar to those numbers found on the nutrition information panels on packaged foods, and your foods’ composition will vary from time to time. So use the numbers as a good guide, but not as an exact prescription.

We are very aware that some people need to keep an eye on carb quantities to manage their blood glucose levels. We are also conscious that others need to count the kilojoules (calories) to help achieve and maintain a healthy (or healthier) weight. To help with this, you’ll find the nutritional analysis for each recipe at the back of the book (see here ).

If you want the nitty gritty on how we derived the data, we analysed the recipes using FoodWorks, which incorporates the AUSNUT and NUTTAB databases. Where necessary, we supplemented this with data from the US Department of Agriculture (ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search ).

Simplify your life so you can enjoy it. Ditch diet fads, feel good about the food you produce, buy, cook and eat, and enjoy the pleasure it brings each day with family and friends.