Engine 2 Cookbook - Edited

Just a reminder, this is MY opinion. Yours may be different. You may have a totally different opinion. Please, no hate notes in the replies.

What can I say about The Engine 2 Cookbook? I know this book was just released today, but I pre-ordered it. My paper version is on a UPS truck but the Kindle version I was able to download as soon as I woke up this morning.

First off, I'm disappointed in a number of ways. The "coaches" on the Engine 2 Seven Day Diet Facebook community assured everyone that the recipes are all new. They're not. From "Our Hummus" which was featured in the original Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease book to the Sweet Fire Sauce that was in the 7 Day Rescue book, there are many recipes that are repeats. Many are exact word for word of the original ones, a few are the same recipe with maybe one ingredient different or a different quantity. For instance, a lot of recipes that call for red bell peppers now say "ancient sweet red peppers" with the plain red bells as an alternate.

The second big disappointment is the fact that Dr. and Ann Esselstyn did this great review of the book the other day on Facebook:



yet many of the recipes contain things people following the Esseslstyn Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease food plan can not eat, like nuts, seeds, and pure sugars, like maple syrup (and I didn't even look at the desserts yet!). Of course, people following the McDougall MWLP or AJ's UWL can't eat these, either, nor should any McDougaller trying to lose weight or handle a medical condition.

And once again, instructions in some of the recipes tell you to cook various foods until super crisp, hard as a rock. I have no idea how those people's teeth can stand things like Mestemacher bread triple toasted, or baked oatmeal cooked so firm you can "knock on the crust for luck," as one recipe in this book says.

Another peeve, a few of the 130 recipes aren't really recipes. For instance, Banana Butter on page 103 tells you to peel and chop a banana and spread it like butter on some of the various dessert breads. Really?? Fire Roasted Corn tells you to wet ears of corn and put them over a fire on a barbecue grill. Really?!?! Best Damn Fries tell you to cut Yukon Gold Potatoes into fry shape and roast them in the oven. Oh, come ON now!!!! Pita chips, corn chips, taco shells, roasted peppers - each its own recipe, each part of the count. We're now down to less than 100 actual recipes in this book. Maybe even less than 50 if you want to count only new, never before published ones.

Tex-Mex and The Acid Queen strike again. Yes, many of the recipe require sriracha, cholula, or other hot, spicy sauces or hot peppers. This was one of my complaints with early recipes by Mary McDougall, too. And you can see Ann Esselstyn's influence in all the vinegars and citric juices as ingredients in recipes. I'm not a fan of either. If you are, you won't be disappointed.

All these gripes and I'm only up to page 130 scanning this book on my Kindle! So far I haven't seen one recipe I would even attempt to make, but I haven't even hit the Salads or Main Dishes yet. I still have hope this book will redeem itself.

Okay, if someone was VERY new to whole food plant based eating and needed transitional meals and never bought any cookbooks or looked at any recipes on-line, this would probably be a good beginner's book. But even if you have a rudimentary knowledge of how to cook this way, or own any other Engine 2 book, you will be as disappointed as I am. 

Time to go get the laundry on. I'll study this more later and keep my fingers crossed that I'll find at least a soup or casserole that looks interesting and hasn't already been published elsewhere.


Later the same day . . .


One recipe that may have redeemed the entire book is the one for brats. When I first heard there was going to be a brats recipe I (wrongfully) assumed it would be another vital wheat gluten based one. I have loads of those going back to the 1970's. I was pleasantly surprised to see it's made with cannelini & pinto beans, rice and oats (think Jeff Novick and his Burgers and Fries DVD). And it uses rice paper wrappers for the "skin" part of the sausage. Unfortunately for me, just like when Shayda posted her famous stir-fry spring roll wraps on the UWL FB community (Sorry, you have to be a member for that link to work), I won't be making them as-written because I have no easy access to rice paper wrappers. Yes, I can order them from Amazon, but with the luck I have with fragile things and Amazon, they would probably arrive ripped to pieces and be unusable. At least the book offers a variety of flavorings for the sausages, but then again, so does Jeff in his DVD.

A few of the chilis look interesting, but familiar, as do the lasagnas.

I took a quick skim of the desserts section, and as feared, it's full of nuts, sweeteners, even tofu. There's a very unappetizingly named thing they call "Bear Scat" that's made with chocolate chips and fruit.

Am I still disappointed I bought this book? Yeah. Will I return them for a refund? Probably not. Right now I've been cooking very simple meals, but perhaps in the future I may look for more complex recipes again. I already own every other Essesltyn book out there, whether it's the father, mother, son, or daughter. Each book has something I can use, even if the recipes need to be tweaked to suit our family's requirements, which most resemble those of Dr. Esselstyn, thanks to my husband's past CABG surgery and my cardiomyopathy, and gluten-free and potato-free thanks to my auto-immune diseases. 

My recommendation requirements still stand. If you're a family in transition from the SAD way of eating, if you have no medical conditions, and if you were born into a family of tall, thin people like the Essesltyns, go for it and enjoy all the recipes as written. Enjoy the nuts, the maple syrup, the tofu! For the rest of us, there's a lot of tweaking and substituting to do. If you already own the other Esselstyn books and don't like repeats, do the Look Inside the Book feature on the bookstore web sites and take a peek at the table of contents or the index first and then decide. Like me, you may wind up buying it anyway.