Good for You contains recipes that are vegan, gluten free, dairy free, vegetarian, or a combo. As someone who suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome and chronic inflammation, I am always looking for new recipe ideas. I do find this more effective for me than my family as they are quite picky. I really appreciate the labeling each recipe had. In the end, I think this is for a person who is more inclined to experiment and has access to better ingredients than I do.

Good For You is a great cookbook to learn the basics of vegan/gluten-free/vegetarian cooking! The easy to follow recipes mixed with the stunning photographs, this book is excellent. I found this book to be an excellent starting block for vegan/gluten-free cooking, with a great Foundations section. I also really enjoyed the dairy-free recipes, with are not super easy to find!

This book provides the reader with solid information that supports a healthier lifestyle and healthier eating options.

Great book of diverse healthy meals! It help bring inspiration to my kitchen! Gave me ideas to work with while meal planning.

A cookbook filled with gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian and vegan recipes. Every recipe is marked GF/DF/VG/V in both the table of contents and on the recipe itself, so it is quick and easy to find the category that you are looking for. A full list of pantry ingredients is included, along with recipes for all of the sauces, marinades and purees needed for any recipe. Each recipe is accompanied by a full color photo and easy to follow instructions. How about gluten/dairy free Pumpkin Pancakes or Weekend Waffles for breakfast? How does a gluten/dairy free, vegan cauliflower Pizza Crust with Seasonal Toppings sound for lunch? On a chilly day, a hot bowl of Smoked Fish Chowder or Chicken and Black Bean Chil (both gluten/dairy free) sounds devine. For dinner, try the Turkey Lasagna or Fish Tacos with Pistachio Mole. Let's not forget the Dark Chocolate Truffles and Dark Chocolate Almond Butter Cups with Sea Salt - gluten/dairy free and vegan!

I received a complimentary advanced reader copy of this book through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Healthy eating, vegan recipes, gluten-free, this book contains many ideas for reforming a meat-based diet into good tasting food with plant proteins. The influence of Indian, Mexican and Italian cuisine among others, gives these recipes a global appeal.

So happy to find a cookbook that can address my food allergies and intolerance with so much flavor! Are there recipes with expensive or hard to find ingredients , sure BUT recipes with costly ingredients are for special occasions and often I have been able to find elusive ingredients online. Most of the recipes are suitable for every day consideration. Beautiful photography and interesting text makes this cookbook interesting to read.

As someone who is a cancer thriver, I really watch what types of foods I put into my body. This book is a really great book to have for those that are looking at adding some great new recipes to their meals. I tried a quite a few of their recipes and have been successful- especially with the little kids! Would definitely recommend this to many others looking for new recipes to bring into their daily lives.

I love the versatility of food and loved that this book had so many ideas on how to pack a punch of flavor into the most bland of foods.

Chronicle Books and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of Good for You: Bold Flavors with Benefits. 100 recipes for gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, and vegan diets. I voluntarily chose to review this cookbook and my opinion is freely given.

This cookbook proves that you can eat well by eating healthy, without having to sacrifice flavor. Good for You is filled with wholesome recipes from simple to more advanced, meeting a host of dietary restrictions in a way that will surprise many eaters.

The cookbook is separated into logical sections. For example, there are foundation recipes like mayonnaise, marinades, and dressing. The recipes range from Breakfast offerings like Acai Bowl with Fruit and Paleo Granola, to Meat recipes like Chicken Tinga, and desserts like Dark Chocolate Almond Butter Cups with Sea Salt. Eaters looking to try something new can make such offerings as Cauliflower Biryani with Mango Chutney, or Yuba Noodle Salad with Ginger Dressing and Raw Vegetables.

The cookbook offers a great layout and varied recipes. What particularly struck me was the use of spices, other than salt, to provide a great layering of flavor. At quick glance, readers will be able to see what dietary restrictions each recipes have. The photographs and the instructions help to make this cookbook one that readers will cherish. Overall, Good for You: Bold Flavors with Benefits is a cookbook that I would recommend to those looking to eat healthy without sacrificing flavor.

Good For You by Akhtar Nawab is not a book I would suggest to the people that live in my community. They would not find the ingredients in our local store and they do not have access to speciality stores. My community is rural and in an area where not everyone has access to fresh vegetables and fruit. This book is more for people who have a bigger food budget. I do like the photos in this book which is always what I want in a cookbook.

This is a beautiful and helpful book that's packed with wonderful recipes, information and techniques. I love the addition of staples, and there's a wonderful variety of recipes for all nutritional tastes and needs.

I loved this cookbook. It came at a time when being confined for an extended time I was looking to expand a meatless but favorable menu. Well look no further. The recipes are healthy yes but they also push the cook to explore the depth of flavor to be found in simple ingredients. The language was straight forward and the pictures were helpful at least for this cook. His inspirations blended the best of several cuisines to tempt the tastebuds beyond beans and rice. A great find.Happy reading

I love cookbooks and so many of these recipes are BOMB! Thank you for giving me a chance to view this book - I'll be buying for friends as housewarming presents for years to come!

In my attempt to find new vegetarian recipes for my family I decided to download this one from NetGalley.

I enjoyed reading this cookbook with 100 recipes that are great for healthy, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, and or vegan diets. While most of the recipes fall under more vegetarian, there are also dishes with meat in it. The recipes are bold in flavours and are influenced by international flavours: Indian, Southern, Mexican & Italian cuisine. The recipes seemed more complicated then I wanted to attempt with ingredients that I don't normally have on hand, however, it seemed like they would be fun for an evening of cooking and food!

The photos are stunning, colourful, pleasing and inviting. I did find myself more interested in looking at the recipes, photos and reading what Akhtar Nawab had to say rather than making the recipes.

Culinary history is a rapidly evolving specialty, and while professionals, students and home cooks alike collect cookbooks, not every volume is one to truly teach, to make a contribution. Akhtar Nawab’s Good for You is an exception, and a truly successful first cookbook. As the culinary world shifts towards traditional cuisines that have always been primarily plant-based, both as an evolution in taste and as a matter of conservation and health consciousness, it’s important that thoughtfully written guides show the way. There’s plenty here for meat eaters too,as well as carefully crafted gluten and dairy-free recipes. The gentle, wise narration provided throughout encourages, inspires and educates the novice and expert alike. It’s rare to find a cookbook that has so many really innovative recipes, using ingredients that may not be well known but should be, as so many others are mere turns on classics at best or overly fussy and ill-suited to most readers’ lives and skill set, meant only to be stared at in a glossy photograph, and never attempted. Grounded in his Indian heritage, the Mexican flavors come out of his current restaurant, Alta Calidad, an evolution he describes as “...overlap between the spices … it feels like home.”As for the photographs, Good For You’s are simply gorgeous, organic to the text, and balance the pleasantly modest narrative that explains the chef’s progress through life in and out of the kitchen. As the author states in the Desserts chapter, “...what follows are some of my favorite ways to find balance between indulgence and health.” That could sum up this beautiful book. Highly recommended.

Unfortunately I was unable to open this book. Therefore, I was unable to read or review it. Thank you for the opportunity, as I was very much looking forward to trying some of the recipes.

For a vegan cookbook or paleo cookbook, this very solid and includes paleo recipes and useful general cooking recipes. It is a solid effort with inviting recipe such as Weekend Waffles and multiple fresh takes on standard shakes and smoothies and that ever tricky vegan baking. However I've been reading recipes for Morning Glory Muffins for 25 years and so on occasion for me, this cookbook lapses into the tried-and-true. Maybe that's just because those recipes are tried-and-true and so they've been included. But what is offered here that is new looks terrific, useful for easy to find ingredients, and as always actual food that will nourish you.

Good for You by Akhtar Nawab is a beautiful cookbook, in the subset of cookbooks I call “Whole Foods Cookbooks.” Which is to say, big and beautiful and full of sumptuous recipes, often with obscure ingredients and/or complicated, lengthy preparations, billed as healthy. But the term healthy in books like these is nebulous, a sort of Whole Foods healthy, wherein meat and fish are still consumed (despite the misleading subtitle about vegetarian and vegan diets, most main dishes are meat -or fish-centric), and olive oil by the cupful, and eggs are frequently praised. But there’s no gluten or dairy, and the author recommends bison instead of beef and cashew-based sauces instead of dairy. Occasional mentions are made of environmental benefit from choosing certain ingredients, but only for those ingredients which are actually environmentally friendly. No mention of the other, more environmentally harmful aspects of other frequently used ingredients. This is not an environmentally friendly cookbook overall, nor, by my definitions, is it particularly healthy. More healthy than McDonalds or fried foods at the county fair? OK, sure. But ingredients like acai juice and a lack of decadent dessert recipes does not necessarily qualify food as healthy.

Does this mean that I hated the cookbook? No, actually, not at all. I bookmarked many recipes in hopes of trying them before my digital advanced copy expired. There are some lovely soups and sides, for instance, and a number of sauces and other staples that sound quite promising. Everything seems a little fussier than my preferred every day recipes (Butternut Squash Soup with Ginger and Chile, for instance, has 16 ingredients listed!), but the recipes I did bookmark seem worth giving a try on my days off. Ginger Blueberry Smoothie sounds delightful, as do Black Bean and Sweet Potato Burger, Black Chickpeas and Lentils with Spinach, Lentil Hummus, and Cardamom Almond Milk, as well as basics like Cremini Mushroom Sauce, Mojo de Ajo, Romesco Sauce, and homemade Tomato Paste, not to mention the Vegan Soubise that is central to so many recipes in this book. Oddly enough some of the recipes I am not interested in trying are the very gluten free ones I came here looking for–the texture of his gluten free breads, pastas, and crackers, as described, sound very unappealing and not worth the extra work.

I also appreciated all the little informational asides throughout the book, explaining the benefits of toasting spices prior to use or of soaking meat in brine or marinade, for instance, or how to make the best basic marinade, or the benefits of coconut flour, as well as a handy key at the beginning of the book for labeling recipes as Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Vegetarian, or Vegan (Those keys are used not only on each qualifying recipe’s page, but also by the recipes listed under each chapter heading, which certainly makes locating applicable recipes more efficient.) and a thorough index at the back. As mentioned before, the book is just lovely too, full of gorgeous food photography and sweet photos of Akhtar with his daughter Ela, or of a fit and healthy-looking Akhtar by himself.

Akhtar, as you might guess from his name, is of Muslim Northern Indian-American heritage, and he devotes a lot of space to talking about that, mostly about how it influenced his cuisine, as well as other aspects of his background, from his childhood as an overweight brown-skinned boy growing up in a mostly white rural southern area of the USA, as well as his experiences working at restaurants around the county, starting and running restaurants of his own and visits to rural areas in Mexico and Italy to learn about their cuisine. The resulting cuisine of the book is a sort of Northern Indian-Mexican-Italian fusion. Sometimes his stories start to feel like name-dropping, when he mentions yet again the chefs with whom he’s worked and restaurants at which he’s worked or which he’s run. He also seems to exist in that Whole Foods economic bracket wherein running to places like Whole Foods for koji or a bottle of acai juice or a jar of ready-made fig paste is realistic logistically and economically. Alas, we don’t all live in that bubble. My husband and I probably spend too much of our income on food, and even we don’t keep the kind of expensive and somewhat obscure ingredients he often calls for (I love trying new spice blends, but even I’d never heard of Tajin seasoning.).

Overall a nice aspirational cookbook, pretty to look at and full of interesting ideas, but maybe not practical for everyday cooking for the non-chef working adult on a limited food budget. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it and looking at the photography, and appreciate #NetGalley and Chronicle Books lending me a free digital advanced copy of #goodforyoucookbook . This is my honest review.

Fabulous cookbook, great vegetarian dishes. Beautifully photographed, well written and easy to follow recipes.