A Healthy Seder

Faye Levy doesn’t look like anyone who’s ever had a problem with her weight. The prolific cookbook author stands at 4-foot-10, and weighs about 100 pounds.

But somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as she was working on “Chocolate Sensations” and “Dessert Sensations,” she realized that testing those recipes, on top of six years at cooking school in Paris, had added a lot of weight to her tiny frame.

“For many years, I thought that since I love food so much, there is no way I can ever be at the right weight for my height. I was just going to be chubby and that’s it,” Ms. Levy said over a cup of coffee.

Good thing her next book focused on vegetables.

“I found out that you can have good meals from mostly vegetables. If you have vegetables and a legume, and maybe a little lean protein, whole grain rice or whole grain bread—but just a little—you can lose weight,” said Ms. Levy, 56, an award-winning author of around 20 cookbooks, including “1,000 Jewish Recipes” (Wiley) and “Feast From the Middle East” (William Morrow).

She has translated that knowledge into her new book, “Healthy Cooking for the Jewish Home: 200 Recipes for Eating Well on Holidays and Every Day,” (William Morrow). Unlike her low-fat books of the late 1990s, this one focuses not on what to cut, but on the wide variety and interesting ways to prepare components of a nutritious diet.

The book offers recipes with adventurous spice blends that perk up vegetables and healthy alternatives to traditional favorites. Passover is the perfect time to take some courageous leaps with vegetables and put colorful organics at the center of meals that might otherwise be laden with fatty meats, dense matzah and ubiquitous potatoes.

In fact, Ms. Levy and her husband once experimented with an all-vegetable diet. They managed on only vegetables for three weeks—it was all the chopping and preparing that eventually got to them—and then slowly added fruit, legumes and then finally small amounts of vegetarian protein and whole grains.

Now, they have a more moderate diet, eating all varieties of meats, grains and legumes but doubling the vegetable amounts in everything.

Talking to Ms. Levy, it became clear just how much she loves food. She told stories of meandering in food markets from Jerusalem to Santa Monica to Istanbul, of the friends she loves to eat with and the people—family, neighbors and professionals—who taught about cooking.

Her new cookbook is something like that, too, full of tales of how she developed these recipes, the people she met along the way, and her many experiences at cooking school and in teaching cooking classes. In her recipe introductions, she offers tips and explanations that are just as valuable as the recipes themselves.

Her recipes blend a variety of traditions—her childhood in a kosher, Ashkenazi home; her husband’s Yemenite traditions; her training in French cooking; and her love for Chinese and Italian food. Some of my favorite recipes in the book are not usable for Passover: baked barley with chard and garlic pesto; a cabbage and carrot salad with peanut sauce; a simple blend of bulgur wheat, fresh garlic and ginger.

But there is a lot to choose from for Passover. Levy’s Passover section includes twists on the traditional, like whole-wheat matzah balls floating in chicken soup with asparagus. But leaf through the other sections to explore the bounty of vegetable recipes—it’s just the thing to offset the potatoes, eggs and meats that usually make Passover eating anything but healthy.

Braised Calabaza Squash with Chiles and Ginger
Cucumber Jicama and Orange Salad with Black Olives
Ethiopian Spiced Vegetables

Julie Gruenbaum Fax is education editor for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.

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