Biased Information and Questionable Recipes

This book purports to be for beginners. I think it is more of a recipe book with a few short articles about the ketogenic diet itself. I found these articles to be heavily biased and light on fact. If you’re hoping to gain true information about this diet to help you better understand it, you would do better to look elsewhere.

The recipes are divided into three sections, breakfast and brunch (30), dinner ideas (31), and snack recipes (10). I have actually written cookbooks myself, so I tend to be a stickler when I look at the format of recipes and how they are laid out. In this cookbook, I definitely found some issues. Some titles are misleading. For instance, the coconut egg scramble, the second recipe in the breakfast section, would lead you to think that it has coconut in it from the title, but it only has coconut oil.

The ingredient lists are inconsistent; they don’t always follow the order in which the ingredients are used. Sometimes the preparation didn’t follow the ingredients when it needed to do so–you can’t have “1 diced bell pepper”; it should read “1 bell pepper, diced”. Sometimes a piece of information that wasn’t preparation followed the ingredient (like “12 strips bacon, organic cooked”). Sometimes the formatting of the directions wasn’t correct either. In at least one place, a paragraph was styled as a header, not as text. There are also issues in the entire book with grammar, punctuation, and usage. They were definitely issues with commas (especially not preceding a preparation method), spacing, and capitalization. This book needs an editor, one who specializes in cookbooks.

As to the recipes themselves, I thought some sounded interesting while others made me question the flavor profile. For instance, I can’t quite imagine a zucchini and coconut flake egg scramble. Some of the amounts of the ingredients in recipes is concerning. For example, the first omelet calls for three eggs but one entire bell pepper that’s been diced. It would seem that that recipe would be more of a bell pepper dish with a little bit of egg binding them than a true omelet.

If you have an interest in the ketogenic diet, I would suggest looking through the table of contents before deciding to purchase to see if these types of recipes would interest you.