fruitastic!

Author: Mohana Gill

Publisher: MPH Group Publishing Sdn Bhd

Price: RM120

When a cookbook is all about fruits, you’d be thinking of the popular ways of preparing them – cut and served fresh, juiced, used in desserts or tossed in salads. But fruitastic!, a new cookbook on fruits, bowls me over with its presentation of the many new possibilities with fruits.

Mohana shows that fruits rule and can be used to make anything edible. Fruits can be the main ingredient in cooking, instead of just looking pretty as garnishing for drinks or desserts.

Generally, fruits are seldom used in cooking. Traditionally, we prefer to sink our teeth into juicy fruits. And if possible, we prefer to enjoy fruits without having to peel them.

Many of us are not adventurous enough to use fruits in cooking although certain fruits have been used in cooking such as jackfruit or papaya. Some of us can’t imagine the results of cooking fruits until they are mushy and beyond recognition.

However, if fruits are chopped, cooked and pureed into soups, they can spring flavoursome surprises. Best served chilled, fruit soups are light and low in fat. It’s definitely free from monosodium glutamate as seasoning can simply be fruit juices (lime, lemon or orange juices) and the thickener can be sour cream, creme fraiche or yoghurt.

If meats and seafood are omitted from one’s diet, nutritious fruits can take over. For hearty main courses, consider fruit with rice as in Grape and Starfruit Salad with Wild Rice, Jackfruit Briyani or Andra Hot Coconut Rice. Or try Guava Curry with puri, an unleavened puffed bread.

Baked Curried Fruit sounds interesting and is simple to prepare. Saute chopped fruits such as pineapple, pear, starfruit and apple in butter, add brown sugar and curry powder and bake for 45 minutes. Or rub pineapple, dragon fruit and papaya with butter and marmalade – and grill!

Dreaming of fruits in a jelly concoction? Well, Exotic Fruit Terrine sounds terrific. For this, you need blueberries, strawberries, kiwifruit and dragon fruit; gelatine or agar-agar power; and calamansi juice.

With fruit soups, you only need to blend the fruits, flavour the concoction with juices and chill before serving. Sometimes, you may need to cook certain fruits until they are tender, then cool, puree and chill before serving. To add texture to the soup, make fruit balls for garnishing! As a thickener, sour cream and creme fraiche are ideal but yoghurt is a good low-fat option.

Fresh fruit smoothies are excellent thirst-quenchers that are naturally loaded with vitamins.

Smoothies appear to be one of the most popular ways of sipping up a fruit or an assortment of fruits that has been pulped. With these tried-and-tested recipes, you don’t need to waste time experimenting in the kitchen unless you want to concoct your own.

There are recipes for 17 smoothies with special blends such as Persimmon Smoothie, Banana Berry Smoothie and Melon Madness.

Oh yes, you can make your own refreshing sorbets, too. Go for something unusual such as Mangosteen Sorbet, Custard Apple Sorbet or Lychee and Lime Sorbet.

fruitastic! is a heavyweight cookbook that doesn’t just serve as a guide to healthy eating but is quite a reference guide on fruits. With photographs, descriptions and trivia on selected fruits, it can pass as a coffee table book, too.

In this big book, the concept appears to be big pictures, big impact. Hence, it’s not surprising to find close-ups of fruits. The tight and artistic shots reflect creativity. However, sometimes, it makes more sense to show the entire fruit to (educate) someone who has no idea how the fruit looks like.

It can be confusing and may leave the reader guessing what fruits are shown, if not for the fruit names (example, custard apple and mango).

The trivia on fruits is well researched and unravels some interesting facts about them. For example, ciku is also known as sapodilla and the Burmese know it as sugar fruit.

Although starfruit is said to have health benefits, it also contains high acid levels which interfere with calcium and iron absorption. Hence, people with kidney or bladder stones should avoid it.

The book scores for its extraordinary and creative recipes. Generally, the large print for the text works for this book. The colourful pages help break the monotony of pages without photographs (as not every recipe comes with a picture). But the wrong colour combinations can have a dizzying effect (for example, page 112 which has pink text against a blue background).

For a cookbook, the food must excite the palate and appear delicious! That’s where good food photography with good styling comes into play. The close-up format with food photographs apparently doesn’t work here.

Moreover, a no-no is to have text all over the food pictures because that spoils the focus (if not beauty) of the food shots. After all, what’s the purpose of the photography? To whet the appetite! Putting a transparent text box and the recipe title over the photograph is, again, distracting. Such overlaps should be discouraged to prevent a page looking too busy.

Some pages can still look good and clean if the food photograph is not masked by text. Good photography should catch the reader’s eye and not lie hidden in the background, overshadowed by text and more text.

Overall, Mohana should be congratulated for her wonderful recipes. If you’re feeling guilty about indulging in too many high-calorie foods, here’s a healthy alternative to power up on fruits!