Macro Cooking Made Simple: 50+ Recipes for Clean Eating and Healthy Living

Macro Cooking Made Simple is a well written beginner accessible monograph on clean eating and macro cooking by Rachel Werner. Due out 25th April 2023 from Quarto on their Chartwell imprint, it's 160 pages and will be available in hardcover format. 

The book is aimed at beginners searching for accessible info about making informed choices about eating in order to promote a healthy lifestyle and gain follow-on physical and mental health benefits. The introductory chapters contain an impressive amount of background and how-to information including why, how, and what. The author is knowledgeable and at the same time has an appealingly informal stayle. The fourth chapter has a solid introduction to meal planning and contains resources and info which are useful even if not used in the context of macro-counting and cooking.

The second section includes the recipes, arranged by mealtimes: breakfast, mains, sides, snacks, and beverages. Ingredient measurements are supplied in imperial (American) units with metric in parentheses (yay).  The nutritional information includes calories, fat, protein, and carbs.   Each recipe has a header with special labels such as nut-free, gluten-free, vegan, dairy-free, etc along with a short description of the recipe and approximate prep-times. Extra tips or recipe alternatives are listed in text boxes in the recipes. The recipes themselves are fairly straightforward and are made for the most part with easily sourced ngredients. Many are very simple, none of them are overly complex.

The photography is gorgeous and abundant. In fact the photography was one of the highlights for me. This not a vegetarian or otherwise plant based collection though it does have many vegan/vegetarian friendly recipes (and many more which can easily be adapted to plant based ingredients).

The book includes a very short abbreviated bibliography for further reading as well as a cross-referenced index.

Four stars. It would make a superlative housewarming gift to a friend or family member or friend trying to eat more health consciously with better quality ingredients. It would also make a good supplemental text in an educational setting (nutrition, physiology, etc) or for library acquisition.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.