Cookbooks For Diabetics

 And Their Families

By Kaaren Valenta

Diabetes is fast becoming an epidemic in the United States.

Doctors are seeing Type 2 diabetes – also called “adult onset” – developing in children, teenagers, and young adults. Until recent years, the disease was rarely, if ever, seen in these age groups.

Sedentary lifestyles, poor eating habits, and obesity, along with an increasingly aging population, are blamed for the increase. Americans want their sweets, and they want quick, convenient, easy-to-prepare meals. Two cookbooks, one by the American Diabetes Association and another by Jean C. Wade, the mother of Janet Shaw of Eden Hill Road in Newtown, recognize this, and provide solutions.

In the American Diabetes Association’s Expresslane Diabetic Cooking (softcover, $16.95), author Robyn Woods shows how to prepare quick, convenient, and healthy recipes using ingredients that can be found in the deli, salad bar, and freezer sections of the grocery store.

Often convenience equals poor nutrition when it comes to prepared and packaged foods. However, this book shows readers how to combine ingredients from packaged foods with fresh ingredients to create healthy, tasty meals. Included with each recipe are instructions for the sections of the grocery stores in which the ingredients will be found.

For example, prepare Mediterranean Chicken and Pasta using chicken from the deli; make Shrimp Provencal with fresh vegetables from the salad bar; or prepare Salmon Tortellini Salad from frozen tortellini and fresh salmon. Most of the 150 recipes in Expresslane Diabetic Cooking take less than 20 minutes to prepare, and some use no more than five ingredients. The truly unique aspect of this cookbook, however, is the way in which the author has divided her book to align with different sections of the supermarket. After an introduction to her system of using ready-made ingredients, she separates the book into four chapters: “Recipes From the Deli,” “Recipes From the Salad Bar,” “Recipes Using Frozen Foods,” and “Recipes Using Shelf-Stable Foods.”

Okay, but what about dessert?  How Sweet It Is…Without the Sugar (Celestial Arts, $12.95) features more than 100 desserts that contain no sugar, honey, corn syrup, or molasses. A diabetic herself, Jean Wade understands the dilemma first-hand of how to watch sugar intake while enjoying a treat after a meal. Her cookbook is filled with welcome suggestions to the problem that plagues diabetics and dieters alike: How to avoid using highly caloric sweeteners that cause blood sugar to soar, but still make something that tastes good.

Ms Wade uses sweeteners that taste good and are good for you, including fresh fruit and fruit juice. A fructose-based alternative sweetener is provided in every recipe for those who wish to avoid artificial sweeteners

Ms Wade begins with an “Alphabet of Hints and Suggestions,” then presents the desserts diabetics thought they would never taste again, including Tangy Norwegian Lemon Bars, Banana Cream Pie with Chocolate and Nuts, Blueberry Muffins, Almond Chocolate Mousse, Choice Cheesecake with a variety of fruit toppings, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Nectarine Bottom-Crust Cobbler.

She makes a Fruity Cream Cheese Topping by combining nonfat cream cheese with all-fruit (no added sugar) jam to spread on crepes, cheesecake, muffins, and layer cakes. Fruit Drop Cookies are sweetened with white grape juice concentrate and mixed dried fruit.

Recipes from How Sweet It Is…Without the Sugar have been served on the Holland America cruise ships since 1994. Ms Wade and her husband live in Santa Barbara, Calif.

The recipes in both of the books are accompanied by the nutritional components per serving including calories, carbohydrates, protein, sugars, total fat, and sodium. Diabetic exchanges also are included.