Mexican Light: Exciting, Healthy Recipes from the Border and Beyond

This is one of the best of the Mexican cookbooks for people who want to incorporate food more authentic than "Tex-Mex," cheese-smothered dishes into a health-conscious lifestyle. While the dishes aren't meant to be historically and culturally precise, they do in my opinion represent the progression in Mexican cooking that has been overdue. A vegetarian-friendly cookbook, "Mexican Light" was written by a woman who clearly has eaten what she cooks, and has tinkered extensively with her creations to come up with just the right textures, flavors, and spices. The recipes run the gamut and can be made every day or for special occasions. Her approaches for fat-free chips have eliminated store-bought kinds in my household. The tostadas, blackbean-and-tomato soup, quesadillas, and pureed fruit desserts are wonderful. The potato-and-chicken soup with lime is fantastic and simple, easily converted to vegetarian by substituting seitan for the chicken. The chayote-and-yam stew is a favorite amongst my friends, as is the potato-and corn salad. The corn soup dish, while time consuming, is spectacular and makes the best of sweet corn in August. The most-made dish in my house is the green chilaquiles, totally unique and better in her recipe than any I've had in a restaurant.

This is a very useful book filled with delicious recipes that my picky husband and our guests love. Try the chipotle chicken salad! The instructions are simple to follow and most recipes are not too time consuming.

Most of the dishes I've cooked in the last few months have been recipes from this excellent book. If you've used Shulman's other cookbooks, you'll recognize the style: chatty writing, bold flavors (e.g., lots of garlic and cilantro), a mixture of vegetarian and meat dishes, careful instructions in the recipes, a nutritional summary for each recipe, and a separate chapter on unusual ingredients. Many of the dishes in this book can be made in 30 minutes to an hour, though some are more complex. And while the food may be good for you, it tastes terrific.Don't expect this book to be an authoritative survey of Mexican cooking. There's no mole poblano, or even a burrito recipe. Some recipes are fairly authentic, others merely "inspired" by Mexican ingredients. Since the recipes she concocts are often as good as the classics she leaves out, that's a minor drawback.