Elaine Magee - The Flax Cookbook: Recipes and Strategies for Getting the Most from the Most Powerful Plant on the Planet

This book is dedicated to my amazing and loving father, Don (1922-2002).

Papa, your big heart, abundant creativity, and sheer joy of living are a constant inspiration to me. My heart is full with love and memories of younow and always.

N INETY-NINE CENTS a pound. Thats the price of what is arguably the most powerful plant food on the planet. Flaxseed isnt newits been around for centuries. Its not exotic its an amber-colored seed the size of a sesame seed. You dont even have to choke it downit actually has a pleasant, nutty taste. Who says you cant get anything for a buck anymore?

Flaxseed must be natures best-kept secret. Heres this wonderful plant food that boasts not one but three nutritional attributesboth types of fiber, plus phytoestrogens called lignans, and a plant form of omega-3 fatty acidsyet no one knows about it. Sure, some people have started hunting down flaxseed and adding it to their smoothies, hot oatmeal, and breadbut not many. All you have to do is ask the people around you. Your average person doesnt even know what flaxseed looks like, let alone that it offers an array of essential nutrients. Flaxseed wasnt even being studied by the scientific community until about a decade ago.

CURRENT research supports several health benefits from eating flax seed including a lower risk of heart disease, cancer prevention, management of autoimmune disorders, and relief of constipation.

F LAX C OUNCIL OF C ANADA

I have spent the past few years writing the Tell Me What to Eat medical nutrition series (Career Press), covering everything from diet, menopause, and type 2 diabetes to eating to prevent breast and colon cancer. No matter which book I worked on, I kept coming across strong, accumulating scientific evidence about the benefits of this itty-bitty seed called flax. Well, you dont have to hit me over the head more than onceit got my attention.

Im not one to promote magic bullets; Im a firm believer in looking at your food intake as a whole. But truly, if there were an almost panacea out there in Nutrition Landthis would be it. The scientific evidence only continues to accumulate on flax-seed and the momentum builds with each year of research. What is it about flax that makes it so magical?

U LTIMATELY THIS IS a flaxseed cookbook, so in addition to bombarding you with the latest information about flaxseed, I am also serving up an assortment of flaxseed recipes. Now, I fully expect that some of you will prefer the easier method of adding ground flaxseed to your smoothies, bread, and muffinswhich works just as well. In fact, there are ample recipes to satisfy this preference in chapters .

Others will be willing to push the flaxseed envelope and try flaxseed recipes for everything from appetizers to entrees and even desserts. If you are in this latter category, I hope you will feel that you have found the Promised Land of flax as you thumb through chapters .

While working on this book, my family came to expect flaxseed in almost everything I cooked up; any food that wasnt white as snow was suspect. But I still managed to surprise them quite often. When my girls drank their Mocha-ccino Freeze (page 72) and told me how much they liked it, I quickly made my flaxseed confession.