Donna Hay’s dishes combine taste and beauty
Donna Hay’s healthy dishes are tasty and beautiful, too, writes Laura Brehaut.
Donna Hay is known for beautiful food, straightforward recipes and delicious results.
Home cooks the world over turn to her eponymous magazine, television shows, Fresh + Light quarterly, and cookbooks translated into 10 languages.
Hay launched Fresh + Light in 2015 as her first “luxe health” effort. Recipes introduced Donna Hay readers to a different ingredient tool box — one that was rich in greens, lean proteins, whole grains, seeds and nuts, unrefined sweeteners and raw cacao.
“What we do well — and what we really work hard on in the test kitchen — is that it doesn’t taste like health food,” Hay says with a laugh from her headquarters in Sydney, Australia.
“It doesn’t taste like you’re giving up anything. I think the worst thing you can do is add whole foods to your diet and then, at the end of the meal, feel like you’ve missed out on something or that you’ve compromised in some way.”
Life in Balance (HarperCollins, 2016), Hay’s latest cookbook, is an extension of her reasonable, “better-for-you” approach.
Chicken, zucchini and feta meatballs use red quinoa for texture, rather than typical breadcrumbs. Various seeds and spelt flour combine in crunchy crackers Ground almonds are paired with raw cacao powder in a five-ingredient flourless fudge cake (right).