I have a food blog! What an amazing discovery!
The latest addition to my cookbook collection is Forks Over Knives. Someone made a recipe from it and it was delicious, so I got my own. I don’t regret it. I’ve had it for about three weeks and I have already made several things from it, and all of them have been successful.
But I do have one problem with it. No oil, seriously? There are certain tastes that simply cannot exist without the help of oils. Curry is sad without oil. And oils are essential for metabolizing nutrients in other foods. I thought fat-free had been abandoned for its multiple nutritional flaws. Some dishes may benefit from the freshness of taste possible with oil-free cooking, but others are hurt by it. I can understand why some people trying to transition to a healthier diet would want to use less oil, but cutting it out almost completely?
Forks Over Knives takes fat-free to an extreme:
hummus without TAHINI???
Tahini MAKES hummus. Hummus cannot exist without tahini. Hummus is not hummus without tahini. It is pseudo-hummus. Chickpea paste. Perhaps it is edible, perhaps even tasty, but it is not HUMMUS. And what is wrong with tahini? It is super nutritious. Protein, iron, B-vitamins, calcium, other good stuff, and yes, it is mostly fat, but it is good nutritious fat. I eat tahini by the spoonful.
If I were stranded on a desert island and I could only have five foods, they would be:
1. Chickpeas
2. Tahini
3. Olive oil
4. Lemon juice, and
5. Salt
Floof in my food 
No oil?! That’s so weird….
Not even coconut oil?
It’s kind of like the anti-Atkins diet, from one extreme to another. I would never try to go fat-free. It would be just as silly as going protein-free or carb-free.
But some recipes call for almond butter. Why is almond butter okay and tahini bad?
Seriously, how does one cook without olive oil? I’d also like to see the recipe for a tahini-less hummus. It seems like the author doesn’t know the difference between good fats and bad ones.
I knew of one person who went a completely fat-free diet for several months, until she became extremely sick. Her doctor told her that her body needed fat to keep skin and hair healthy and to metabolize food into energy. When she caught a cold, it sent her body into a tailspin: she had no reserves, no energy to fight off a run-of-the-mill virus.
I should read the intro stuff to see what their philosophy is. At least chickpeas naturally have some fat.
The recipe is: 2 c. chickpeas, 4 cloves garlic, zest & juice of 1 lemon, 1 tsp toasted cumin seeds (ground), and salt.
Uff dah, that is dry! I’d think the chickpeas, even after being pulverized in a blender, would be kind of crumbly-rough.