Ely, Leanne

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Ely, Leanne

PERSONAL:

Children: two.

ADDRESSES:

Home—NC. Office—Saving Dinner, P.O. Box 118, Waxhaw, NC 28173. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, columnist, journalist, broadcaster, public speaker, entrepreneur, caterer, and certified nutritional consultant. Daily Courier, Rutherford County, NC, feature writer. National Frozen and Refrigerated Foods Association (NFRFA), nutrition expert and consultant. Host of radio show, The Heart of a Woman and cohost, the Fly Show. Guest on television shows and networks, including QVC, HGTV, ABC, CBS, and Ivanhoe Broadcasting.

WRITINGS:

Healthy Foods: An Irreverent Guide to Understanding Nutrition and Feeding Your Family Well, Champion Press (Fox Point, WI), 2001.

Healthy Foods Unit Study: For Grades 6-9, edited by Brook Noel, Champion Press (Vancouver, WA), 2001.

Healthy Foods Unit Study Guide: For Grades K-5, edited by Brook Noel, Champion Press (Vancouver, WA), 2001.

The Frantic Family Cookbook: (Mostly) Healthy Recipes in Minutes, Champion Press (Milwaukee, WI), 2002.

Saving Dinner: The Menus, Recipes, and Shopping Lists to Bring Your Family Back to the Table, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2003.

(With Marla Cilley) Body Clutter: Love Your Body, Love Yourself, FlyLady (Brevard, NC), 2005.

Saving Dinner for the Holidays: Menus, Recipes, Shopping Lists, and Timelines for Spectacular, Stress-Free Holidays and Family Celebrations, illustrated by Sandy Strunk, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Saving Dinner the Low-carb Way: Healthy Menus, Recipes, and the Shopping Lists That Will Keep the Whole Family at the Dinner Table, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Saving Dinner Basics: How to Cook Even If You Don't Know How, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Saving Dinner the Vegetarian Way: Healthy Menus, Recipes, and Shopping Lists to Keep Everyone Happy at the Table, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2007.

Author and editor of weekly newsletter, Healthy-Foods; author and editor of subscription nutrition newsletter, "Menu-Mailer"; author of column for eDiets.com; author of syndicated newspaper column, "The Dinner Diva"; author of weekly column, "Food for Thought," Flylady.net; author of column, "The Manic Housewife," Daily Courier (Rutherford County, NC).

SIDELIGHTS:

Food expert, cookbook author, and broadcaster Leanne Ely is a certified nutritional consultant whose work often involves techniques for creating nutritious yet appealing family meals. She concentrates particularly on nutrition for children, and her works include hands-on study guides for children in kindergarten through ninth grade. In other books, Ely offers guidance for preparing vegetarian and low-carb meals, and provides instruction for inexperienced cooks who want to learn how to prepare flavorful but nutritional basic meals.

In Saving Dinner Basics: How to Cook Even If You Don't Know How, for example, "the fundamentals of cooking are covered in an easy, colloquial style," noted Courtney Greene in the Library Journal. Ely offers advice that covers all aspects of food selection, storage, and preparation, including choosing the proper utensils and cookware, stocking a kitchen with dry and frozen foods, choosing meats and fish, and setting a table. She also includes numerous recipes that cover the preparation of uncomplicated meals with salads, soups, desserts, meat dishes, and easy-to-fix main courses. Kliatt reviewer Shirley Reis observed that "experienced cooks will find it reassuring that they are ‘doing things right,’" whereas newcomers to the kitchen "will find a wealth of essential information" to make cooking easy and enjoyable.

Ely strives to make her food suggestions healthful as well as delicious, and in Healthy Foods: An Irreverent Guide to Understanding Nutrition and Feeding Your Family Well, she provides a nutritionally conscious cooking guide that is also sprinkled with a generous helping of humor. She encourages the use of ingredients such as whole-wheat flours, yogurt, buttermilk, and safflower oil, noted Booklist reviewer Mark Knoblauch. Though Ely's approach is humorous and irreverent, the ingredients she recommends "are all healthful ones," Knoblauch observed.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 2001, Mark Knoblauch, review of Healthy Foods: An Irreverent Guide to Understanding Nutrition and Feeding Your Family Well, p. 1106.

Kliatt, January 1, 2007, Shirley Reis, review of Saving Dinner Basics: How to Cook Even If You Don't Know How, p. 41.

Library Journal, October 1, 2006, Courtney Greene, review of Saving Dinner Basics, p. 100.