A new cookbook packed with delicious dishes that also make you feel good

Most cookbooks that purport to help with healthy eating often lack finesse or, well, delicious recipes. But not so in the new book “Help Yourself: A Guide to Gut Health for People Who Love Delicious Food” by author Lindsay Maitland Hunt. Hunt’s book is about learning to eat foods that make you feel good, period, while laying out the science behind what goes on in our guts with well-researched authority and, thankfully, a matter-of-factness that gets straight to the point.

The cover of “Help Yourself: A Guide to Gut Health for People Who Love Delicious Food.”

(Linda Pugliese)

The fact that her dishes are enticing is a bonus, especially for food that is, in her words, “healthful.”

“I really try to stay away from using words like ‘healthy’ and ‘clean’ or ‘guilt-free’,” Hunt says. “‘Healthy’ means different things for everybody, and I don’t want to prescribe good or bad attributes to any way of eating. Balance, and eating to make yourself feel good, is what really matters.”

In addition to recipes to stock your fridge with an arsenal of roasted vegetables, sauces and cooked grains to make daily healthful eating easy, Hunt also offers lots of nourishing meals that work for a weeknight dinner as well as a weekend celebration meal. Her “Spiced Lamb Meatballs and Escarole Soup” is just such a recipe, combining simple spiced meatballs with escarole — or any green of your choice — for a quick soup that freezes well for repeat meals. The fact that this dish — and all her dishes in the book — make you feel good is an added bonus.

Spiced Lamb Meatball and Escarole Soup

Time 50 minutes

Yields Serves 4 to 6