Oh dear, grains—the moral majority of the dinner plate. Dull, bland, righteous, humourless, dour, and about as much fun as doing your taxes. No foodie rushes to tell friends he’s just gotten his hands on the new season’s barley. No invitation includes the conspiratorial whisper, “Psst, I smuggled back some organic oats.”

Judith Finlayson knows all this. The Toronto-based author of The Complete Whole Grains Cookbook: 150 Recipes for Healthy Living (Robert Rose, $27.95), she is well aware that some people (down with that forest of hands) find grains boring, and she’s out to redress the balance. She got interested in the topic when she was writing about healthy slow cooking, she said over tea during a recent trip to Vancouver. Grains “first came to public consciousness in the ’60s,” she added, but fell out of favour because of leaden muffins and an “eat it because it’s good for you” ethos. “I’m a foodie, I’ve always loved to cook,” Finlayson said, and it was combining her lust for flavours with an emphasis on nutrition that gave rise to this, her ninth cookbook.

If you grow up “eating bleached white flour, rather than whole wheat,” she writes in the introduction, you “become accustomed to the dull taste of refined foods”. The author says she was intrigued by western society’s culture of refined grains (basically whole grains with all life and energy, and most of the goodness, knocked out of them). “It’s really because manufacturers want the long shelf life,” she says of the white bread and white rice that dominate supermarkets, and, to be honest, whole grain does not keep as well. “It’s a real food,” she said. “It has these healthy oils [the reason it can go rancid]. Buy it at a place with high turnover, [and] if you’re not going to use it within a couple of weeks, store it in the fridge or freezer.”

But isn’t it true that whole grains take hours to make? Yes and no. You can watch a feature-length movie in the time it takes to cook barley, but couscous (which is technically a pasta) you simply soak. Finlayson acknowledges that certain grains can take a long time to prepare, but she points out that, in many cases, leftovers can be frozen. As Canada’s leading authority on slow cookers, she tells you when you can use your slow or rice cooker in the “Whole Grains Primer” that prefaces the recipes, which also points out that those little brown or beige thingies are good for everything from reducing your risk of having a heart attack to keeping you regular. Hers isn’t the only whole-grain manifesto out there. “The differentiater is the nutritional information,” she said of her book’s inclusion of comprehensive profiles of all the grains, from amaranth to wild rice.

Perhaps because Finlayson came to food writing via mainstream journalism rather than a home-economics degree, she adds verve and gusto to what could be an eye-crossingly dull topic. “I love to cook with spices,” she said. “I love chili peppers. Good robust food.” Her trick is to surround whole grains with flavour-loaded ingredients. Just as boring-but-worthy dinner guests can be a foil for the brilliant chat going on around them, grains can highlight high-octane flavours. One of her favourite salads combines kielbasa, Asiago, red onion, and pickled hot peppers. A Turkish-style wheat-berry soup is goosed with cumin and lemon juice. She also recommends black sticky-rice pudding rich with coconut milk, and a roasted red pepper risotto. “I discovered that short-grain brown rice is naturally glutinous,” she said. “You get risotto results without the stirring.”¦Cranberry-orange pecan muffins—you can make the batter two days ahead, and bake them while you shower.”

While she’s a bit of a hedonist—suggesting that you soak raisins in rum to add to your brown-rice pudding, spiking a quinoa pudding with amaretto and cherries, and using whipping cream and real (rather than low-fat) cheeses—she keeps meat content to 30 percent, bulking plates up with whole grains and vegetables. It’s zero percent if you opt for “meatless mains” like a Korean-style rice bowl or mushroom varnishkes.

This isn’t just spin. I’ve already made a few of her recipes, and they’re genuinely delicious. Spiked with zingy lime flavours, her citrus lamb with spinach and couscous alone was tasty enough for me to move The Complete Whole Grains Cookbook from the reference shelf to a permanent spot in the kitchen.