Good recipes - but avoid the 3rd edition

books:


	• 1,001 Low-Fat Recipes: Quick, Easy, Great Tasting Recipes for the Whole Family Sue Spitler, Linda R. Yoakam Surrey Books, 1998 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Endless delicious, low-fat recipes!

I can't even begin to give you an idea of the incredible variety present here. However, I can say that I drooled over the salad chapter. Really. I don't even like salads all that much, normally. But the dishes in this book are fresh, original, delicious, simple, and, for the most part, very flavorful. The recipes and their directions are incredibly simple. The only nitpick I have is that sometimes it seems like a tiny bit more detail would be nice, such as exactly how thick they mean by "thickened." However, the recipes are simple enough conceptually that even with only a small amount of experience in the kitchen you should be able to figure them out.

I really love most of the flavors in this cookbook. Let's take a bean salad as an example. As a general rule, I really don't like beans much. You have to do something truly nifty to them for me to like them, and I don't think I've ever enjoyed a bean salad before. Ever. And neither has my husband. But the dressing looked so good (apricot preserves, ginger, vinegar, etc.) that I couldn't resist trying it, and we both loved it so much we practically couldn't stop eating it! The only thing we made that was bland was the mushroom rolls--there wasn't much in the way of flavoring agents, but all it took was a bit of spice mix to fix that. And I expect a friend of ours who enjoys bland food would have thought the recipe was fine, so that's more a matter of taste than anything else. I'm very impressed by cookbooks that can take foods I normally don't like and turn them into foods that I love, and this is certainly one of them.

Nutritional information is included with the recipes, including calories, fat grams, saturated fat grams, cholesterol, sodium, protein, carbohydrates, and exchanges. Unfortunately for people on the Weight Watchers POINTS system they don't include fiber. In the menus section they even include an assessment of the nutrition per serving for the entire menu as a whole!

I've really enjoyed using this cookbook, and plan to make many more recipes out of it. Oddly enough, I expect many of those to be from the bean and salad sections.

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Excellent cookbook!

This is a great cookbook. So many recipes, you can always find something to make and they taste great!! Very easy to follow too, short ingredient lists. I have already given it as a gift also. And I just saw there is a new version out--"the Best 1001 low fat recipes". Looks as good to me. I sent that one as a gift too. Nice to know you are making healthier recipes with these cookbooks.

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Great Find

I have had this book for about a year now, and continually find myself going back to it when I'm stuck in a rut. This book has been so helpful in my weightloss journey. There is a great variety of recipes, and they taste great! I love the soups and desserts listed, but my favorite is the Chicken-Vegetable Manicotti and Spinach Sauce. You can't go wrong with this cook book.

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Good recipes - but avoid the 3rd edition

I regret buying the third edition (and Amazon won't let me downgrade my four stars for the original to two stars - which is what I'd give the new edition). The original edition of this book has been my most heavily used cookbook over the past few years - mostly for the section on meat-based main dishes (the chicken dishes aren't that good), for quiet dinners at home - not company fare. Just the fact that it has low-fat pork recipes is a big plus - the guy I'm cooking for loves the stuff and most lowfat cookbooks ignore it. The microwave "oriental sliced beef" (a stir-fry without oil!), the lamb and white bean soup, the Creole ("Bayou" in 3rd edition) pork chops, and two recipes dropped from the 3rd edition - the Austrian pork loin with apples and cranberries and the Swiss steak - are dishes I make regularly. Not a "wow!" cookbook - but the original book was great for the daily grind.
But the third edition is unuseable - due to one of the worst indexing jobs I've ever seen. Recipes get only one entry each, in long lists under broad headings. (All vegetable side dishes are listed under "Vegetable side dishes" and not otherwise indexed. A couscous recipe is indexed only under "Vegetarian entrees - pasta". Pie recipes are listed under "Pies and Tarts", but the list of pie crust recipes is hidden under "Crusts - Pie"). Locating a recipe for something specific can be an exercise in frustration. Poor editing too - e.g., no one noticed that the instructions in the Gingered Indian Lamb recipe that call for veal, not lamb? If you can find a secondhand copy of the first edition, buy it.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

With an emphasis on the quick and easy, this updated edition of Spitler's encyclopedia of healthy cooking including 100 new recipes, 25 menus, and a schedule of steps for advance preparation. 20 illustrations.

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