Those Cynical Women Look at Cookbooks! July 21, 2010

Can you ever have too many cookbooks? Here are a few recent titles that are worth a look.

CopyKat.com is a website where one can find over 1500 recipes that duplicate famous offerings from popular restaurants (mostly chains), as well as a few from grocery stores and products on grocery store shelves that are better fresh than made from a box. The question some may ask is, “Why would you make Boston Market meatloaf at home when you can just go over to Boston Market and have it?” Good question.

Many people have visited, but do not live near, the Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, or Boston Market (among the many restaurants included in Dining Out at Home). Cravings for Outback’s Queensland Chicken and Shrimp or Rainforest Café’s Caribou Coconut Chicken (pictured) may not be strong enough to warrant the round trip to a distant restaurant.

No one can promise that the Wendy’s Chili copy you make will taste exactly like the chili you get at Wendy’s, but then again, it’s not made with chopped-up, leftover hamburgers and is, in fact, a whole lot better than the original. Home chefs are not guaranteed restaurant results, but most of the dishes are equal to the originals or close enough to satisfy that T.G.I. Friday’s Nine-Layer Dip jones from which one suffers.

The techniques for creating the poser dishes are not difficult, however some of the recipes are complex and require a multitude of ingredients. The time spent in the kitchen for a few of the recipes will exceed the time it takes to order dinner and eat it in the restaurant. However, for those who actually enjoy cooking, there’s lots of fun to be had in recreating popular dishes, as well as reinventing them. It’s important to remember, though, that CopyKat.com’s Dining Out at Home Cookbook recipes are not the original recipes from the source restaurants, but CopyKat.com’s version of those recipes. “No sponsorship or endorsement by, or affiliation with, the trademark owners is claimed or suggested by the author or publisher.”

Recipes for dips, desserts, entrees, drinks, salads, and side orders are included in this collection. Imagine the barbecue or dinner party where you surprise your guests with favorite restaurant dishes that you’ve prepared at a fraction of the cost. In addition to the restaurants already mentioned, others inspiring recipes in CopyKat.com’s Dining Out at Home Cookbook: Recipes for the Most Delicious Dishes from America’s Most Popular Restaurants are Jack in the Box, Red Lobster, The Cheesecake Factory, Chili’s, IHOP, Brennan’s, Hooters, Cinnabon, and many others. Readers may not have heard of all the included restaurants, but have certainly eaten at a few (or more).

Bottom Line: Would I buy CopyKat.com’s Dining Out at Home Cookbook? Absolutely. Having lived in a metropolitan area and moved to a rural area, I miss many of the dishes copied within its pages.

Read more: http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-copykatcoms-dining-out-at2/#ixzz0uL59il3t

If you know your current weight and would like to maintain it, it’s easy to find out how many calories you should eat per day. I maintain my weight by counting calories but I do so rather cavalierly.

If I ingest 1615.9 calories per day, I will neither lose nor gain weight. My idea of calorie counting works like this: I can have sixteen 100-calorie packs of snacks and all the Diet Snapple I want and I won’t gain. That’s not exactly how I eat, but just as Weight Watchers assigns values to foods, I give snack-pack values. Every food is the caloric equal to “x” bags of Nabisco “100 cal Oreo Thin Crisps.” I have maintained my weight by regularly over- and under-estimating the number of calories in the foods I eat.

Scientifically, this method of dieting does not work. Unless you actually know how many calories are in a substance, you can’t keep track of them. For example, “that doesn’t look like it has many calories” is like saying “I’ll bet there’s not more than 150 calories in a banana split.” Sugar-free Jell-o doesn’t look like it has many calories and it doesn’t. But regular Jell-o looks exactly the same, and it has lots more calories. The world just isn’t fair. Not that it matters; I don’t eat Jell-o.

The “Bikini Chef,” Susan Irby, has a new cookbook, Substitute Yourself Skinny. My method would be to cut out pictures of Victoria Beckham’s body and attach them to photos of me. Susan Irby’s suggestions are better.

Irby presents 175 recipes in which she has substituted lower-calorie, lower-fat food items. To my way of thinking, it’s only logical that if you eat the same amount of the same dishes you’ve always eaten on a daily basis, but they are lower in calories, you are going to lose weight. Chef Irby teaches you how.

When reviewing the calorie counts for some of the dishes she prepares, I thought “hey, that’s amazing!” But the point is that the dishes aren’t as hefty as they were with their original ingredients. To lose a pound a week, you need to cut 500 calories a day (or five 100-calorie snack packs). If you are not obsessive, and are interested in losing weight or maintaining your current weight, you could easily cut five hundred or so calories out of your daily intake by using these recipes. Losing four pounds a month painlessly might be a good solution for someone who isn’t interested in a rapid, massive weight loss, but rather in being healthy.

Okay, so what does Chef Irby have to offer? Julienned carrots? Steamed carrots? Diced carrots? Raw carrots? Mashed carrots? Forget about the carrots. If the relative sweetness of food is your guide to good eating, start at the back of Substitute Yourself Skinny. Tiramisu, banana pudding cake, éclairs, cheesecake, brownies, and strawberry shortcake are just a few of the dessert recipes offered.

Eating a 225-calorie dessert may not sound like good weight-loss or maintenance advice, but if you eat that instead of the 600 or 700 calorie dessert that you would normally eat, you can see how the calorie savings will add up.

Many of Chef Irby’s suggestions are common sense, such as substituting low-fat sour cream for regular. The value in Substitute Yourself Skinny is that it is full of such information, and it is used in new recipes and combinations you may not have imagined.

One of my favorite recipes is for a baked bloomin’ onion (“everything’s bloomin’ with delicious onions and bacon). I loved bloomin’ onions when Outback first introduced them as a menu item. Bloomin’ onions, however, don’t love me. Incredibly greasy, they don’t sit well, although I have a feeling they sit forever (at least on the thighs). I do love onions, but don’t eat many fried foods. Irby’s recipe pares the 576 calories per serving in the original down to a mere 36. Heck, you could eat the whole onion (I save even more, because I skip the bacon)!

Substitute Yourself Skinny recipes include comfort foods like macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, lasagna, and chicken à la king as well as “fancier” fare such as eggs benedict and

"Skinny Stroganoff." There are suggestions for appetizers, soups, desserts, breakfast, lunch, and supper, and they are accompanied by “Skinny Secrets” and mouth-watering photographs (I’m surprised anyone used a cookbook 50 years ago; most of the photos make the food look inedible.).

One of the most appealing things about Substitute Yourself Skinny is that it includes recipes for the foods people actually eat. Burgers, burritos, chicken and dumplings, pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, and club sandwiches all get the lower-cal treatment and many of the recipes inspire tinkering with the user’s favorites.

Bottom Line: Would I buySubstitute Yourself Skinny? Yes. I need to try the killer crab cakes, and love the low-cal desserts and appetizers.

“My kitchen is so small…”

“How small is it?”

“It’s so small we keep the refrigerator outside.”

That joke may not be hilariously funny, but it’s true. My kitchen is so small that if I’m cooking and someone else is hanging out, he'd better sit down before I find a new use for my chef’s knife. We have a cabinet-sized refrigerator sort of built in beneath a (you guessed it) cabinet, which we use for cold drinks and condiments. Our refrigerator and freezer are in a tiny smokehouse that’s fine if it doesn’t freeze outside (then the food in the fridge freezes, too. If you’ve ever dealt with defrosted mayo, you know it’s not pretty.) Canned foods and other non-perishables in animal-proof containers are out there (we really don’t want to attract bears and coyotes), as well as my bakeware (and my leaf-blower, but that’s another story).

Jennifer Schaertl has written a cookbook for all of us who suffer from KD, kitchen dysfunction, due to undersized kitchen facilities. In addition to fabulous recipes (I’m not exaggerating) like “Swanky Strawberry Salsa,” “Hot-and-Bothered-Dragonfly-Prawns” and “Bread Pudding with Bourbon Crème Anglaise,” Schaertl includes a plethora of information in sidebars like “Swap It” (you can make the bread pudding with rum instead of bourbon, if you like) and “Did You Know this Crap” (e.g., facts about Brussels sprouts and how to choose the right ones), and “Chefology” (explanations of a variety of things, like saffron).

Gourmet Meals in Crappy Little Kitchens is illustrated with photographs that jump off the page, grab you by the throat, and scream, “Make me!” How appetizing are the photos? I’ve got barbecued ribs going right now, but it’s the photos in this book that are making me drool!

Schaertl does a fine job of listing and describing the kitchen tools you absolutely must have in a small kitchen, and the ones you should deep-six. I love her suggestion for a ceiling pot-rack, but with our seven-foot ceilings, my six-foot husband would regularly be in stitches, and not because I’m funny. She emphasizes that the home gourmet cook does not require the same equipment needed in a restaurant kitchen, and her recipe directions reflect this philosophy by using a small assortment of utensils and tools.

With chapters like “It’s Not What You Have, It’s How You Use It,” and “Preventing Crappy Little Casualties,” Schaertl gives more than instruction; she gives encouragement. Her recipes include everything from appetizers to desserts, with wonderful entrees, and “Dignified One-Pot Creations.”

In a crappy little kitchen like mine, I have to be very selective about cookbooks. Gourmet Meals in Crappy Little Kitchens definitely deserves space, even if it means sending The Nancy Drew Cookbook and The Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook out to the smokehouse. One warning, though: after trying these gourmet dishes, you will never go back to Hamburger Helper.

Bottom Line: Would I buy Gourmet Meals in Crappy Little Kitchens? Absolutely — for myself and for anyone I love who is cooking in a CLK.