The Best Light Recipe
Have I mentioned I’m a big fan of Cook’s Illustrated?
I started with their magazine, which is completely free of advertising. It’s not a glossy, but if you like to cook, this is a great magazine. What they do is choose a recipe and then test the heck out of it to figure out the best way to make it. And beside recipes, they also do taste tests to help you pick the best ingredients from the store, and they also test equipment to tell you what’s worth spending hundreds of dollars for, and what is the budget alternative.
I recently found out they were also doing a PBS cooking show called America’s Test Kitchen. While their other site is by subscription, the ATK site is mostly free (registration required though), and you can get a sense of what they do. For example, I’ve been meaning to try this recipe for chicken biryani. Yum!
Anyways, today I got a copy of their The Best Light Recipe Cookbook. They describe it this way:
I’ve done a quick scan through, and I can’t wait to start making some of the recipes. One of them is a way to make brown rice in the oven! This is something that Alton Brown recommends too. (I’ve been making mine in the rice cooker, and it seems to work out okay.)
There are some recipes that I cannot figure out. Their light guacamole replaces 2/3 of the avocado with boiled, skinned lima beans and low-fat mayo. Okay, well that means a lot more fiber and a few grams less of fat, but it also probably means replacing a healthier fat (avocado) with a less healthy fat. And the light recipe saves just 30 calories.
The desserts are also spotty. I’m not sure it’s worth the work to save 20 calories per cookie. But I might want to give the light cheesecake a try, as the light version has a lot less fat (which for a dessert, makes sense to me).
But other recipes look really yummy. I can’t wait to try some of the salad dressings (like the roasted garlic dressing) and the grains (like the curried brown rice with tomatoes and peas).
I’m not sure, but these may be carried in regular bookstores, so if this sounds like something of interest, please check it out!