Hungry Girl 300 Under 300: 300 Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner Dishes Under 300 Calories Author: Visit Amazon's Lisa Lillien Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0312676816 | Format: PDF
Hungry Girl 300 Under 300: 300 Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner Dishes Under 300 Calories Description
Review
“Healthier takes on the familiar … will give time-starved cooks a litany of choices.”
—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Lisa Lillien is not a nutritionist, she’s just hungry. She’s the founder of www.hungry-girl.com, the daily email service providing approximately one million fans with guilt-free recipes, food and product reviews, dieting news, shockers and more. She also writes weekly columns for WeightWatchers.com and Yahoo!, and regularly contributes to Redbook magazine. She has appeared on TV shows like Rachael Ray and Extra, and now has her own show on the Cooking Channel. Her Hungry Girl cookbooks are New York Times bestsellers. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
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- Paperback: 560 pages
- Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (March 29, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312676816
- ISBN-13: 978-0312676810
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 1.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
This book is a great resource for recipe ideas that are about as low-cal as you wish to make them. I see lots of reviews angry about the over-dependence on processed foods in this book - if you have concerns about a particular ingredient, simply use the real one. The general rebuttal that I see to this is "then the calorie counts go up!" however if you utilize a calorie database (such as calorieking.com) and do your own math, you may find that the counts do not go up as much as you might expect. For example, instead of 2/3 cup egg substitute (90 calories) you can use one whole egg and two egg whites for 104 calories. Recipes that call for granulated splenda usually use it in small, sparing amounts - using real sugar instead is not going to inflate the calorie counts beyond all reason. Add these simple changes to the fact that MANY of the recipes in the book manage to be under 200 calories, let alone 300, and you'll find there is a lot of wiggle room. Also, ultimately, 300 calories is not very much for a meal. Use better ingredients and bring it in under 500 and you are still doing a fine job at a healthy meal.
My favorite thing so far in this book is the cupcake lasagnas (see the picture I added under customer photos). I use low-fat rather than fat-free ricotta, a bit less mozzarella to offset that, and one real egg instead of egg substitute. I am fairly certain that with these changes this meal has no processed ingredients, and a delicious muffin-sized lasagna comes in at only 163 calories. And that's even with the little dollop of neufchatel that I hide in the center of each lasagna! At 163 calories you can eat 3 of these with no guilt and that's a LOT of food. This is just one example of a recipe that I never would have discovered without hungry girl!
This is actually my first HG book. I'd heard alot of hype about the website/show/books, but didn't know much about them until I happened across the show one evening. I liked that the recipes she was making seemed quick and easy, but appealed to the not-so-healthy cravings we all get sometimes. I signed up for the mailing list and friended on FB...hence how I found out about the new cookbook. I preordered it for the Nook the day before release and got the download early yesterday morning.
Having spent a good portion of yesterday and this morning perusing the recipes, I have mixed feelings about this cookbook. While I love that they are all under 300 calories and many look like they would be tasty, alot of them don't seem all that healthy. Artificial sweeteners are used ALOT (as a caveat, she does add as a tip more than once that you can use Truvia or regular sugar instead), and while the calories are low, the sodium and carb levels on several recipes I saw were pretty dang high.
Another little nit-picky thing that bugs me in cookbooks that is also in this one is brand-name dropping. There's alot of brand names used and in a good majority of the recipes (Laughing Cow, Pillsbury, Fiber One, etc). I realize that the author is probably getting kickbacks to endorse particular brands in their cookbook, but if I wanted constant advertisements for brands, I'd buy that brand's cookbook or a magazine. There is a "Recommended Products" list at the back of the book and I like that...just wish all the name-dropping could have been confined to there.
On the plus side, there is good website support for the book. The ebook version doesn't include any pictures, but there are pictures of every dish on the website, along with WW point values for those using the WW system.
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