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1200-Calorie-a-Day Menu Cookbook : Quick and Easy Recipes for Delicious Low-fat Breakfasts, Lunches, Dinners, and Desserts
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Diabetes Recipes and Low-Calorie Cooking
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by: Nancy S. Hughes
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Hughes breaks the 1,200 calories a day into breakfast and lunch recipes that contain no more than 350 calories each, dinner recipes that contain no more than 400 calories, and dessert recipes that contain only 100 calories. The majority of the meals contain 20 percent or less of their total calorie content from fat; all contain less than 30 percent. The totals are listed with each recipe. Hughes, author of three other cookbooks, insists this is not a diet plan but rather a comprehensive collection of recipes that can be used to limit calorie and fat intake. Many of the recipes can be prepared in 15 minutes or less. George Cohen Book Description Imagine savoring three delicious, satisfying meals every day without worrying about counting calories or calculating fat grams. Now you can enjoy hundreds of combinations of tempting, flavorful breakfasts, lunches, dinners--even desserts--all for only 1200 calories a day.
Delicious, low-cal meals
My wife and I have made about a dozen of these recipes and have never been disappointed -- they have been consistently delicious. We also use "Eating Well" magazine and a few other sources of tasty low-cal recipe, in addition to standard cookbooks.
Each recipe tells you the calories (important) and grams of fat (not as important) per serving. As with any cookbook, there are always minor modifications to make to suite your taste (for example, the lemon-mustard chicken with angel hair pasta recipe doesn't create enough sauce for our taste, so we increase those ingredients).
These are not "15-minute recipes," nor do they take hours. You have to want to cook; it's not uncommon for a dinner entree to have a dozen ingredients. But the rewards are worth it.
These recipes taste great!
I've tried recipes from a number of low cal/low fat cookbooks and many of them are so bland and tasteless my husband has begged me to never cook them again. Everything I've tried from this book has won rave reviews (especially the cajun chicken and beef stir fry). I also found them to be easy to adjust to personal taste preferences. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is trying to stay low cal without giving up taste.
Reviews:
If you Like..
If you only like eggs, bacon and ham for breakfast then these recipes are for you. While noting calories and fat Hughes leaves out sodium, cholesterol, protein, and all other nutritional information. If I wanted to raise my cholesterol and sodium intake then I'd eat eggs and ham every day for breakfast. In addition, she adds some variation of fruit to each breakfast. I could of thought of that on my own. I admit that I did not buy this cookbook for the lunch recipes, so my input in that section of the book may not be relevant. However, if I had purchased it for the lunch recipes I would have been very disappointed; no one has time to make these lunches on a daily basis unless they are at home all day and have nothing to do. I hardly have time to make breakfast and dinner! There were only a handful of dinner recipes that even seemed appealing to me and were good...however, would I have purchased this book knowing there would only be a handful of recipes I'd use? No. The desserts aren't worth bothering with unless you want to spend time preparing a variety of fruit and spice combinations. Not very exciting. Fortunately I only paid $8 or else I'd be a lot more unhappy. Also, there are no pictures and that makes it difficult to get excited about as well. If you're looking for a diet book look somewhere else. If you're looking for low calorie recipe ideas, look somewhere else. There is nothing special or exciting about these recipes.