Juan-Carlos Cruz Calorie Countdown Cookbook: A 5-Week Eating Strategy for Sustainable Weight Loss
Author: Juan Carlos Cruz
The Food Network's Calorie Commando shares his five-week weight-loss program, including 150 low-fat, healthy, and delicious recipes that follow his mantra to "keep the taste while you trim your waist."
As a pastry chef at Los Angeles's glamorous Hotel Bel Air, Juan-Carlos Cruz created dazzling desserts. Surrounded by the best ingredients and the most tempting dishes, he began to gain weight, eventually topping 280 pounds. Finding little relief in fad diets, he developed his own weight-loss strategies and re-created many of his favorite dishes reducing both calories and fat content.
Today, he's a buff television star who reinvents recipes on the air, slashing wasted calories and making flavors sizzle. The Juan-Carlos Cruz Calorie Countdown Cookbook reveals the tricks of his trade, delivering a five-week plan to get menus on track and establish a weight-loss plan you can savor for life.
After telling his own story of success and weight loss in the "Confessions of a Recovering Pastry Chef" chapter, Cruz eases readers into a gradual calorie-reduction plan. He provides five weeks of daily menus that incorporate his own recipes as well as popular commercial foods. By the end of five weeks, readers will have omitted five hundred calories from their daily intake. Tips, such as his "Chocolate-Chip Cookie Theory," help readers identify how one deleted menu item can result in big annual calorie savings and sustained weight loss.
Recipes spanning breakfast, snacks, appetizers, sandwiches, main dishes, and even desserts put the spotlight on Cruz's world-class cuisine. Chicken parmesan, macaroni and cheese, tortilla casserole, calzones, and even chocolate cake andcheese fries prove that with the right ingredients there is room for indulgence in a healthy diet. Sixteen pages of tempting color photography complete this savory, surefire package.
The All-American Dessert Book
Author: Nancy Baggett
When Nancy Baggett set out to find the best homemade desserts in America, she knew just where to look. She turned to small-town cooks who are locally famous for their specialties, innkeepers and bakers whose treats lure guests back year after year, and church and bake-sale ladies whose creations are always snapped up at events.
Many of Nancy's finds have never been published, or even written down, before. Some of the local treasures include
* an irresistibly easy blueberry buckle from a Vermont bed-and-breakfast
* a tender peach cobbler from a home cook in the Ozarks who learned it from her mother
* a lusciously thick chocolate-banana malted from a celebrated soda fountain in St. Louis
* a supremely moist chiffon cake with a zingy orange glaze from Nancy's grandmother's "receipt" box
* big, soft, glazed gingerbread cookies that were a huge favorite at a former diner in Washington, D.C.
* creamy chocolate-dipped caramels, the proprietary secret of the guild members of a New Mexico Episcopal church
"Although I've been baking and writing about sweets for more than three decades, time and time again I found myself thinking, 'What a great idea! I'd never have thought of that," Nancy writes in the introduction.
Nancy has tested and retested each recipe in her own kitchen, so that you're assured of a flaky, easy-to-roll pie crust, a brownie with a perfect fudgy center and a deep chocolate aroma, and a silky-smooth cheesecake every time -- even if you've never baked before.
Since the most memorable desserts are often the ones you make with your children, this book features plenty of projects for the whole family: rock crystal swizzle sticks, caramelapples, graham cracker "gingerbread" houses, and gifts such as brownie bars in a jar and quick heavenly hash fudge.
The All-American Dessert Book tells the intriguing story of America's fascination with sweets, complete with regional legends, behind-the-scenes recipe stories, fascinating snippets of baking history, and words of kitchen wisdom from cooks of the past.
Publishers Weekly
Apple pie may be America's signature dessert, but if this fine cookbook is any measure, there are a number of contenders that could reign equally supreme. Take Yellow Sour Cream-Butter Layer Cake, for example: a staple of wedding and birthday celebrations, it can be paired with nearly any icing and, in Baggett's version, is moist, aromatic and "very buttery." Baggett (The All-American Cookie Book) canvassed the country, visiting bakeries, restaurants, confectioneries and old-fashioned soda shops to come up with this collection of 150 recipes. Her book covers pies, tarts and cheesecakes; cakes and frostings; fruit desserts; puddings; cookies; ice creams; candies; and easy gifts and treats, such as Maple Sugar on Snow (a popular Vermont confection). There are, naturally, many regional favorites, such as Black Walnut Pound Cake, adapted from several versions from Missouri, where black walnuts grow in abundance. Many recipes include instructional asides (e.g., a lesson on forming the lattice top for a pie, used in both Deep-Dish Blueberry Pie and Deep-Dish Raspberry-Apricot Pie), and useful sidebars detailing the history of Concord grapes, Key limes, Martha Washington's cheeseless cheesecake and other fare. Most recipes also have a solid introduction explaining the recipe and any required techniques. Elegant and inspiring, this volume has something for every cook. Photos. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Just as she did for her big All-American Cookie Book, Baggett traveled around the country for her latest collection culled from heirloom cookbooks, old-fashioned "receipt books," and her own favorites from family and childhood memories. The resulting 150 recipes for luscious regional specialties include pies and tarts, cakes, cobblers and crisps, puddings and custards, and ice creams, along with newly discovered cookies, candies and confections, and a chapter of "Family Fun," easy gifts from the kitchen. Readable headnotes include culinary background, helpful tips, and suggestions for variations, and recipe instructions are thoughtfully written and clear. Many of the mouth-watering desserts are shown in full-page color photographs. A good companion to Judith Fertig's All American Desserts, this is recommended for all baking collections. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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