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Review of 

The Perfect Recipe for Losing Weight

& Eating Great

By Pam Anderson Photographs by Maura McEvoy

Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston Massachusetts, 308 Pages, $27.00

Unless you have an amazing metabolism and a tape worm to boot, after awhile your culinary passion will get you into trouble. Those size 8 pants just aren’t made the same any more. They have less fabric and seem to shrink with each washing! Then you look in the mirror and realize it isn’t the clothing but all of the fabulous meals you have been eating that have adhered to your frame. Pam Anderson, cookbook author, writer, and former executive editor for Cook’s Illustrated, found herself in the same predicament and decided to fight her food demons.

Anderson’s first chapter sets the stage. She is at a physical crossroad weighing too much and with high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Something has to give.  Realizing that she wants to stop the diet band aids on her weight, she is ready to make a real commitment and use professional help. Anderson finds a therapist to help her understand her emotional eating habits and embarks on a physical regime as well. Peppered throughout the book are “fifty ways to lose it” little nuggets of information to challenge and educate you.

For anyone who has dieted before, you know that abstaining from something you love only makes the weight loss harder and reinforces the raging desire for those foods. Anderson wanted to make changes that she could take beyond diet, allowing herself tea and a sweet at 4 and a glass of wine when making dinner. Without keeping these qualities of life she knew she would be heading for disaster. By allowing just one sweet and a light snack of wine and nuts, she retained her happiness for eating. 

The Perfect Recipe for Losing Weight & Eating Great is her guide book for good eating habits when dieting and beyond. All the recipes have the calories per piece but this is more of suggestion to help you plot your choices. This caloric analysis should not be used as absolute if you have health problems.

The recipes can stand alone as a creative light way to eat, and add to your healthy arsenal. The book is divided by times of the day with; Eat (or Drink) Your Breakfast, Big Lunch in a Bowl, Time for Tea, Before-Dinner Nibbles, Dinners-Fast and Faster, Dessert Too.

Eat (or Drink) Your Breakfast has a wonderful selection of fruit smoothies and breakfast parfaits that can be thrown together while the coffee is brewing for an energizing first meal. Anderson also has recipes for eggs on the go, again reminding us that it is just as easy to take less than 5 minutes at home instead of waiting in line at a fast food shop to eat. With a bit more time for breakfast there are breakfast pita pizzas, multigrain pancakes with tasty add-ons, open-faced omelet (frittata) ideas, and crustless quiches.

My favorite chapters are Meal-In-A-Bowl Salads and Meal-In-A-Bowl Soups. By following Anderson’s salad suggestions it is easy to create a myriad of meals. The key is to load up on the low calorie stuff and be diligent about the protein amounts and dressings. You can indulge in a generous bed of greens with scallions and fennel, topped with seared sea scallops and a sweet and sour orange dressing; and not close your eyes when you get on the scale the next morning! The eternal grilled overcooked chicken breast can be banished from your slimming repertoire and replaced with grilled shrimp, smoked salmon, or lean ham. Fruit, cheese, nuts, and other toppings are fair game as long as you stick to the quantities. To start you on the right track, Anderson has several yummy salad recipes she has created from the initial ingredient list. This is not a lesson in denial but a lesson in extracting the most pleasure from the food without gaining weight.

Soup receives the same deconstructed outline. We often forget what soup is all about. It is a simple dish that is bound by flavored liquid, filled with complementary ingredients to satisfy hunger. To put it succinctly, soup isn’t rocket science but a free wheeling medley of ingredients from the fridge and pantry. Even the most hesitant cook will be able to follow her outlines and bring smiles to the table. After trying several of Anderson’s own soup combos she turns you loose with her outline of portions to follow to create your own soup recipes.

I’m not much of a tea time gal but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like to add some healthy muffins, cookies, bars, and biscotti to my sweet rotation. Anderson has created an All-Purpose Slice-and-Bake Butter Cookie. With this double batch recipe and her 12 add-on suggestions you will have many months of different cookies to munch on. Unlike most of the other recipes that are scaled for 4-6 portions, the sweet section is scaled larger so they can be made ahead and either frozen or stored in airtight containers for future nibbling. My eyes are set on the Gingerbread Straws and the Cardamom Pistachio Cookies!

“Dinner at our house is light…instead of cooking half a box for my husband and me, I weigh out six ounces.” This is a friendly reminder of portion size responsibility that is healthy and also fulfilling. There are crisp bread pizza recipes, sear and sauce meats and fish, as well as mix and match foil packets for quick meals.

I think Anderson has covered all bases on the healthy and tasty front. This cookbook is an uplifting reminder that lifestyle change need not be full of abstinence and denial but filled with healthful changes that can be absorbed into anyone’s daily life!

Read! Eat! And Enjoy!

Stay Healthy

Judith Bishop

www.ingoodtastestore.com

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