My father-in-law's wonderful, marvelous, fabulous wife is a fantastic cook. Trouble is, she is a high-fat, high-calorie, decadent cook. Her favorite recipes come from the barefoot contessa, aka Ina Garten, a woman who has never put less than three sticks of butter in a recipe. Her food sure is delicious, though.
Anyway, we rung in the New Year with: 10 kinds of homemade cookies, 2 kinds of quiches (both containing bacon!), a ham, and the contessa's sticky buns, among other delicacies. Everything was scrumptious and I ate a ton. I decided just not to count Dec 31, 2008-Jan 1, 2009. I had eaten light and exercised enough from Dec. 29-30 that I should come out even in the weight game. I hope.
Now we are home. We were sent home with a plate of cookies, of course. We placed them straight in the freezer, saving them for our board game night next Friday. Friends will eat them! Not us!
All this decadent cooking has inspired a new year's goal for me: to learn to cook super-fine low-fat recipes. I'm a pretty good cook of regular food, ie, food that is less fatty than the contessa's but more fatty than reduced-fat meals. Can I become a fantastic low-fat, high-fiber cook? I think I can!
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4 comments:
I have found that the only things that really must contain butter are baked goods--and even many of those can do fine with less butter. For much other cooking, it takes very little butter to achieve the mouthfeel and taste, and the other ways of intensifying flavor work quite well. (I know I've recommended the Moosewood Low-Fat cookbook, and I found it to be the most useful single cookbook for the low-fat stuff. "A New Way to Cook" by Sally Schneider (I think) is also quite good.
Thanks for the tips, Narya! Once I'm ready for another cookbook on the shelves, I'll check those out. Right now I'm taking common-sense measures, such as automatically reducing fat in recipes, by cutting butter or oil and using low-fat versions of ingredients like sour cream.
Those are good strategies. The other thing that can help me is measuring things. It feels terribly obsessive in some ways, but it definitely helped me realize just how large my portions were. I still do this with things like pasta, because i could easily eat a half pound of pasta.
Yeah, I definitely measured my hummus today...then went back and ate more out of the container.
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