Fix-It & Forget-It Lightly : Healthy Low-Fat Recipes for Your Slow Cooker

Rating:
Summary: Muliple Choice
Review: An Index of eleven pages of triple columns tells you immediately that this is a book packed with enough recipes to last a lifetime. (There are for example over 70 pages on soups....) I didn't realise that all are sent in by people as recommendations so they are also all tried and tested in the home. The recipes have the great merit of being straightforward and can be created with the minimum of fuss.
Admittedly the American housewife has recourse (a little too often to such handy kitchen shortcuts as garlic salt - what's wrong with garlic and salt?) but you can adapt things.
In addition the attraction of low-fat recipes doesn't appear to have prevented the production of all-round tasty recommendations for a wide range of meals. No illustrations but very good value.


Rating:
Summary: Basic crockpot recipes adapted for special diets.
Review: Containing over a thousand tried-and-true recipes from cooks all over the country, this cookbook provides easy slow cooker meals, all with reduced fat and reduced salt. Substitutions are the key here, with reduced fat ingredients such as turkey sausage and ground turkey, in place of beef, and low-fat cuts of pork, skinless and boneless chicken breasts, and low-fat cuts of beef in place of the higher fat cuts normally used. Low-fat condensed mushroom and chicken soup (canned), low sodium barbecue sauce, low-fat or nonfat cheeses, and low-sodium tomatoes and tomato sauce replace the usual products.

The soup section is the largest section, and there are over twenty-five versions of chili. Desserts feature fruit, rice pudding, and bread pudding, but there is one Hot Fudge Cake resembling the standard "Denver Chocolate Pudding Cake," which quickly converts this delicious baked recipe to the slow cooker.

The primary value of this cookbook is that it shows easy adaptations of standard recipes, so if you have favorite recipes and need to adapt them, this offers some good alternatives. Most of the recipes are light on herbs and spices, and adding them or increasing the amounts greatly improves the low salt versions of these recipes. The chicken recipes are particularly good, with a Dill-Lemon Chicken, a Twenty-Clove (Garlic) Chicken, and a Southwestern Chicken which are delicious, though there is a significant loss of texture to the meat when skinless, boneless chicken is used in place of chicken breasts with bones and skin.

Very low fat meat cuts (pork tenderloin or pork top loin, flank steak or extra lean beef cubes, for example), do not result in the cut-with-a-fork, fall-off-the-bone meats one is accustomed to with slow cooking--they remain quite firm (and rather dry) even with hours of cooking. Longer cooking of the pork, especially, creates an almost pasty texture, and the slow cooker's original purpose of tenderizing a tough, fatty cut is lost. This may be one of the reasons that the soups, which are imaginative, are the largest and most interesting section here. Lovers of slow cookery may prefer to use their own recipes and seasonings for favorites, checking here for ways to cut down on fat and salt and perhaps getting ideas for new ways of cooking. Mary Whipple


Rating:
Summary: too much of the usual
Review: I bought this as it was the only crockpot cooking book at the bookstore. I read it and most of the recipes are just lighter versions of the old casseroles using too many prepared soups like light cream of mushroon soup and spices like light sodium seasoned salt. There were only a few recipes I even wanted to try..I like to cook and would be wiiling to come back and check ingredients and stir things and so forth during the day but did not want to be tied to the stove and maybe burn things. The ingredients rarely had extra spices and wine and etc. I'm too much of a foodie for this one...leave it for the church suppers in the midwest.