Let’s face it: nobody likes dieting. No wonder, then, that there are so many sales pitches for meal plans that claim you can eat whatever you want while still losing weight. Of course it’s not that easy. Devin Alexander’s new cookbook is a great place to start for people who love food but don’t love their size in jeans.
The Most Decadent Diet Ever!: The Cookbook that reveals the secrets to cooking your favorites in a healthier way (Broadway Books, US$19.95) has plenty of yummy dishes on offer. And its cover is drool-inducing: Alexander, who wrote The Biggest Loser Cookbook, is holding a chocolate cake in one hand and a big plate of pasta with meat sauce in the other. What makes this book a great addition to your shelf is that the recipes are fabulous whether you want to lose five pounds or 50, and there’s lots of straightforward advice.
Alexander structures her meal plans based on a system of “decadent disks”. Once you determine how many calories you should be eating per day, you convert them to disks. Each one represents 100 calories. So if you’ve figured out that you should consume 1,600 calories a day, you get to eat 16 disks’ worth of food. Easy peasy.
Fortunately, the focus of The Most Decadent Diet Ever! isn’t on number-crunching but on intriguing dishes. Alexander stocks her pantry with such exciting staples as ancho-chile and chipotle peppers, light coconut milk, panko bread crumbs, and dried orange peel.
Among the breakfast highlights are Orange-Raspberry Pancakes, made with low-fat buttermilk, whole-grain oat flour, and egg whites (and worth one Decadent Disk each). Then there’s her Bacon and Egg Breakfast Quesadilla, lively with green chilies, green onion, and light cheddar cheese. (One quesadilla scores three disks.)
A section on burgers, sandwiches, and wraps has a few standouts, like the Sexier Sausage and Pepper Sub. Serviced on a multigrain French baguette, this flavourful mouthful has Sweet and Slim Italian Sausage (recipe included) mixed with crisp strips of green pepper and onion.
There’s nothing boring about Alexander’s salads. Take the Antipasto Chopped Salad, which is a celebration on a plate with arugula, basil, ham, salami, roasted red pepper, Roma tomato, mozzarella, and hot chilies, all tossed with her Red Wine Vinaigrette.
And dieters can still dig into meat and potatoes. Her Roast Beef With Horseradish Cream is simple and simply heavenly.
Dessert? Of course! Check out the Chocolate Not-Only-In-Your-Dreams Cake for a serious guilt-free wow. Alexander—who lost 55 pounds herself—mixes unsweetened applesauce with cocoa powder and espresso beans for a rich treat.
Not all of Alexander’s choices seem to fit with her excellent taste. She suggests such ingredients as preservative-laden, jarred nacho-cheese sauce, for instance: Ick! The terms Frito-Lay and Whole Foods simply shouldn’t appear on the same page. She also includes a recipe for Potato-Chip Crusted Chicken. Why bother?
Still, The Most Decadent Diet Ever! deserves a spot on your kitchen bookshelf, if only for the Dark Chocolate Layer Cake With Chocolate Buttercream Frosting (a mere three disks).
Gail Johnson - Hello! I'm the health editor of Vancouver's Georgia Straight newspaper, where I also copy edit and write about everything from food and ...
