Cara Hobday

The brief introduction discusses fat in the diet, pointing out the health benefits of reducing fat and that it is unrealistic and unhealthy to eliminate fat altogether. It goes on to explain how to reduce the amount of fat in the diet, mentions some useful equipment, looks at cooking methods, and offers some serving suggestions to make meals more appealing.

In the same format as other books in this series the recipes are clearly explained and laid out one recipe to a page, with the facing page showing a full colour photograph of the finished dish. The recipes are grouped under the headings: everyday, quick, something special, vegetarian, salads, and desserts. The book includes an index, but as with other books of the series each recipe is listed just once and not always where you might expect it to be; unless you know the name given to the recipe it can be difficult to find what you want.

The recipes that include meat in the ingredients specify low fat cuts, this obviously helps achieve the low fat aim, but I wonder how much flavour is lost; my experience with such cuts is that they can be dry and tasteless, although with really good quality meat it is perhaps less of a problem. Cheese features in a number of recipes but it tends to be goat cheese - OK if you like goats cheese, but I find it can be insipid. The desserts might include quark, or low/half fat versions of either fromage-frais, crème-fraîche, yogurt (yoghurt) or cottage cheese.

While I am something of a fan of these handy little books I don't think I will be making a great deal of use of this particular one, but no doubt those seeking to reduce fat in the diet will find plenty to choose from, for as with the the other books there is a great deal of variety here, and the dishes certainly look appealing from the photographs.… (altro)