Fix-It & Forget-It Lightly: Healthy Low-Fat Recipes [Hardcover]

Phyllis Pellman Good (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2004

Yes, Now you can have it all: Food from your slow cooker that is scrumptious, quick and easy to prepare and low fat!

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

By New York Times bestselling author Phyllis Pellman Good

This volume in the best-selling Fix-It and Forget-It tradition gives you more than 500 new and revised recipes that are mouth-watering but guilt-free. Now you can choose healthy, light dishes, fix them quickly, and then forget about them until mealtime.
With each recipe in Fix-It and Forget-It Lightly comes an analysis of its calories, fats, and carbs, as well as what it contributes to your daily vitamins and nutrients.

About the Author

Phyllis Pellman Good is a New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold more than 6 million copies. Good has authored or co-authored many cookbooks, including the national #1 bestselling cookbook (with Dawn J. Ranck) Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook: Feasting with your Slow Cooker and, also in the series, Fix-It and Forget-It Recipes for Entertaining: Slow Cooker Favorites for All the Year Round (also with Ranck).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 284 pages
• Publisher: Good Books (October 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1561484334
• ISBN-13: 978-1561484331
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (80 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #828,718 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Phyllis Pellman Good is a New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold more than 8.5 million copies. Good has authored the national #1 bestselling cookbook "Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook: Feasting with Your Slow Cooker" (with Dawn J. Ranck), which appeared on The New York Times bestseller list, as well as the bestseller lists of USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Book Sense.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

220 of 223 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Basic crockpot recipes adapted for special diets., October 28, 2004

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: FIX-IT and FORGET-IT LIGHTLY : Healthy, Low-Fat Recipes for Your Slow Cooker (Paperback)

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

157 of 163 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I REALLY WANTED to like this!, September 12, 2005

By 

WELLNELL (Arizona, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: FIX-IT and FORGET-IT LIGHTLY : Healthy, Low-Fat Recipes for Your Slow Cooker (Paperback)

I REALLY WANTED to like this book, but after trying five or six of the recipes, I went back to the original "Fix it and Forget it". All of the other reviews make good points and are very accurate. Just a few comments from my personal experience. I have a 7 quart slow cooker, and in an attempt to reduce calories, portions have also been reduced. As a result, I have found that many of these recipes do not make enough sauce. For example, I will still use the recommended 4-6 pieces of chicken, but I will double all the wet ingredients, so as to have twice as much sauce. If I don't do this, my food will burn. I have also had to add additional liquid not called for in recipes just to keep them wet enough to cook. Again, this is probably due to my large slow cooker size. That said, the recipes I made all tasted pretty bad. The mandarin orange chicken combined orange juice and mandarin oranges, which seemed like a great idea, but then it called for poultry seasoning, and I think that ruined it. No one in my house like it. The apricot mustard chicken will get another attempt before I abandon it entirely, with some modifications. Again, I will double the wet ingredients and possibly add some additional water. I am still going to try some of the desserts and see how they turn out. The techniques for reducing calories are no brainers that any experienced dieter already knows, like using lower fat dairy and low sodium soup. These are things most of us do to our "regular" recipes already. So, for my part, I will continue to use the first two books, "Fix-it & Forget-it" and "Fit-it & Forget-it for Entertaining" with a healthy dose of common sense. This book will get pushed to the back of the shelf or re-sold.

58 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Most interesting of this series, March 24, 2005

By 

CMCM (Nevada City, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: FIX-IT and FORGET-IT LIGHTLY : Healthy, Low-Fat Recipes for Your Slow Cooker (Paperback)

I've just gotten a new crockpot and am getting back into lots of slow cooking, and am collecting various slow cooker cookbooks. This one is not bad....however, before getting it you should have some knowledge about crockpot cooking techniques because nothing of that nature is given. This is basically a collection of recipes from people all over the country. Two recipes per page, the the book is organized by sections: Main courses (chicken/turkey, beef, pork, bean, seafood each having sections), soups, veggies, desserts, and assorted other appetizers, snacks, breakfast dishes, even breads (not something I'd especially want to do in a slow cooker!). Good points: each recipe indicates how many servings and the ideal slow cooker size to use, and full nutritional breakdowns are given. There are often multiple recipes for the same basic dish, and some of them differ only slightly by one or two ingredients. One reviewer mentioned an over-use of canned soups, but I don't look at that too negatively: These are used in recipes that might otherwise use milk, and milk is not something that can be used successfully over 8 hours of cooking--hence the substitution of creamy canned soups (especially celery, cream of chicken, cream of mushroom). As I mentioned, no real basic techniques are discussed; for example, the desirability of browning beef before putting it into the pot. This book assumes some basic knowledge. That said, it's a useful book to have on the shelf, and I've done a fair number of recipes from it that are quite good. There are several books in this series. This one looks better to me than the others because as I recall, the earlier ones didn't include nutritional information. There's also a lot of repetition with recipes throughout all the books. This one at least makes an attempt to be lower-fat in nature. There is also a new one for Diabetics that might be interesting.