Customer Reviews

Fresh Start: Great Low-Fat Recipes, Day-by-Day Menus--The Savvy Way to Cook, Eat, and Live (The great good food series)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I like my Silver Palate cookbooks and use them often. But this book was a disappointment. The recipes don't work out well without experimentation and tinkering; I don't have time to test everything and revise the recipe before I have friends over for dinner! For lower fat cooking I recommend Cooking Light's Five Star Recipes and Alice Medrich's Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts. These have both proven foolproof and delicious!

I completely disagree with the negative review given to this book. These are very simple and great tasting recipes for everyday cooking. I live in an area where exotic ingrediants are hard to come by and I have no problem finding everything for these dishes. Julee Rosso really knows how to bring out the best in food with little prep and few ingrediants. As far as "tinkering with the recipes" i guess it's all a matter of taste and all cooks automatically change recipies to suit their style (spicy, sweet, salty). I have many cookbooks and experiment often and i agree with the other reviewers that this IS one of my most used cookbooks. BRAVO!

Rosso has turned out lots of great cookbooks, but this one is for us who want or need every now and then to cut back and eat more sensibly.

The great thing is that this doesn't have to be boring,uninteresting food. Her zest and skills in putting together healthy food with attractive and luscious fare is evident in this collection. For example, one dinner entree I love is: Herbed brushetta, Broiled Honey Salmon, Hobo Potatoes, Asparagus Spears with Parmeasan Shards, Green Beans and Peaches in Wine.

Having tried this more than once, it's good, you'll lose pounds and smile all the while you're tasting this great food. All the nutritional analysis is there as well as great sections on smoothies and treats/snacks, etc.

Once again Julee Rosso delivers on her promise. These really are great tasting meals with significantly lowered fat content. In my first week with the book I've tried three recipes with total success. Best of all, a favorite from the original Silver Palate Cookbook (Chicken Marbella) is reborn in a guilt-free version (Roasted Chicken with Fresh Figs). I predict this will be one of the most used cookbooks on my shelves!

Whenever I'm in the middle of a dish and not sure how to continue, or just need a good, relatively simple (with ingredients you can actually get) recipe, I always reach for this one. The opening chapter is fantastic, along with the hints and comments along with the book. There are plenty of great recipies, from vegetarian dishes to easy ones to more complicated meat dishes. The organization could be a little better, but once I read through it once, I can just flip to the index. The individual eggplant towers are delicious and it definitely is my go-to recipe when I can't think of what else to make. Highly recommended.

This is probably the single volume we use most in our house for new recipes. It's not that we don't like the taste of richer foods, but they disagree with us, and these recipes are (so far) without a clunker in the bunch. A combination hard to beat!

Good golly, Miss Molly, does this woman love garlic! She even puts a quarter of a cup of garlic (admittedly for 8 servings), eggplant and a jalapeno pepper (!) in her "classic" Bolognese sauce - which, in the traditional recipe, has no garlic, let alone no eggplant, and we're not even going to address the jalapeno, but does have a carrot and celery. Carrot and celery seem adequately healthy to warrant their inclusion in Bolognese sauce - perhaps Ms. Rosso might have called her sauce something other than Bolognese, since it is so far from the real recipe and miles away from "classic." Yes, okay, you can adjust the recipes to suit your taste. I just find so few recipes here that I feel like tackling - something about the recipes - perhaps it's the long ingredients lists - just makes them feel so complicated I can't imagine actually working your way through the book as a meal plan for a month.

...While it's true that the recipes are organized by menu, it is not so difficult to pick and choose your way through the book to create alternative meals that suit your style.

What I can say about this book is that the recipes ROCK. My loving partner has a family history of heart-disease. We are both failed vegetarians who fell off the wagon because we LIKE meat. Neither of us are interested in going back to eating TVP and soy. What we do want is a book that will help us eat sensibly, reduce the risks of dropping dead from poor eating habits, and still allow us to eat food we like.

Recipe after recipe in my book has been marked Very Good! or Excellent! beside it. The Turkey Paillard Piccata and Brown Rice with Asparagus and Almonds is delicious, the Country-Roasted Chicken with Green Beans and Potatoes is savory and pleasing, the Roasted Chicken with Fresh Figs and Kalamata Olives is out of this world, and the Individual Eggplant Towers have become a family favorite.

Julee's Book was full of new and intresting flavors! She has a good flair for spicing things up to take the hum drum out of cooking!

The Silver Palate Cookbook is a favorite in my house, but Fresh Start has sat in my bookshelf for a year basically unused. Why? I cannot stand the way the book is organized (according to menu plans) and the index section does not compensate. This was a disappointment.