Secrets of Fat-free Chinese Cooking (Secrets of Fat-free Cooking)

Love the recipes, hate the design, July 31, 2003

By 

T. Reinhardt “olivia lee” (east coast) –

  

  

Okay…first the great stuff! While dieting, its hard to find many options at a chinese resturant besides steamed veggies and plain tofu without sauce and with a bit of rice (unless your low carbing..than you can forget the rice, even) This book has none of the typical sweet and sour heavy gloppy sauces and deep fried anything… And the food is better for it.

According to the author it is more *authentic* to the real cuisine and I can see that she is right. The recipes smack of healthful trasitional ethnic cuisine…with a bit less sodium and fat. In the beginning there are some general guidelines for reducing dietary fats as well as a glossary of asian ingredients…some familiar (green onions) some more esoteric (agar-agar)… and some helpful cooking hints.

The book is separated into chapters of soups, springrolls and dumplimgs, rice and noodles, tofu, veggies, meat, seafood, and desserts.

The soups that I have enjoyed from this book are the tofu spinich soup, the meatball spinch soup,and the chicken rice soup. All the soups were very low sodium, probably much lower than people are accustomed to. Adding a bit more might be necessary for some people.

The steamed shrimp dumplings are delicious! Sodium and fat on this is low as well but you are eating this with a dipping sauce of some kind so it is a highly flavored and delicious dish. The bai zai chicken is easy and wonderful and also makes a great wrap type sandwich. (plus you end up with a light stock after you have poached the chicken!) The steamed turkey cakes were a bit odd to me… I guess Im accustomed to a different texture on ground meat than steaming provides and I don’t especially like the smell of ground turkey. There is a shrimp cake recipe that reminds me of a bit of shrimp toast…( the delicious deep fried shrimp on white bread thing)…Its great when I want a good subsitute for that fatty appitizer.

there is a resourse list in the back of the book to locate hard to find items. But the pulication date is 1997 so its hard to know how current that is. There are however many sites on the internet for delivery of these kinds of items if the ones in the book do not work out.

My only problem with this book are design issues. It didnt lie all that flat and so after several uses on the same page, and trying to get it lie flat the binding has cracked on my favorite recipe pages. Im afraid soon the pages will be all over. The pages also arent able to be wiped of spills and are a bit thin, so you can see the type of the other pages thru them. You cant read it, its more of a shadow, but its distracting to me. I would prefer a bigger font on recipes that have more, rather than less ingredients..and some of these do. Im not sure I understand the logic for taking up half a page with a recipe and half with a large cartoon of walking vegetables when a larger font would have made it much easier to read.

But….as i have said…overall this book has more plusses than minuses. It suits many diets as well as just generally tasting very very good. The recipes are simple and dont require complex cooking techniques or a whole host of difficult ingredients sometimes needed for ethnic cooking.

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