David Zinczenko - Cook This, Not That! Easy & Awesome 350-Calorie Meals

CHAPTER 1

The skills and ingredients you need for amazing healthy meals

CHAPTER 2

Satisfying morning meals to supercharge your day

CHAPTER 3

The perfect start to any meal

CHAPTER 4

Never has food this healthy tasted so good

CHAPTER 5

Heroic handheld meals to satisfy any appetite

CHAPTER 6

Sizzling steaks, succulent fish, and everything in between

CHAPTER 7

Hearty Italian classics made healthy at home

CHAPTER 8

Eat all your favorite comfort foods and watch the pounds melt away

CHAPTER 9

The most delicious dishes from around the world

CHAPTER 10

The quickest, easiest, and tastiest meals for when you're short on time

CHAPTER 11

Little foods that make a big difference

CHAPTER 12

Insanely decadent post-dinner delights

That may sound counterintuitive, but its true, and its why this book is essential for anyone who wants to enjoy delicious food while also losing weight quickly, safely, and effectively. See, this may be a cookbook, but its not necessarily a book for people who love to cook.

This is a book for people who love to eat.

The goal of this book is to help you get from hmm, Im hungry to yum, thats good in as little time as possible. Its designed to help you keep hungerand weight gainat bay by keeping your belly filled with smart, lean versions of all your favorite foods and letting you eat to your hearts content whenever you want. Especially if you want it fast.

Now, that doesnt mean there isnt plenty of joy to be found in the process of planning, shopping, and prepping a meal. Plenty of people just love to pore through their recipe collection, selecting the ultimate creation for that nights meal and improvising like a jazz artist over the stove. They love sorting through the kitchen shelves to ensure they have just the right colander and the perfect gauge of grater for their next pasta masterpiece. They love to linger in the supermarket, rapping on the melons and sniffing the peaches and poking the beef and talking shop with the fishmonger. And theyre happiest of all when theyre watching the yellow-blue flame of the stovetop lap at the steel bottom of their designer cookware.

But you dont have to be one of those people to get the most out of this book. Ive got nothing against the pleasures of chefdom myself, but Im happiest when all thats done, and the food is on its way to my mouth. And Im even happier when I can eat all I want, when I want, and know that my indulgence isnt going to cost me on the bathroom scale.

That makes me especially fortunate to have a recipe-shuffling, melon-rapping, cookware-rattling, James Beard Awardnominated writer and chef as a coauthor. Because while everybody wants AWESOME food, people who dont like to feel hungry also want EASY food. And people who want to eat all they want, when they want, are looking for food they can enjoy without the fat, sugar, and calories that have forced too many of us food lovers onto dietsthe food-lovers purgatory. We want easy and awesome foods that we can eat lots of, whenever we want, without having to spend hours at the gym or wasting our time watching our waists. And thats where this book comes in.

Easy & Awesome 350-Calorie Meals is the ultimate cookbook for people who want to eat great foodand lots of itand never have to worry about gaining weight. In fact, learning to cook fast and leanand cutting down the time between the first hunger pangs and the first bite of smart, healthy foodis just about the best thing you can do to start losing weight more effectively. Why? Its simple:

THE 350-CALORIE RULE

You are going to find a handful of recipes in this book that drift north of the 350-calorie border. Truth is, we could have followed the lead of other low-calorie cookbooks and shrunk down entres to Lilliputian portions, turned to scary food anomalies like fat-free half-and-half, and played funny math games with the nutritionals, but we wanted to feed you, not deceive you. The recipes in this book are for real food, the kind of seemingly decadent plates that wont just tickle your taste buds, but also keep you from raiding the pantry an hour later. Even if you ate the worst dish in this book, the 410-calorie Baked Ziti, every night of the week, were positive youd still shed pounds and youd still save plenty of cash.

Hunger is making you fat

Seriously. When your body gets hungry, it starts doing two things that are bad for your belly:

It goes foraging for fast calories.

When your body senses hunger, it goes into stress mode. Since theres no telling how long this food shortage will last, your instinctdiet be damnedis to try to get calories, fast. In primitive times, that meant climbing trees to find fruit or turning over boulders to find worms. Today, it means climbing kitchen shelves to find Fruity Pebbles and turning to Burger King to find Whoppers. Hunger sets the stage for cravings, and cravings set the stage, inevitably, for unhealthy calories. And thats why dieting doesnt work: One moment youre being good, sticking to your diet, and maintaining discipline, and the next moment youre chewing through the freezer door and diving into an ill-advised love triangle with two guys named Ben and Jerry. But theres something else your body does when it gets hungry thats even worse.

It starts burning body tissue.

Since your body needs energy to do things like pump your heart, fill your lungs, think great thoughts, keep up with the Kardashians, and all the myriad other projects it has going on right now, shutting down when you run out of gas simply isnt an option. So when you get hungry, your body starts looking around for stored calories to burn. At first, that sounds great: Im feeling fat, so Ill just skip some meals and let my body burn off my flab. But as anyone whos tried to starve themselves slim knows, losing weight that way is hard, and once you start eating again, you gain it all backand more! (See Alley, Kirstie.)

Why? Because its not fat that your body wants to burn first, its muscle. You see, your body stores fat to protect itself in times of severe hardship. When you get peckish for a few hours, your body senses that, hmmm, maybe all is not well in the food supply chain, and it instinctively starts to store and protect flab. And because its counting on that stored flab for the future, when hunger strikes, it looks elsewhere for quick caloriesto the protein stored in your muscles. Put it another way: Every time you feel hungry, what youre really feeling is your body burning away muscle and preserving fat. And worse, when you start eating again, your bodyhaving now been taught that starvation might just be a threatis even more prone to storing fat, just in case.

Hunger is robbing your wallet.

The fastest, most effective way to drop pounds is to pick up a cookpot, because always having something healthy and delicious to eat will keep your body running at its best, burning food and belly fat (and not muscle) for energy. But cooking your own food will do more than make you look better in clothesitll help you afford better clothes. (And with all the weight youre going to lose, believe me, youre going to need new clothes!) For example: Lets say you love Olive Gardens Spaghetti and Italian Sausage. That meal will cost you about $14.75and 1,270 caloriesper person. Feeding a family of four? Good-bye, $59. Now, feed those same four family members our Spaghetti with Spicy Tomato Saucea lusty bowl of noodles goosed with hunks of smoky baconand your cost per person goes down by nearly $12.74 (and youll save 900 calories as well). Thats $50.96 back in your pocket.