Wolfe - The Fat-free Junk Food Cookbook: 100 Recipes of Guilt-Free Decadence

In April 1993 I was pushing two hundred pounds. For a five-foot seven-inch human, thats long past the point when youre embarrassed to be seen at the pool.

I had seen my hero, and the worlds most followed yogi, Lilias Folan, on TV still looking incredibly fit as I ballooned. I knew I had to do something.

So I went on a low-fat diet. And I discovered there was nothing good left to eat. I wanted brownies, cookies, and ice cream, but even one serving of any of these treats would get me pulled over by the pudge police for exceeding my twenty-five-gram-a-day fat limit.

So I started working on fat-free junk food. I looked for ways of improving existing no-fat recipes. I found fat placebos for my favorite recipes. I started from scratch and created new recipes.

No fat. No guilt. No gain. As a matter of fact, during the initial experimentation for this book between April and July 1993, I lost thirty-three pounds.

I didnt even count calories. My portions of low-fat food were unrestricted. I could eat all the red beans and rice I wanted. If I craved an extra helping of fat-free jam cake for dessert, fine. (I said, an extra helping, not the whole cake!)

I lost weight, but more importantly Ive kept it off, even through the dreaded winter holidays. Here are the best of the fat-free recipes that I, and my family, have come to love. I hope you find them as gooey, juicy, tasty, and helpful as I do. Many take less than thirty minutes to prepare and cook. The tells you the amount of precooking preparation time for each recipe. The shows you the total time the recipe takes, start to finish, including cooking time.

The words fat-free are flying around more these days than UFOs over Graceland. Heres the real truth. Fat-free does not mean a food contains absolutely no fat: By FDA guidelines fat-free means that a serving of food contains one-half gram of fat or less.

This can be misleading. Heres an example: A large snack food company is peddling fat-free devils food cookies that contain just under one-half gram of fat per cookie. On the box, a serving is listed as one cookie. People were once willing to hijack this companys trucks to get these cookies.

A smaller company is producing the same cookie at the same factory with a slightly altered recipe. They have been doing so for years. Each of their cookies also contains just under one-half gram of fat. On the back of their box, a serving is listed as two cookies. So per-serving fat content is listed as one gram. Nobody buys cookie B. Yet both brands of cookies have virtually the same fat content. The difference? The big company has a better marketing department.

Very few things are truly fat-free. Flour has one gram of fat per cup. Skim milk has one-half gram of fat per cup. Even vegetables contain trace amounts of fat. That being said, all the recipes in this book have one-half gram of fat or less per serving. Ive kept the serving sizes as generous as possible.

The fat content of the recipes in this book was estimated by using the most current fat-content information from the manufacturers of the ingredients used. Fat content added in the preparation, by cooking spray, for example, and by the use of cornmeal on cooking surfaces, was also factored in. To keep these recipes fat-free, please use the ingredients listed, in the portions listed. There will always be slight fat-content variations in ingredients from manufacturer to manufacturer and from batch to batch. (For more, see Reading the Label.)

The serving size has been calculated to contain less than one-half gram of fat. If you increase the serving size, your portion will no longer be fat-free. However, even if you increase your portion by six, it will still be low-fat according to FDA guidelines.

Some tips for reducing fat: