Dawn Hall - Busy Peoples Low-Fat Cookbook

Busy Peoples
Low-Fat
Cookbook

Dawn Hall
Rutledge Hill PressTM
Nashville, Tennessee
A Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc.
www.ThomasNelson.com

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In memory of my gentle hero, faithful best
friend, cherished lover, loving father, and
courageous husband, Tracy Hall.
11/27/625/4/01

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Copyright 1998, 2003 by Dawn Hall All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Rutledge Hill Press, a Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc.,
P.O. Box 141000, Nashville, Tennessee, 37214. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hall, Dawn.
Busy peoples low-fat cookbook / Dawn Hall.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 1-4016-0105-7
1.

Low-fat dietRecipes. I. Title.
RM237.7.H3448 2003
641.5'638dc21 2003001766 Printed in Hong Kong
03 04 05 06 075 4 3 2 1 Complete Your
Busy Peoples Library The recipes in these two cookbooks are all easy to prepare and cook They all contain 7 ingredients or less and can be prepared in less than 30 minutes Down-Home Cooking
Without the Down-Home Fat
1-4016-0104-9
$16.99 Includes recipes for: Citrus Pancakes Caesar Oyster Crackers Chicken Skillet Cobbler Chewy, Gooey No-Bake Freezer Cookies Turtle Cake Busy Peoples
Slow Cooker Cookbook
1-4016-0107-3
$16.99 Includes recipes for: Cinnamon-Kissed Chicken Mushroom Chowder Apple-Yam Casserole Peaches and Cream Spoon Cake Pistachio-Nut Snack Cake Available at better book stores everywhere!
or at
www.RutledgeHillPress.com Contents A s I take a moment to reflect and gather my thoughts, I am overwhelmed with thankfulness. I wholeheartedly believe my talents are a gift from God, so of course I thank Him first. Its not uncommon for me to wake up at 3:30 A.M. with a low-fat, fast and easy recipe idea in my head.

For years I thought, What is wrong with me? But after friends and family members kept requesting the recipes Id created and encouraging me to write a cookbook, I realized that it wasnt a problem; it was a gift. A gift from God. It is to Him that I give all the praise and glory for all the good He does through me. Next I thank my daughters Whitney and Ashley who have served as my guinea pigs for so many years. When you taste the recipes in this cookbook you may think that would be a good thing, but believe me, Ive had my share of flops. I never follow a recipe.

I love to create. Sometimes when eating out Ill jot down on a paper napkin what I think is in the dish, then when Im home I try to recreate the same dish using low-fat ingredients quickly and easily. For someone to ask me not to be creative with food would be like asking a flower not to blossom. My family has never done that to me. I am truly thankful for their support and encouragement. I greatly appreciate the help of my personal assistants: Diane Bowman-Yantiss, Karen Schwanbeck, Mable Jackson, and Robin Friend.

I couldnt have done it all without you. You are the glue that keeps it all together. Last but certainly not least I thank my publisher, Larry Stone, for believing in me, Bryan Curtis and Terri Woodmore for getting the word out, and Geoff Stone, my editor. I am grateful for all the hard work, time, and patience he put into the project. I ts been said that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Often this has been the case in my life.

If I were not the one living my life, Id find the truth of my life unbelievable. Many have said my story would make a great movie. Who knows? Maybe someday. I was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. My parents divorced when I was five. When I was ten we moved to Toledo, Ohio, when my mom remarried.

Im the oldest of seven. I feel I was born watching my weight and have struggled with being a compulsive overeater for as long as I can remember. I hate it. I flunked first grade. In early years of elementary school my teachers always told me I wasnt focusing in class, even though I was trying to with all my might. It wasnt until adulthood that I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which explains my extreme difficulty (even today) to concentrate with background noise and distractions.

I graduated with honors in 1981 from Springfield High School. I married my high school sweetheart, Tracy Wayne Hall, in 1984. I never went to college. I worked as a waitress until I was pregnant with our first child in 1986. We were blessed with two wonderful daughters born in 1987 and 1988. It took one year to physically build our small ranch home ourselves (with the help of friends) while our family lived in a tiny efficiency apartment above Tracys parents garage.

We fondly named our new home Cozy Homestead, and we moved into it in June 1992. I enjoyed teaching aerobics and facilitating classes for compulsive overeaters. With passion I was creating new recipes every day, and our family never ate the same meal twice for family dinners. I home-schooled our children until November 28, 1994. Ill never forget that day. It was the day my life was turned inside out and upside down and also the last day of a normal life as I can remember it.

November 28, 1994, the day after my loving husbands thirty-second birthday, was the day we found out Tracy had brain cancer. Doctors were able to surgically remove one pound of malignant tumor, leaving Tracy completely paralyzed on his entire left side. He was given six to eight months to live. I told Tracy the day we found out about his cancer that I believed God was going to use our most challenging situation to give Himself praise and glory. That is exactly what God is doing to this day. To make a long story short, in order to pay for an experimental treatment, we had to raise thousands of dollars each month because our insurance would not pay for experimental treatments.

All of the recipes I had been creating over the previous five years I printed into books and sold in order to earn enough money for Tracys treatments. My thought was we could use what little we had left in our savings to pay for a couple weeks of Tracys treatment, or we could try to invest the money into cookbooks and hopefully earn enough to pay for his treatments indefinitely. In the beginning, when I was driving home with my first vanload of a thousand cookbooks I thought to myself, Youre nuts, Dawn. How in the world are you going to sell a thousand books? Youre nuts! Well, we sold a thousand cookbooks in five days and eighteen thousand in ten weeks. That first book was Down Home Cookin Without the Down Home Fat. It was selected as one of Ohios Best of the Best Cookbooks by Quail Ridge Press and the 1996 Best Cookbook of the Year by North American Book Dealers Exchange.

Not too shabby for a homemaker who didnt know how to type or use a computer, huh? I would be a fool if I thought for even one moment that I did it. Over 650,000 cookbooks sold. It was definitely a God thing, and He gets all the credit. He did it through me and for that I am forever grateful. I guess we werent living with enough stress of daily financial bondage and fighting cancer and its devastating effects. We had a house fire on Valentines Day in 2000.

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