Dana Carpender - The New 500 Low-Carb Recipes: 500 Updated Recipes for Doing Low-Carb Better and More Deliciously

Over 125 New and Revised Recipes

DANA CARPENDER

500 Updated Recipes for Doing Low-Carb Better and More Deliciously

W hats the hardest thing about your low-carb diet? And whats the most common reason that people abandon their low-carb way of eating and all the health benefits and weight loss that come with it?

Boredom. People just plain get bored. After a few weeks of scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast, a hamburger with no bun for lunch, and a steakno baked potatofor dinner, day after day, people get fed up and quit. They just cant face a life of food monotony. Sound familiar?

If youve been getting bored with your low-carb diet, this is the book for you. Youll find dozens of exciting ways to vary a hamburger, a steak, pork chops, chicken, and fish. Youll find a wide variety of side dishes and salads. Youll find snacks and party foods that you can eat without feeling like youre depriving yourself. Youll even find recipes for bread, not to mention muffins, waffles, pancakes, and granola. In short, this book has recipes for all sorts of things you never dreamed you could have on a low-carb diet.

Did I come up with these recipes for you? Heck, no! I came up with these recipes for me.

Who am I? Im a person who, through circumstances that surely could have happened to anyone, has spent the past several years writing about low-carbohydrate dieting. In fact, I spent so much time answering questions for the curious that I finally wrote a book, How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost Forty Pounds! To supplement the book, I started an e-zinean Internet newsletterfor low-carb dieters, called Lowcarbezine! Knowing that recipes had been instrumental in my success, I included one or two in every issue. Lowcarbezine! is gone, but Im still coming up with recipes!

Ive always loved to cook, and Ive always been good at it. My friends long ago dubbed me The God of Food. So when low-fat, high-carb mania hit in the 1980s, I learned how to make a killer low-fat fettuccine Alfredo, curried chicken and mixed grain pilau, black beans and rice, blue corn pancakes, low-fat cheesecakeyou name it.

And I got fat. Really fat. And sick. And tired. Thank heavens, in 1995 I got smart and tried going low carb, instead. Within two days my energy levels skyrocketed and my clothes were looser. It was overwhelmingly clear that this was the way my body wanted to be fed and that this was the way of eating that would make me well. I had set my foot upon a path from which there was no turning back. I was low carb for life.

The only thing that nearly derailed me was a terrible sense of Kitchen Disorientation. I had to discard the vast majority of my recipes when I dropped the grains, beans, potatoes, and such from my diet. For the very first time in my life, Id walk into my kitchen and have no idea what to cookand I had always known what to cook and how to put together a menu. It really was pretty scary, and it certainly was depressing. But I set out to become as good a low-carb cook as I had been a low-fat cook.

By 2002 that mission was accomplished, and then some! What you hold in your hands is the end result of those first years of trial and error, of learning what works and what doesnt, of experimenting to find out which substitutes are yummy and which are just plain lame.

This is not, for the most part, a gourmet cookbook, which for many of you means that the recipes you find here are recipes youll actually use. Youll find a lot of fairly simple recipes and a few more complex ones for special occasions. Theres lots of family fare herepork chops and meat loaf, burgers and chicken. Youll find lots of meals you can cook on the stove top in a simple skillet and plenty of salads you can make ahead and stash in the refrigerator, ready to be pulled out and served when you dash in the door at a quarter-to- dinnertime. Youll find many one-dish meals that are protein and vegetables combined, from main dish salads to thick, hearty soups to casseroles. Youll also find ethnic flavors from around the world right alongside comfort foods you wont believe are low carb!