Dawn Hall - The Busy Peoples Fast and Frugal Cookbook

Busy People's fast & frugal
cookbook 2009 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, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc. Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

Photography on pages iv, vi, xii, 13, 29, 46, 55, 64, 75, 77, 86, 92, 109, 122, 151, 194, 213, 215, 222, 228, 240, 24546, 24950, 263, 280, 289, and 291 by Danielle Adams. Library of Congress Control Number: 2009934420 ISBN-13: 978-1-59555-290-7 Printed in the United States of America 09 10 11 12 QW 6 5 4 3 2 1 Busy People's fast & frugal
cookbook Dawn HallContents Introduction
Watching My Weight
and Counting My Pennies I feel like I was born watching my weight and counting my pennies. It is a part of who I am. I have learned to do the best I can with what I have and to be content. For me, this life lesson has been a gift. Please dont get me wrong.

I would never choose to be born watching my weight or counting my pennies; but much good has come from it, and for those life lessons that I have learned, I am grateful! I have struggled to be within my ideal body weight as far back as I can remember. We grew up on a farm and took pride in how much we could eat. You can eat six ears of corn? I can eat seven! As children, we were proud that our hefty dad won the Hog Trough Award for eating too much at the ice cream parlor. Even now, there is nothing a hot fudgy brownie cant make feel better. But I also remember the not-so-proud feeling of my little white gym shorts being too tight in the first grade. It is no wonder I struggle with food.

Can you relate to anything I am saying here? I have learned the hard way that, for me, the price I was paying by being unhealthy is a LOT higher emotionally, mentally, and physically than the sacrifices I pay of eating less calories and healthier foods so I can be within my healthy weight range. I wish I could tell you that after all of these years it is now easy for me to be within my ideal weight, and that I have no desires to ever pig out, but I cannot. It is still a daily challenge for me. Sometimes I feel as if there is this obese woman in me, just wanting to eat her way out. To help fight the battle of the bulge, along with exercising, I count my daily caloric intake as if each calorie has one dollar value, and I only have so many caloric dollars to spend a day. Eating low-fat and healthier food choices instead of unhealthy junk food has helped me stretch and enjoy daily caloric restriction.

As if shopping at a great sale on clothing, I try to get a great value with my limited daily caloric dollars, thus one of the reasons why I eat low-fat. Of course,reducing the risks of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, which all thrive on a high-fat diet, are other reasons I try to eat low-fat. I try to eat 80 percent of my daily calories from healthy food choices and allow the remaining 20 percent to come from what I call unhealthy food choices (also known as junk food or foods with little nutritional value). On a financial note: I am the oldest of seven children, and we grew up living on my fathers modest income. I was very fortunate and blessed to learn from my mother how to stretch a dollar! As my life transitioned from a single lady in my early twenties living on my own, to a stay-at-home-mom in my late twenties, to the financial provider for our family while my loving husband was fighting brain cancer for six and a half years, until now as a widow, I have ALWAYS counted my pennies! I believe that what we make of our money is every bit as important as how much we make! About a year ago I was literally fighting back tears as I was grocery shopping because it just seems as though financially it is getting more and more difficult to stretch my grocery budget eating healthier choices. I thought to myself, If I am feeling the pinch, surely others are also! That is when I decided to write Busy Peoples Fast & Frugal Cookbook.

My goal was to create home-style recipes that busy people could quickly and easily afford to make in the comfort of their own homes using inexpensive and easy-to-find grocery store ingredients. I wanted the recipes to taste and look as though we had slaved over them all day, but in all honesty each recipe had to be effortlessly made with seven or fewer ingredients, be low-fat, and be finished in five to thirty minutes! The Cost Factor: The Bottom Dollar vs. Fat and Fiber Content
Choices Youll Need to Make for Yourself Throughout this cookbook you will see that I had to make choices regarding the higher costs of fat-free and higher-fiber products compared to the lower costs of using products higher in fat and lower in fiber. Prime examples are in cheeses, butters, salad dressings, breads, and pastas. My choices: Higher-Cost Ingredients: For most recipes I chose to pay the higher cost to use fat-free cheeses, low-fat butter or light margarines, fat-free salad dressings, low-calorie sliced breads and only the egg whites. Why? Because for me, the extra money I am paying seems worth it for the amount of fats, cholesterol, and unwanted calories I am saving.

Lower-Cost Ingredients: For the most part I chose to pay less for regular pastas and did not use whole-grain pastas which have more fiber. Why? Because for me, I did not feel the extra costs to use whole-grain pastas were worth the benefits. However, I do try to eat 25 grams of fiber a day. Now if the whole-grain pastas were on sale, and I was able to purchase it at a price comparable to the lower-fiber pastas, by all means I recommend using the higher-fiber pastas! You may have to cook them for just a little bit longer, but the time is well worth the effort. For the most part I choose to save on cholesterol, unwanted fats, and calories by using only the egg whites of eggs in my recipes. Youll save more than 300 milligrams of cholesterol per egg by using just the whites, plus oodles of calories and fats.

I have found that purchasing eggs by the dozen is usually less expensive than buying liquid egg substitute (aka Egg Beaters).However, If you like the ease of using liquid egg substitute, then by all means, go ahead and substitute it in my recipes for the egg whites. Egg Conversion Chart 2 egg whites = 1.4 cup liquid egg substitute = 1 whole egg
1.4 cup liquid egg substitute = 1 whole egg = 2 egg whites If you prefer to use the entire egg, then substitute 1 whole egg for 2 egg whites in recipes. TIP: Adding a few drops of yellow food coloring to the egg whites (before beating them) makes the color look as if you used whole eggs. You will need to make these choices for yourself, but I recommend substituting an ingredient that has greater nutritional value whenever you are able to do so at the same price as a lower-nutritional ingredient. (Example: whole-grain pasta instead of regular pasta.) In order to do this you will need to be on the lookout for sales. Saving on Groceries