Table of Contents
A PLUME BOOK
TOP SECRET RESTAURANT RECIPES 3
TODD WILBUR is the bestselling QVC cookbook author. Hes appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Today, and Good Morning America , among others. He lives in Las Vegas.
The recipes are easy to follow and... by preparing your own versions of restaurant meals you will almost always save money.
Arizona Daily Star
[Wilburs] recipes use everyday supermarket ingredients to bring brand-name foods to the home kitchen. Perhaps not surprisingly, his recipes are not complex. If anything, they reflect how easy home cooking can be.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul)
Having this dude on her show must have really tested Oprahs dietary mettle.
Entertainment Weekly
For MoMo
Thank You
Words cannot express how grateful I am to all the people who help serve up each new batch of Top Secret Recipes books:
Thank you to everyone at Penguin Group including Clare Ferraro, Cherise Fisher, Kate Napolitano, Barbara OShea, Sandra Dear, Liz Keenan, Laurie Connors, and Anne Banfich.
A big shout-out to Robert Reynolds, Perry Rogers, Colin Smeeton, Shannon Doucett, Ken Langdon, Robert John Kley, Darren Emmens, Melinda Baca, Daniella Paz, and Anthony Corrado.
Thanks to the Stern Show and everyone at Howard 101 for entertaining me during the long hours in the kitchen, and getting the poison out so I can keep laughing through the frustrating and tedious process of creating each of these Top Secret Recipes from scratch.
Huge hugs and big kisses to my amazing family for putting up with the craziest deadline of my career. Its really great to be back!
And a superbig helping of gratitude to all of you who read my books; thanks for your support and your kind words over the years.As long as there are people like you who keep cooking with these books and enjoying the recipes, Ill keep whipping up extra batches of these formulas to make sure they are the best original clone recipes available anywhere.
CANDY BARS AND MAGIC TRICKS
At the age of twelve I was consumed with secrets and sweets.
It was then that I saw the price of candy bars increasing from 15 cents to 20 cents each. As a true candy loverI was your typical kid, after allthis 25 percent price increase was devastating. Each day I rode my bike for miles around Orange County, California, searching out every liquor store, convenience store, and supermarket where I could spend my lawn-mowing money on any remaining inventory of candy bars that still had 15 cents printed on their wrappers. To me these wrappers were precious collectors itemssymbols of my vanishing preteen candy-loving years.
After spending several months finding as many of the 15-cent wrappers as I could, I continued to build my collection by saving every wrapper for each size of every candy bar on the market. Because I always ate what was inside each of those wrappers I tasted practically every candy bar sold in the United States from 1976 to 1978. I noticed how each candy bar was made, and I studied the list of ingredients on the packaging. After carefully removing and consuming the contents from the packaging, I stored the wrappers in scrapbooks and shoe-boxes until I had several hundred in my collection. I stopped collecting the wrappers a couple years later when the price of candy bars increased again, this time to 25 cents each.
While writing my first cookbook, Top Secret Recipes, twelve years after I started my candy bar wrapper project, I found myself in a kitchen creating clone recipes for some of the same candy bars I had collected and inspected as a kid, including Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers, Almond Roca, Mounds, and Almond Joy. I eventually cloned several others for later books, including Baby Ruth, Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, Twix, Payday, Nestle Crunch, York Peppermint Pattie, Mars Bar, 100 Grand, and many more. As it turns out, my hobby as a kid studying candy bars and their ingredients had planted a seed in me that would later sprout into a facet of my career.
The money I didnt squander on candy I spent at magic shops. In addition to obsessing over candy bars at age twelve, I had become fascinated with illusionistsback then these guys were cool. I bought dozens of magic props and piles of books about magic because I absolutely had to know how all the magicians did their amazing tricks. For me, watching a magician perform on TV was more about figuring out how the tricks were done than about sitting back and being amazed.You might think that knowing all the secrets would demystify the performance and ruin the experience, but I found that understanding the details behind the scenes gave me a larger appreciation of all the work that went into the craft. I actually enjoyed the show even more when I knew how all the tricks worked.
People who create good food have something in common with magicians. They, too, are artists in a specialized craft often reluctant to reveal their secrets. And just as earlier in life when I was compelled to uncover the secrets of the magicians who demonstrate their skills on stage, I now spend my time figuring out how the magicians of the kitchen perform their tricks. But what makes my current obsession more challenging than my hobby as a younger man is that there are no shops selling the secrets I now seek to uncover. I must figure out these culinary tricks all on my own.
It was only recently that I realized that these two seemingly unrelated hobbies from the same moment in my childhood were the first signs of character traits that would guide me toward my career destiny.
The First Clone Recipe I Tried
My first encounter with a clone recipe was in college. I was a freshman, and as is the case with most first-year college students, I had very little money.This was an unfortunate situation for many reasons, but especially because living right down the hall of my dormitory was a group of girls who really loved drinking Kahlua, and they really loved boys who gave them bottles of it. To show their devotion to the expensive coffee liqueur, they would peel the fabric seal off the neck of each bottle they finished and proudly tape it to the outside of their dorm room door. By Christmas, their door was about half-covered with the little booze trophies, and the throw rug in their room smelled like Black Russians.
One day my buddy turned me onto a fifth-generation photocopy of a recipe someone had given him. It listed five ingredientsvodka, sugar, water, instant coffee, and vanillathat when cooked together under the right conditions would produce a liqueur that tasted exactly like Kahlua.This was too good to be true! We immediately got to a kitchen and converted the cheapest vodka we could find into the party girls beverage of choice, loaded it into empty Kahlua bottles, and anxiously awaited the weekend. When we presented our female friends with a couple bottles of special Kahlua, the party was on. And they loved it! The liqueur tasted exactly like Kahlua, but what we didnt realize was that the proof was close to double whats in the real stuff! You can imagine the shenanigans that ensued when everyone downed the usual number of drinks with twice the alcohol content they were used to. Its no wonder nobody noticed when we took the empty bottles home with us at the end of the night to refill again for the following weekend.
