Complete Idiots Guide to Low-Carb Meals (The Complete Idiots Guide)

Thanks for writing such a wonderful cookbook. What do I like about the cookbook Well...actually...everything. Im going through it section by section and cooking wonderful meals for us. One thing that has made an impression is the vinegar/acidity concept to lower the glycemic index. It really works to help keep me feeling full longer. The Chicken Piccata is marvelous and is even better the NEXT day, for breakfast. Today, my grocery shopping was totally based on the cookbook. There are Lucy Beale-things marinating in my fridge as I write this

You can actually make flourless chocolate tiramisu cake, pasta-less lasagna, and tortilla-less chicken quesadilla. Let Beale and Couvillon in their book, The Complete Idiots Guide to Low-Carb Meals, give you detailed instructions on how to pull off these low-carb favorites.

The book intros with this statement. The challenge of low-carb cooking is to cook up the most delicious foods with the right amount of carbohydrates-enough to satisfy your palate and your tastes, but not so many that you exceed your daily carb allotment. An additional challenge is to make every carbohydrate count nutritionally for your best health, ideal weight, and overall well-being.

Beale, a weight-loss expert and coach, and Couvillon, a registered dietitian, succeed in writing a recipe book that meets the low-carb cooking challenge. Each chapter overflows with not just detailed ingredients and cooking procedures, but also nutrition info on each dish. For each recipe, there are notes on prep time, cook time, serving size for how many, and exact measures of grams of carb, fiber, nutritive carbs, and total protein broken down into grams from animal and plant sources.

The book also has valuable nuggets of wisdom scattered about in side-boxes, like the Recipe for Success, Table Talk, Hot Potato, and Low-Carb Vocab. At the end of each chapter is the segment on The Least You Need to Know, which lists the chapters highlights. Plus, theres a Glycemic Index and Carbohydrate List indicating the glycemic ranking and carb content of each ingredient mentioned in the book.

I especially appreciate the chapter intros, like in the section on Chocolates. It tells you everything you ever need to know about chocolate - a little background, varieties of chocolate, ingredients it goes well with, and why its good for you.

Whether youre watching your carbs, looking for seven egg salad variations with zero cooking time, or meeting challenges like how to make lunches without sandwiches and what to substitute for pasta and potatoes, this is the recipe book for you. - Ruby Bayan,

The book contains a reasonable number of recipes and lots of hints that if youve done ANY reading about low carbohydrate eating, will be superfluous.

The recipes run the gamut of carb counts, though I thought that the bulk of them were much higher carb than is helpful. Following the suggestions in this book and the recipes, it wouldnt be all that hard to hit 80-100++ grams of carb per day... which is simply TOO HIGH for many people who are following low carb lifestyles.

Many recipes call for sugar, white flour, semi-sweet chocolate and cornstarch. Come ON... those are NOT low carb ingredients.

This is more or less a repackaged low fat/lower cal cookbook with low carb thrown on the cover to try to generate some market share. My copy is being donated to a charity, it isnt worth the space on the shelf for someone interested in real low carb cooking.

Book Description
Delicious recipes for the low-carb cook. Todays most popular diets rely on cutting down on carbs, but most cooks have difficulty finding scrumptious low-carb alternatives. Enter cookbook authors Lucy Beale and Sandy Couvillon-with more than 330 mouth-watering recipes for the diehard dieter that will appeal to the whole family and are easy to make.

- Includes meal-planning information and charts
- Provides important nutritional information