Cook This, Not That!: Kitchen Survival Guide

Did you know the average dinner from a chain restaurant contains more than 1,200 calories? Few people understand the perils of eating out better than the authors of "Eat This, Not That!", and after years of investigating menus and dissecting nutritional information in an effort to help diners make smarter choices, they're back with the best cash-saving weight loss weapon of all: a book filled with decadent yet low-calorie recipes, healthy cooking techniques, and plenty of savvy nutritional strategies to help people eat better and lose weight without ever dieting again. The authors take their winning formula into the kitchen to teach readers how to enjoy all of their favourite restaurant foods at a fraction of the price and the caloric impact. This title features: healthy recipes for 100 of the most indulgent dishes; dozens of strategies for cutting calories and saving cash while stocking your pantry; and, chapters filled with life-changing cooking tips, like 37 ways to cook a chicken breast, a dozen 10 minute pasta sauces and the ultimate sandwich. Part mouth watering cookbook, part insider nutrition strategy guide, "Cook This, Not That! Kitchen Survival Guide" is poised to change the way we cook at home.

Let’s Get Cooking!
 
It’s a terrible time to become a chef. But it’s a great time to become a cook.
 
Ever since the American economy hit a giant RESET button back in September 2008, things have changed—a lot. We’ve grown wiser with our money, and we’re determined to spend it smartly. Whereas once we aspired to drive the biggest, broadest, hungriest SUV on the block, today Humvees look as outdated as bell-bottoms. Whereas once we admired the men and women boasting power suits and toting briefcases, today most kids whose parents work on Wall Street lie to their friends to save face. “My dad? He’s, um, he’s ... in jail!”
 
And while the TV seems to bring us nothing but celebrity chefs—and wannabes who are willing to be humiliated by celebrity chefs—in the real world, we’re starting to take a second look at our restaurant culture as well. In 2008, 28 percent of Americans said they had visited a fine dining restaurant in the past month. In 2009, that figure dropped to just 19 percent. And 52 percent of respondents in a poll by Mintel said that they are spending less at restaurants than they did the year before. Sorry, Gordon Ramsay, but it’s suddenly a cold day in Hell’s Kitchen.
 
And that’s a good thing, for our wallets, our waistlines, and our overall health. It’s not a huge leap to look at all the drive-thrus and quickie sandwich shops and prepackaged take-out meals, then look at our growing bellies and thinning wallets and think—hmm, maybe there’s a connection here.
 
And there is.
 
The Better Way to Eat
 
Forget dieting. Forget joining a gym. Forget the ads for the Ab-inator device you saw on QVC. If you really, truly want to lose weight, there is no quicker way to shave pounds off your body—and dollars off your food bill—than to cook more at home. That’s what Cook This, Not That! will teach you to do.
 
Now, we don’t mean to say you should avoid restaurants and prepared supermarket foods like the plague. The Eat This, Not That! series is designed to help you make smart swaps at all your favorite restaurants and in choosing all your favorite supermarket foods.
 
But in many cases, the very smartest swap you can make ... is to make it yourself. Just check out this sampling of restaurant and prepared supermarket foods and see how many calories you can save if you simply learn to cook these very basic dishes at home.
 
Who Blew up the Food?
 
PIZZA (per slice):
Restaurant: 210 calories, 11 g fat (4 g saturated)
Supermarket: 510 calories, 22 g fat (10 g saturated)
Home-Cooked: 187 calories, 5.5 g fat (2 g saturated)
 
HAMBURGER (regular):
Restaurant: 830 calories, 50 g fat (16 g saturated)
Supermarket: 350 calories, 16 g fat (6.5 g saturated)*
Home-Cooked: 329 calories, 12 g fat (4.5 g saturated)
 
STEAK:
Restaurant: 655 calories, 47.5 g fat (21 g saturated)
Supermarket: 360 calories, 14 g fat (6 g saturated)
Home-Cooked: 243 calories, 8 g fat (2.5 g saturated)
 
WAFFLES (no syrup):
Restaurant: 547 calories, 8 g fat (4 g saturated)
Supermarket: 170 calories, 2.5 g fat (0 g saturated)
Home-Cooked: 218 calories, 10.5 g fat (2 g saturated)
 
PIE:
Restaurant: 533 calories, 30 g fat (11 g saturated)
Supermarket: 355 calories, 21.5 g fat (10 g saturated)
Home-Cooked: 355 calories, 17 g fat (5 g saturated)
 
GRILLED CHEESE:
Restaurant: 430 calories, 26.5 g fat (8 g saturated)
Supermarket: 590 calories, 22 g fat (7 g saturated)
Home-Cooked: 270 calories, 15.5 g fat (9.5 g saturated)
 
PASTA:
Restaurant: 867 calories, 34 g fat (15 g saturated)
Supermarket: 840 calories, 42 g fat (16 g saturated)
Home-Cooked: 422 calories, 10.5 g fat (2.5 g saturated)
 
ENCHILADA:
Restaurant: 1,315 calories, 65 g fat (25 g saturated)
Supermarket: 380 calories, 9 g fat (2 g saturated)
Home-Cooked: 304 calories, 10 g fat (3 g saturated)
 
ROAST BEEF SANDWICH:
Restaurant: 571 calories, 25 g fat (11 g saturated)
Supermarket: 700 calories, 29 g fat (11 g saturated)
Home-Cooked: 245 calories, 8.5 g fat (1 g saturated)
 
Imagine that, over the course of a week, you cooked these nine foods instead of going out to eat them. You’d save a whopping 3,385 calories just in that 1 week alone—essentially, a pound’s worth of flab. Cooking just these nine foods at home instead of letting the pimply-faced grease purveyor at your local chain restaurant do it for you would shave an unbelievable 50 pounds of fat off your body in just 1 year.
 
Why the dramatic discrepancy? In part, it has to do with the ingredients—restaurants want to mess with your taste buds by adding as much fat, salt, and sugar as they can to everything they touch. But another issue is serving size. In 2008, the USDA found that people eat an estimated 107 more calories each time they choose to eat out instead of eating at home. And a 2002 study looked at restaurant portion sizes and found that they far exceeded what they should be. By weighing foods, researchers found that, compared with USDA portion sizes, the following foods ballooned considerably.
 
Pasta:  480 percent oversize
Muffins:          333 percent oversize
Steak:  224 percent oversize
Bagels:            195 percent oversize
Hamburgers:   112 percent oversize
 
Of course, you’d still save a ton of calories and money by buying prepared foods in the supermarket—just under 1,700 calories a week. But why lose only half the weight you want to? And why spend more than you have to? And why settle for something that was cooked by a stranger yesterday (or last week or maybe even months ago)?
 
It’s so easy to shave off the pounds, just by mastering a few simple cooking skills. So why don’t we all do it? That’s the mystery.
 
Let’s solve it.
 
Who Moved My Cheeseburger?
 
Here’s an experiment: Think of the term “family dinner.” Now, close your eyes and imagine what that looks like. Can you see it, smell it, taste it? Yes?
 
Can you? And more important, how can you still be reading this if your eyes are closed? What are you, superhuman?
 
Seriously, when we think of the term “family dinner,” we almost always think of a family sitting around the dining room table. It’s an image that’s been carved into our brains over decades by books, magazines, TV shows, and movies. And maybe we remember those dinners from our own past because our parents or grandparents hosted family meals in just that way.
 
But today’s “family dinner” doesn’t look like the family dinners we see in movies or read about in books or even conjure up in our own minds. Family dinner cooked at home is rare, after all. We’re far more likely to hit the fast-food joint, order a delivery, or heat up something that was prepared in a supermarket than we are to actually cook our own dinner. In 1963, only 28.5 percent of our food dollars were spent on meals prepared outside the home. But by 2006, it was nearly 49 percent—half of our money being sucked away by restaurant and supermarket-prepared foods. And so, instead of clinking dishware and “Pass the gravy,” it’s crinkling paper bags and “Who got the Tater Tots?”
 
And that means we’re not in control of our food or our bodies. Sure, you can study that takeout menu like a grad student on Ritalin and pore over the side panels of the packaged food labels like Tom Hanks trying to crack the DaVinci Code, but in the end, no matter how careful you are, you’re still not in charge.
 
That’s why we want to take you to the kitchen.
 
But before we go there, come with us for a moment to your local fast-food restaurant or sit-down joint. Let’s say you’re hungry for a cheeseburger. Order one.
 
But before you do, answer a few questions: Does this burger contain lean beef or fatty beef? And just how old is that beef, anyway? (There’s no way to tell, since a fast-food burger could contain beef from dozens of different cows. Eww.) Is it properly cooked, or is there some E. coli hanging around, as has happened at several burger chains over the past few years? And how many calories are in that burger? If you’re ordering the A.1 Peppercorn Burger at Red Robin (nice balloon, kid), you’re tackling 1,440 calories—about the amount of calories you should eat, in total, for all three meals, not just one.
 
And what about the bun? Is it made with whole grains or with refined flour that will create a sugar rush in your bloodstream, helping to increase the odds that you’ll join the one in three Americans who develop diabetes in their lifetime? (And is that bun fresh or has it been tanning under a sunlamp since 6 a.m.?) If you ordered the Bacon Cheddar Minis at Ruby Tuesday, you got a whole lot of bun in relation to your burger—and a whole lot of the 1,358 calories those burgers pack are carb calories, rushing sugar into your bloodstream.
 
And the condiments—are they exactly what you want, or are they exactly what the penny-pinchers at the big multinational corporation have decided is best for their profit margins? If condiments include ketchup, mayonnaise, even relish, then they also contain high-fructose corn syrup, which has been shown to interfere with your body’s ability to process the hormone leptin—the hormone that tells you when you’re full. Oops!
 
Oh, wait, sorry ... you wanted fries with that? Okay, but are those fries cooked lightly with a coating of heart-healthy olive oil? Or do they get a bath of trans-fatty acids, which have been shown to raise your risk of obesity and heart disease? If you’re eating at Jack in the Box, those medium fries come with 7 grams of cholesterol-spiking trans fat—more than you should eat in 3 days!
 
Wash it down with a shake, okay? Maybe a chocolate one. But if you’re at Cold Stone and you order the Gotta Have It PB&C milk shake, you’ve just slurped down an additional 2,010 calories. That’s a whole day’s worth of calories for an adult woman plus more saturated fat than you should eat in 3 days. And you didn’t even eat your burger yet!
 
What an adventure! And that’s just a burger, fries, and a shake!
 
Now, imagine you could eat the exact same meal at home, except for a few slight differences: You could eliminate more than two-thirds of the calories and most of the harmful fats—and at the same time ensure that the food itself was actually fresh, because you prepared it yourself. Oh, and the cost? A typical burger, shake, and sides at a low-end chain restaurant like T.G.I. Friday’s will cost you nearly $35. At home? Less than 6 bucks.
 
Makes you want to learn how to cook, right?
 
Good thing you bought this book.