Eat What You Love: Restaurant Favorites

The latest entertaining, family-friendly entry in Koch’s Eat What You Love series (Everyday, Quick & Easy, etc.) gives readers healthy alternatives to fast food and comfort food staples with recipes that cut the fat, calories, and sodium in each dish. Time-pressed home cooks can easily recreate such restaurant favorites as Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, crispy chicken fingers (from any a number of restaurants), or bruschetta mussels from Maggiano’s Little Italy. While the lower calorie counts are impressive, Koch’s lowered sodium for some recipes is eye-popping (for example, her Chicken Fried Chicken with Gravy, from the Midwestern Cotton Patch Café chain, cuts 2,020 mg of sodium down to 600). Koch’s take on the Cheesecake Factory’s chicken taquitos lowers the calories from 1,140 to 190 (that’s with two taquitos, rather than the restaurant’s four). Her recipe for Chili’s Style Beef Fajitas contains only 210 calories and 380 mg of sodium, compared to 1,600 calories and 5,600 mg of sodium in the original. Koch lists which of her recipes are gluten-free, and, when dining out, advises how to order healthily (“opt for grilled, steamed, or broiled entrees” and eat dessert at home). These accessible, healthy versions of popular dishes are sure to be enjoyed by kids and adults alike. [em](May) [/em]