(Note: This honest review contains affiliate links as per our disclosure.)
When I was asked if I would like a copy of The Perfect Portion Cookbook in exchange for an honest review, my curiosity was piqued. While I have never been one to count calories, the concept of the cookbook sounded interesting: 150 comfort food recipes redesigned to offer old-fashioned flavor while also offering an easy way to balance meals since every recipe in the cookbook comes with a clear illustration of a 100 (200, 300, 400...) calorie portion.
Thus, despite the fact that I was unsure of if my family would actually be able to eat many of the recipes included in the cookbook due to our special dietary needs, I agreed to the review.
A Well-Thought and Inviting Design
When my review copy of The Perfect Portion Cookbook arrived, I was immediately impressed by the many full-color photographs on its cover, end pages, recipe pages, and tip pages. Upon perusing the cookbook further, I was equally impressed by how true to its mission it is. Happy Days' TV star and director Anson Williams, along with co-writers Bob Warden (a New York Times best-selling author) and Mona Dolgov (a reputed nutritionist) certainly met their goal in creating a cookbook that is chock-full of recipes for classic comfort foods as well as tips, graphics, and even meal-plans to make it easy for folks to enjoy eating without overeating.
Recipes for apple turnovers, chicken pot pie, chili, crab cakes, flatbread pizza, meatloaf, sweet & sour meatballs, ... even cheesecake... are accompanied by tantalizing full-color illustrations and clear graphics that show how large a 100 calorie portion of what each recipe would look like.
Mind you, the suggested serving size is often larger than 100 calories. The idea is that if you know what 100 calories of a recipe looks like, you can choose to eat, say, a 400 calorie breakfast, a 500 calorie lunch, and a 600 calorie dinner, while still leaving room for three 1000 calorie snacks throughout your day.
The The Perfect Portion Cookbook also offers:
- culinary tips
- nutrition "tricks" for better-for-you ingredients
- information on calorie goal-planning
- a seven day suggested meal plan of perfect portions
- lists of 10o-calorie portions of protein, carbohydrate, raw vegetable, cooked vegetable, fruit, dairy snacks, sauces & condiments, and fats to make snack and sides planning easier
- ideas for balanced snacks as well as grab & go ones
- ideas for burning calories and meeting success at tipping the scales
Thus, The Perfect Portion Cookbook proves a well-rounded, helpful cookbook which invites you to enjoy perennial favorites while making portion control easy.
How Perfect is the The Perfect Portion Cookbook?
If you eat a pretty traditional American diet, love comfort foods, and seek recipes tweaked to make such foods a bit healthier and easier to apportion, The The Perfect Portion Cookbook is for you.
If you love cookbooks with glossy pages and beautiful full-color photographs, The Perfect Portion Cookbook may also be for you.
However, if, like me, you have folks with special dietary needs in your home, The Perfect Portion Cookbook may prove for better browsing than for actual use. For, I have to be honest. In our our home, we have a several who eat gluten- and casein-free, one who is vegetarian, and one who is moving toward a nutritarian diet, so many of the recipes included in the cookbook were simply not ones that would work in our kitchen without major adaptations. That said, I like the concept of the book for others and plan to happily gift our review copy of The Perfect Portion Cookbook forward to someone who can utilize it more than us. For I know many who would love it!
I also will add that if the authors of The Perfect Portion Cookbook ever make a special diets cookbook with a similar format - tantalizing photographs, culinary tips, helpful lists, easy graphics for portion planning, etc. - I would love to see it! For me, such a cookbook would be ideal. For you, The Perfect Portion Cookbook may be!
