I'm really proud of myself for knowing what a Blog was before many of my friends did and then getting a chance to write one here at bettycrocker.com.
As a food blogger, I like to look at other food blog sites to see what they are writing about and how their sites are designed. Last week, I had a chance to hear Lisa Lillien speak about her very successful food blog site at Hungry-Girl.com. She has also just written a cookbook titled, Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the Real World. Her goal for the cookbook was to make the recipes delicious but also to keep them low in fat and calories.
After paging through the cookbook and going to her blog site, I realized what makes the Hungry Girl so popular. Lillien has a wonderful sense of humor and doesn't take herself too seriously. For example, one recipe in her cookbook is titled, Fancy-Schmancy Oatmeal. About this recipe she writes, "I love oatmeal. The problem for me is that one serving of oatmeal isn't enough to fill me up (come on—are they SERIOUS?). Adding pumpkin to it makes it way more filling, and it adds some extra fiber as well."
We tested two recipes from her cookbook in our kitchens. One was the Lord of the Onion Rings recipe. To make these baked treats, onion rings are dipped into fat-free liquid egg substitute and then into ground up Fiber One bran cereal. We found that the cereal didn't stick very well to the onions (unless it was very finely ground) and that there wasn't enough of it. Our recommendation would be to double the amount of the cereal and then make it two servings instead of "1 humongous serving".
The other recipe we tried was the Loaded 'n Oated Veggie Pizza. Once again we had a few problems with the recipe. First of all, the crust dough was a bit sticky to work with and there was way too much sauce to spread onto the small-size crust. The recipe tells you to bake the pizza directly on the oven rack but our tester placed the crust with toppings onto a piece of foil before putting it into the oven so the cheese couldn't melt, run off and bake onto her oven bottom. If you like crisp-crust pizzas, you might not be happy with this recipe. But if you are dying for a pizza because you haven't tasted one in awhile and have been living on salads and veggies, this one (with only 231 calories, 2 grams of fat and 11 grams of fiber) is for you. It will really fill you up.
