Dead Celebrity Cookbook - P 2012
Start off the new year with some new recipes. Three recent cookbooks offer hilarious and healthy options for people resolved to cook at home.
Those looking to lose weight will like The Carblovers Diet Cookbook, which offers carb-sensible diet recipes. Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s Deliciously G-Free cookbook offers help to people like her who have been diagnosed with celiac disease. For those seeking something offbeat, Daily Show contributor Frank DeCaro has collected the favorite recipes of more than 140 deceased celebrities in The Dead Celebrity Cookbook.
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Check out The Hollywood Reporter’s rundown of these new cookbooks below:
The Dead Celebrity Cookbook – A Resurrection of Recipes from More Than 145 Stars of Stage and Screen by Frank DeCaro (HCI, 384 pages, $19.95)
Sure, any living celebrity can write a cookbook, but it takes a certain kind of genius to put together a book of dead celebrity recipes. Inspired by a dead celebrity-themed party, DeCaro, the former Daily Show movie critic, collected the best recipes from well-known deceased Hollywood stars, including Lucille Ball, Dean Martin, Michael Jackson, the Golden Girls (minus Betty White, of course), and John Wayne.
The book is cleverly organized into witty chapters like “I Lunch Lucy,” “The Supper Under The Stars” (Star Trek), “Monkeying Around in the Kitchen” (Planet of the Apes), and “Thank You For Feeding a Friend” (Golden Girls) that group the recipes around a theme. Other chapters are devoted to Batman, sitcom moms, rockers and the Rat Pack.
The recipes themselves are often hilarious, ranging from the risqué (Star Trek‘s Yvonne DeCarlo’s Exotic Chicken Ecstasy) to the oddball (Gloria Swanson‘s Potassium Broth). Then there’s Dean Martin‘s Burgers and Bourbon, which is just hamburger meat mixed with bourbon.
The Dead Celebrity Cookbook is hands down the funniest cookbook you’ll read this year.
The CarbLovers Diet Cookbook: 150 delicious recipes that will make you slim… for life! by Ellen Kunes and Frances Largeman-Roth (Oxmoor House, 336 pages, $29.95)
This new book from the editor and nutrition director at Health magazine features 150 easy, delicious, and carb-friendly dishes for a registered dietician-approved diet plan to help carb lovers lose as much as 12 pounds in a month.
In addition to the recipes, the cookbook offers sensible advice on carb-healthy eating, including information about understanding the difference between regular carbs and carbs packed with resistant starch that help burn calories, basic cooking tips and grab-and-go options for when cooking is not an option.
The authors also recruited some well-known celebrity chefs to contribute diet-approved recipes to the volume. Wolfang Puck offers his barbecue chicken. The Food Network’s Guy Fieri provides his spinach-tomato pasta shells and prosciutto, pear, and blue cheese sushi comes from the kitchen of Cat Cora, the Iron Chef America host.
Ellen Kunes, Health’s editor-in-chief, and Frances Largeman-Roth, a registered dietician, bring a lot of experience to their healthy eating advice. The two collaborated on 2010’s best-selling The CarbLovers Diet. Largeman-Roth previously wrote Feed the Belly: The Pregnant Mom’s Healthy Eating Guide. Kunes helped found O, The Oprah Magazine and was the editor-in-chief of Redbook.
Deliciously G-Free: Food So Flavorful they’ll Never Believe It’s Gluten-Free by Elisabeth Hasselbeck (Ballantine, 288 pages, $30)
Growing up in a family where everyone came together at the dinner table, Elizabeth Hasselbeck savored the signature meatball, lasagna, and ziti dishes of her grandmother and great-grandmother, and the pierogies of her father’s heritage. But she often felt sick and unhealthy.
It was only when she was in the Australian Outback in 2001 for Survivor and subsisting on a starvation diet that she realized her problem might be with her diet. When she returned to the U.S., Hasselbeck was diagnosed with celiac disease, an autoimmune disease that causes people to be intolerant of the glutens found in wheat and other grains.
Now The View co-host has written Deliciously G-Free, a gluten-free cookbook for the more than two million Americans who suffer from the disease.
Hasselbeck aims to show that gluten free doesn’t have result in bland or uninteresting food. She’s also trying to show how easy it is to cook for someone with celiac in a household of healthy people–neither Hasselbeck’s husband, former NFL quarterback Tim Hasselbeck, or her three children has celiac.
The book offers more than 100 gluten-free recipes, ranging from breakfast to lunch to dinner. Some of the inventive gluten-free options include French toast with caramel rum banana, mac and cheese, buttermilk chicken, and chocolate cupcakes. She even managed to rework her grandmother’s classic spaghetti and meatballs into a gluten-free version that everyone can enjoy.
Hasselbeck opens up about her story dealing with celiac, from getting diagnosed to teaching her family about the disease, and shares suggestions about what to stock in your kitchen and how to store foods to prevent cross-contamination in a mixed-use kitchen–Hasselbeck’s own kitchen is only about 60 percent gluten-free.
For anyone dealing with Celiac disease or curious about it, Deliciously G-Free is a great starting point.
