Product Description

Join Bethenny on the Skinnygirl journey and learn how to cook
fearlessly and make the food you love that fits your lifestyle

In her New York Times bestseller Naturally Thin, Bethenny Frankel shares her ten real-life rules for enjoying healthful natural foods and escaping the diet trap. Now, in The Skinnygirl Dish, Bethenny joins you in the kitchen and shows you how to stop the "cooking noise" and put an end to the anxiety about how and what to cook and eat. The Skinnygirl dishes on how anyone can:

• Get in touch with your "inner chef" and make the Skinnygirl philosophy yours

• Use Bethenny's list of kitchen essentials and the core concept of using what you have at hand to enjoy creating healthy, satisfying meals

• Take your basic cooking skills to the next level with practical tips for saving time, money, and sanity

• Make personalized gourmet recipes from celebrity chefs, including Bobby Flay and Top Chef stars Lee Anne Wong, Hosea Rosenberg, and Ariane Duarte

• Light up -- and lighten up -- holidays and special occasions with tips and recipes for throwing the perfect, stress-free party

Over sixty recipes become more than a thousand recipes with Bethenny's "Use What You Have" substitution charts. Enjoy Breakthrough Breakfasts, Delicious Dinners, Simple Snacks, To-Die-For Desserts, and Skinnygirl Cocktails, plus tips to turn almost any dish into a vegetarian delight. With the famous wit and real-world sensibility that made her a breakout star, Bethenny reveals her kitchen adventures and inspires readers to cook the Skinnygirl way with taste and style.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43080 in Books
• Published on: 2009-12-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Bethenny Frankel began her TV career in 2005 when she earned the title of ?break-out star? on NBC's Martha Stewart Apprentice and finished as runner-up in the competition. After graduating from The Natural Gourmet Institute for Health & Culinary Arts in New York, Bethenny created a company that offers a line of wheat, egg and dairy free baked goods. She now highlights her healthy lifestyle as one of the stars of The Real Housewives of NYC on Bravo and will soon have her own spin-off reality show. Her recipes and health tips can be read monthly as a contributor and TV expert for Health magazine, and Pepperidge Farm named Bethenny their new spokesperson for Pepperidge Farm Baked Naturals. Bethenny currently resides in New York City with her dog, Cookie.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

I have no food in this house. I'm standing in front of the open refrigerator and I don't have the slightest idea what to make for dinner. There is nothing to eat! I hate to cook. I don't know how to cook. I don't want to cook. I worked all day and I'm exhausted. If I cook, I'll have a huge mess to clean up. The last place I want to go right now is the supermarket. My kids are whining at me because they are hungry. I'm totally overwhelmed. I'm so uninspired. I don't have time to be healthy. Cooking is just too hard. It's too much to deal with. Maybe I'll just order a pizza....

Stop right there, Skinnygirl!Calm down, breathe, and think thisthrough. You do have food in the house, even if you don't immediately see a pre-made meal as you stare into the refrigerator. You don't have to fear, hate, or dread cooking. And you don't have to call the pizza guy.

In my first book, Naturally Thin, I showed you how to stop the food noise and begin listening to your food voice. In this book, I'll show you how to stop the cooking noise and listen to your inner chef. Cooking can be stressful if you make it stressful, but it doesn't have to be. Instead, you can learn to feed yourself well without stressing yourself out.

I don't have time to cook, either. I come home exhausted, too. Sometimes I do order a pizza, but I'll make it special. I'll order the whole-wheat crust (when that's an option) and make a big fresh Greek salad to go with it. Then I let myself really enjoy it. Most of the time, however, I make something. I wouldn't call it cooking as much as it is putting together things I already have in my refrigerator and my pantry. Get creative and the delicious results won't break the bank or make you feel as if you overate.

You have time to be healthy because it doesn't take very much time at all. That's the gist of this book: an end to the anxiety about what and how to eat when you have to cook for yourself and your family.

What to Eat

In Naturally Thin, I shared ten rules for unleashing your inner Skinnygirl and freeing yourself from a lifetime of dieting. As the New York Times best-seller list describes it, the book contains "rules and recipes for escaping the diet trap." That's exactly how I see it. Dieting is a trap, and it had me caught for many years. The point of that book was to set you free with new ideas for how to manage the food in your life.

If you've already read my previous book, you have the tools to be in control no matter how hazardous the situation may be, how stressful or inconvenient your schedule is, how hormonal you are, or how unusual your lifestyle might be. You can handle any pizza moment because you've been building a healthier relationship with food and you are well on your way to being naturally thin for life.

But the question remains: When you are tired, cranky, bored, uninspired, and just plain hungry, what are you going to eat? Naturally Thin brought you here. Now, The Skinnygirl Dish is the next step on your Skinnygirl journey.

I know from the many letters and eâ??mails I receive every day that a lot of you are still working on getting back in touch with your own hunger. I want to help you keep moving in the right direction, toward a realistic idea of what it means to eat like a naturally thin person. In this book, I'll walk you through my kitchen, my cooking philosophy, and the way I put a meal together. I promise you, none of it will be intimidating, difficult, timeconsuming, or expensive. I just don't cook that way. Instead, I've tweaked my favorite comfort foods to make them more in tune with my Skinnygirl lifestyle, and I'll share those secrets with you. Most important, I'll show you how to cook -- not just how to follow a recipe -- so that you can stay inspired to steer clear of heavy habits and embrace thin thoughts every day.

The heart of this book is a new set of tools to teach you how to answer the question: "What am I going to eat?" No, I'm not going to tell you what to eat. If you read Naturally Thin, you know that's not what I do. What I will tell you is how to make something you will like in a way that works with your individual lifestyle. I want to give you the tools to cook fearlessly for yourself, taking risks, being creative, thinking for yourself, and never stressing out again about how to make dinner.

Food is important. Food is pleasure, comfort, community. Food is delicious. It's also one of the most powerful tools you have for building a healthy body and a calm mind. Food can make you strong or weak, energized or depleted, skinny or fat. What you eat can affect your hair, your skin, and your mood. It all depends on your choices. As the old saying goes, you are what you eat. You learned all that in Naturally Thin. For better or for worse, life isn't cookie-cutter. We plan and God laughs, as they say. You and I will continue to make mistakes occasionally -- bad investments, regret, food noise, emotionality regarding food. I still wish I exercised a little more, drank a little less. We 're all human. I don't pretend to be some perfect person with all the answers who is going to transform you into somebody you aren't.

Yet you and I are getting there and feeling freer than ever. Like yoga or anything else challenging, being naturally thin is a practice. You will never be perfect because nobody is perfect, but you are on the path and you are focused. I often give people this bit of business advice: You don't have to know exactly where you are going, as long as you are moving forward.

The Skinnygirl Dish will help you move forward. Throughout this book, I'll occasionally remind you of the ten secrets from Naturally Thin, but I'll include new rules I've learned since I wrote that book, as well as some ideas that didn't quite fit into that book's structure or that I thought would be too much information all at once.

I will also walk you through some of the things I make for myself, telling you how and why I chose to create those meals. There will be no intimidation in my kitchen, I swear to you! You will not find duck à l'orange or coq au vin or chateaubriand in this book because, frankly, those are not foods that I or any of my friends ever want to cook or eat at home. When you want some crazy foam mousse or shellacked salmon or beet puree, go visit an expensive fancy restaurant on your anniversary. You won't find those dishes here. I wouldn't even know how to start making them.

I am a natural foods chef. I went to a culinary school that specialized in food and healing with health as a priority, and I certainly can cook delicious food. However, I am not French trained. Bobby Flay would put me to shame with his knife skills and technical experience. Jean-Georges won't be calling me to give him cooking lessons anytime soon, and my plates don't look like pieces of art, even though I like to make them look attractive.

I specialize in figuring out how to make comfort food healthy. I'm talking about chicken pot pie and mashed sweet potatoes, baked ziti and red velvet cupcakes, and banana bread. I play around in my kitchen, taking all of my best friends' favorite foods that they are afraid to eat because they are too fattening and finding a way to make them good investments. Making low-fat guacamole and spinach artichoke dip that only tastes decadent is what I love. These are the foods that people crave, eat, then feel guilty about eating, but I think everybody should be able to enjoy the foods they love without guilt. Cooking should be accessible, tasty, healthy, and quick.

That's why this book is neither a cookbook nor a diet plan. It takes the best parts of both of those kinds of books and puts them together. Every single recipe in this book came from this situation: I was home. I was hungry. I looked in my kitchen to see what I had, and I made something out of it. I never once went to the store and bought every single ingredient for a recipe I wanted to make. This book is about using what you have and making it healthful and delicious. It will teach you how to cook the Skinnygirl way, built on a methodology you can trust. I don't care who you are or how bad a cook you think you are. If you can read, this book can teach you how to cook for yourself.

Your Kitchen, Your Wardrobe

In Naturally Thin, I compared your diet to your bank account. In The Skinnygirl Dish, I want to work from a new metaphor: Food is like your wardrobe. You all know what it's like to stand in front of your closet with the door hanging open and wonder why you have a closetful of clothes and nothing to wear, or why you hate everything you have and can't possibly wear any of it. Maybe you don't even get that far. Maybe you know what it's like to come home after a long day, lie down on the couch, and just dread getting up again and trying to figure out what to wear for an evening out.

Dinner can feel like a comparable situation as you stand in front of your refrigerator and think that you have absolutely nothing you can possibly eat or make or even begin to imagine you could pull out of there for dinner. Maybe you're lying on that same couch after work, thinking there is just no way you can get up and cook dinner.

This book is here to end all that.

My friends tell me that I should have a TV show called What's in Your Kitchen because I can go into anybody's kitchen when they say they have nothing to eat and find enough to make a delicious meal. I could probably do the same thing peeking into someone's closet and find them something to wear, but that's a different book. In this book, I'm going to show you how to work that magic in your kitchen.

To continue my clothing analogy, you need to know what classics to have on hand -- the culinary versions of the black turtleneck, the crisp white shirt, the perfect jeans, the blazer, and the simple black dress. Th...