Southern Living Annual Recipes

Every recipe published by Southern Living in 2004--traditional and seasonal southern recipes, including variations on grits, ribs, grilled specialties, congealed salads, catfish, and many pound cakes--share pages with lighter fare--Braised Tuscan Pork Loin (with cannelini beans), Salmon with Lemon and Olive Oil, and Shrimp with Yogurt-Cucumber Sauce. The dessert favorites for which Southern Living is famous--the pound cakes, including the gorgeous cover feature (Cream Cheese-Coconut-Pecan Pound Cake), the chocolate specialties (like Rudolph's Chocolate Truffle Cake) and the creme brulees, like the Pina Colada Creme Brulee here--continue, but more attention is paid to less fat-laden desserts, such as the Creamy Lime Cakes (individual versions of old-fashioned pudding cakes), and a lower fat Strawberry-Lemon Cheesecake. As the wife of someone who underwent successful triple bypass surgery two years ago, I've long given up the pound cakes with their 254 g. of saturated fat, which is the fat content of the gorgeous-looking pound cake on the cover (which serves ten). Cardiologists recommend that a healthy person eat no more than 20 g. of saturated fat in a DAY, and cardiac patients should limit themselves to only 10 g. of saturated fat per day. Though the Healthy and Light recipes are a relatively small percentage of total (51 recipes in total), they are well tested and delicious, and most of them do not taste "lowfat." Some recipes included among the general recipes are also low-fat, though there are no nutritional values for them listed here to indicate that--only the "light and healthy" recipes include nutritional information. The recipes using yogurt, including Greek tzatziki, yogurt-cucumber sauce for shrimp, yogurt lime sauce for pork, and appetizers using yogurt cheese, all fall into the lower fat category, though they are not listed as such. The Roasted Sweet Onions, the Black Bean Corn Salsa, and some of the pasta recipes are also lower in fat. Including the test kitchen's choices for Best Recipes of 2004, an enhanced Healthy and Light section, Top-Rated Menus, the 2004 Cookoff Winners, a Cooking School Bonus Section, and several indexes--for menus, titles, month-by-month specialties, and a general index--the book is well organized and accessible. Though the recipes tend to be heavy on the fat, and laden with butter, eggs, and cream, they are delicious for those who can afford to eat them. Perhaps someday in the future Southern Living will provide nutritional information for all their recipes to promote awareness of the relationship between saturated fats and heart disease for an audience that is aging and increasingly dependent on healthy cooking. n Mary Whipple

Being Southern born, when I first picked up this book I went looking for things that Grandmother used to cook. In the first few pages I found "Hot-Water Cornbread." Yup! The recipe was right on. To be sure, Grandmother used yellow cornmeal rather than white, but that's OK. And in the recipe says "stir until the batter is the consistency of grits." -- That's southern. Speaking of grits, there are six different dishes cooked with grits. I've only cooked four of those so far. (For you yankees, grits is polenta.) One recipe was not so good, it called for quick cooking grits. No self-respecting southerner would use quick grits. Instead get some good stone ground yellow grits. (Google will give you a lot of choices when you search for "stone ground grits." I've not tried them all, but all that I've tried have been good.) This book is a collection of recipes from Southern Living magazine. They take a pretty wide interpretation of southern including gumbo from Louisiana, some Texas/western dishes, and even some Mexican. As an annual book, this one contains a selection of recipes that were well received by the readers and by the magazine staff. It's a great book.