cover image Fresh Start: Great Low-Fat Recipes, Day-By-Day Menus--The Savvy Way to Cook, Eat, and Live

Fresh Start: Great Low-Fat Recipes, Day-By-Day Menus--The Savvy Way to Cook, Eat, and Live

Julee Rosso. Crown Publishers, $30 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-517-70278-9

In a lengthy introduction, Rosso (Great Good Food) gives out all sorts of sound--if not revolutionary--advice for eating healthfully. Recommendations include increasing flavor while decreasing fat, consuming fewer animal products and basing one's diet on complex carbohydrates. Four weeks' worth of menus and recipes follow and comprise the body of the book, which seems to lack cohesiveness and to run in many, sometimes contradictory, directions. The daily menu format itself counters the flexibility that Rosso advocates, while the pages, chockablock with recipes, nutritional analyses, menus, charts, sidebars, statistics and illustrations, are more confusing than lively. A box explaining nutritional labeling advises, ""Pay close attention to serving size. It may be larger than a pyramid portion or so small it's ridiculous."" But in the two-page spread on dips, nutritional analysis is given per one-teaspoon serving. Rosso gathers such useful information as charts listing food values for frozen desserts and common bread spreads, and offers valuable everyday suggestions, as the recipe for a multi-purpose Nonfat Blend (blended nonfat plain yogurt blended with nonfat cottage cheese) that will keep in the fridge for a week. But in general the unexceptionable recipes are familiar, e.g., Pasta Primavera (sauced mainly with the water used to steam the vegetables), White Lightning Chicken Chili, Silver Dollar Corn Cakes and Orange Custard. Major ad/promo; author tour.(May)