Customer Reviews

500 Low-Carb Recipes: 500 Recipes, from Snacks to Dessert, That the Whole Family Will Love

5 star:		(121)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

The author has lived the diet and through trial and error created simply amazing recipes. Makes it easy to stick to the Low Carb lifestlye

This is by far the BEST collection of low-carb recipes. The recipes are easy to make, and taste great! My family loves the Heroin Wings, and they are not low-carb eaters. This collection helps make the low-carb way of life much easier. Thank you, Dana Carpender!

I have made a few recipes from this book. They are both good and easy. Its a nice change and twist from your normal, meat, eggs and cheese. The author is informative. The book is easy to follow for anyone who is new to cooking or an expert. Even my boyfriend who is not on a low-carb plan enjoyed the receipes. I would recommend this cookbook to low carbers who are in their beginning to mid weight loss fazes. Eat up and enjoy!

Struggling to figure out how to keep to your low-carb diet but still enjoy food (plus feed your family)?

This book is the one you need.

Recipes like Pumpkin Cheesecake (great for breakfast with some bacon on the side, by the way), Vegetable Lasagna (tip: add some strips of zucchini cut longwise with a veggie peeler for faux lasagna noodles), and frittatas keep us feeling happy, full, and not deprived. My family has enjoyed many of these recipes (had to arm-wrestle my 16-year-old nephew for the cheesecake - I finally taught him to make it himself).

Some of the recipes - particularly baked goods - may require some nonstandard ingredients. Most of these are available in health food stores, natural food stores, or, if all else fails, online.

Dana has a breezy, enjoyable writing style that makes you feel like you're in the kitchen with your best friend, and none of the recipes are beyond the average cook.

If you can only get one low-carb cookbook, this is the one to buy!

No way is this book worth $20, or even $14. It's a mish-mosh of recipes quickly thrown together to cash in on the popularity of lo-carb diets. The author is interested in making a few bucks, not in presenting you with good recipes.

Some of the recipes are so basic and low-brow that they reminded me of my first days of cooking as a college student. Others were complete disasters. One of the reasons I bought the book was that it has several recipes for lo-carb breads. I went out and bought all the expensive, hard-to find ingredients and made them carefully according to the recipes. Not one of them was even edible.

I've bought a lot of cookbooks over the years, and still enjoy buying a new one, but I will never buy another cookbook from this author.

I've recently started a "low carb" diet; I'm loosely following the South Beach plan. I'm not a big meat eater and I really love sweets, therfore cutting carbs is proving to be very difficult! I was hoping this recipe book would help me out with some low carb sweet treats. However, I was very disappointed that all of the recipes include Splenda, which is an artificial sweetener. The jury's still out on whether this is a healthy additive, and I'm guessing that it will have the same bad reputation as aspartame as more is learned about it.

I understand that some folks need to cut out sugar for health reasons and therefore replacements like Splenda are better than sugar. But for those who are just vain (like me!) and want to lose a few pounds, I think that Splenda is a bit of a high price to pay for that. So, sadly, there's no "miracle" recipe that allows you to have all of the joy of a sweet treat with none of the pain. Personally, I've decided to cut the carbs as much as I can, but to allow the occassional "sugary" snack.

Although I won't be making use of the dessert recipes (or some of the sauce recipes either that include Splenda), there are many main course and side dish recipes that are Splenda free. I tried my first one this past weekend and it was DELICIOUS...Zucchini Meatloaf Italiano. I have always been quite proud of my traditional meatloaf (made with such evils as ketchup and barbeque sauce!), but I must say, this definitely gave it a run for its money.

The author does a nice job of describing the various "staple" low carb components of her recipe book and I found that to be quite helpful. The recipes are easy to follow and although some of the ingredients may require a trip to a "health food" store, I am not intimidated by them even though I don't consider myself to be terribly skilled in the kitchen.

This book calls for a lot of high-priced specialized ingredients. Some of the things I've made are just plain terrible. Lemon Poppyseed Muffins used almost an entire bottle of lemon extract and a half bottle of poppyseeds...they were so bad I had to throw them out. I also just made the peanut butter protein bars and they are inedible. It's such a waste of pricey ingredients (like the protein powder, nuts, and Splenda). I like the Pecan Sandies but the recipe is flawed. Calls for so much butter that the butter oozed out of the cookies and all over the bottom of my oven. (Burning butter smells terrible!) The recipe also says to spray the pans with cooking spray. There was so much butter and grease that they slid off the cookie sheets and onto the kitchen counter. The recipe works better with half the butter but I still had to wipe the pan down between batches.

Maybe the dinner recipes are better. But from experience the baked goods are lousy.

I also bought The Good Carb Cookbook by Sandra Woodruff and those recipes have works wonderfully.

I had been flirting with buying this book for some time, and after three months of dithering, I took the plunge. This has some great recipes and they are easy to prepare. No matter what low carb plan you are on, this book will fit in with it.
I am a Somersizer and I have allergies; but I don't find it at all difficult to make substitutions or deletions. These recipes are what real people make at home. I have all of Suzanne Somers' books and credit her with a 70 pound weight loss. I will buy every book that she publishes- they are visually beautiful, and have some terrific ideas. But Suzanne's books are the ones I read like novels, and to get ideas from. Somers' recipes are tricky- the directions are not always good at producing the expected results. You sometimes end up going to her web site to find out what others have changed to get the desired results. In some cases, it's more time and more steps.
Even though I am an experienced cook, I like something I know I won't have trouble with. This book is perfect for me and for everyone else. It's everyday food that you can serve to your family and guests with confidence. My husband was flipping through this right after I got it, and he was impressed. He even picked out some recipes for me to make. That's unusual for him! He doesn't usually show any interest in my cookery books. Or in any of my books. The cover is eye-catching and inviting, the writing style is homey, chatty, and informative. If you only buy one low carb book, buy this one.
I also bought her first book, How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet And Lost Forty Pounds. It is a nice companion piece to this book, and very informative. It isn't necessary to have both of the books, but I'm betting that if you buy one, you will want the other. I wish I had bought Dana's books a long time ago. There are some fabulous recipes in every category. Give this book a try, and a place of honor on your book shelves. It's a keeper. I could only give this book 5 stars, but it's definitely a 10.

I returned the book because I found it to be worthless in my kitchen. It might as well be titled "500 Recipes -- 450 of which you already know but I thought I would stick them in here anyhow". I didn't need a recipe for mayonaise or instructions on how to cook shrimp. Instructions on how to make a chef salad?!?!? A whole chapter on different things you can put in an omelet? This book just wasn't worth the money and wasn't worth the space it would take up on my shelf. I was looking for NEW ideas. It might be helpful for someone entering a kitchen for the first time.

I have to say that if you are going to write a cook book, then add pictures of the meals!
Also, people wanting to eat low-carb are obviously hip to the fact that Splenda and other artificial sweeteners, besides Stevia, are horrendously bad for you. This book is not for health conscious people.
I've returned this book.