Culinary blogs and Web sites are
cropping up across the Internet,
offering food for thought and
something scrumptious for every
cook and reader.
WRITTEN BY LYNNE KONSTANTIN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHUCK MELDS
Far right: In her online blog
and New York Times
best-selling cookbooks. Lisa
[Alen. a.k.a. Hungry Girl,
che olia Rightl
shares her favorite
ingredients to create
guilt-free recipes that taste
great but are low in fat
Sul% rce
MAcocci; far
50 roods
Soo Crave
and calories. Right: Planet
Hungrywood Sweet &
Cap'n Crunchy Chicken
(234 calories per serving)
and Woohoo Waffle Stack
(105 calories for the whole
stack) are among the recipes
included in Li:lien's just-
n
1E1 II 101 Eil
released Hungry Girl Chew
the Right Thing recipe cards.
nts
In this age of the Internet, online
readers can find blogs of every nature.
Some are helpful; others not so much.
Among the former is a crop of culinary
blogs, offering musings and recipes on
everything from Cooking 101 to living
a vegan lifestyle to all cupcakes, all the
time. Many are helpful, entertaining
live-action cookbooks written by pro-
fessional writers who double as experi-
enced cooks. And many have a unique
hook that attracts thousands of devoted
followers, hanging on every written
word and scrumptious concoction like
an addiction. Which, most of us know,
food is.
So Platinum took a look at many of
the hundreds of culinary blogs out there
P10 •
JANUARY 2010 •
platinum
and chose a few of our favorites to share
with our own readers. Bon appetit!
HUNGRY GIRL
(hungry-girl,com)
If you've ever been to a Weight
Watchers meeting, chances are you've
come across that attendee who has tons
of tips for getting to eat what you want
in a weight-conscious, healthy way.
Lisa Lillien is that woman times 1,000.
She's your favorite foodie friend, who
knows all the most delicious ways to eat
healthfully and weight consciously and
is thrilled to share her secrets with you.
So thrilled, in fact, that in May 2004,
Lillien, 43, launched her Hungry Girl
daily e-mail service with approximately
150 subscribers.
Today, the service sends a daily
guilt-free recipe to the inbox of approxi-
mately 900,000 subscribers and employs
11 full-time staffers who have helped
Lillien develop her 1,000 plus-and-
growing recipes. She has authored two
New York Times best-selling books,
2008's Hungry Girl Recipes and Survival
Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the
Real World (St. Martin's Press; $17.95)
and 2009's Hungry Girl 200 Under 200:
200 Recipes Under 200 Calories (St.
Martin's Press; $19.95). In December,
she released Hungry Girl Chew the Right
Thing: Supreme Makeovers for 50 Foods
You Crave (St. Martin's Press; ($16.99), a
brilliant and easy-to-use 50-recipe-card
deck of some of Lillien's most ingenious
and popular makeover recipes (low-cal
versions of high-cal restaurant favorites).
In addition, she maintains her Web
site, hungry-girl.com , where she dis-
penses advice on questions from read-
ers (what to eat while on vacation),
recommends her favorite products for
cooking substitutes and, of course, offers
hundreds of recipes. "I'm more of a cook
than a chef," explains Lillien. "And more
of a mad scientist than even a cook,
I think." Case in point: Among the
recipes in her collections are Chocolate
Marshmallow Madness Cupcakes (109
calories), Fettuccine Hungry Girlfredo
Veggie Explosion (151 calories, made
with Tofu Shirataki noodle substitute)