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Fixing Fast Food
Cookbook Remakes Fast Food in a Low-Fat Way
By Jenn Director Knudsen
About four years ago, professional chef Devin Alexander wrote a column for Muscle & Fitness Magazine that took a burger from a popular fast-food restaurant and remade it, keeping its taste intact while ridding it of tons of calories and fat grams.
Readers responded very positively to Alexander's burger remake. In fact, one reader recommended she write a book filled with such recipes.
And so she did. The result was Fast Food Fix: 75+ Amazing Recipe Makeovers of Your Fast Food Restaurant Favorites (Rodale, 2006).
The cookbook's recipes emulate – from portion size to flavor – 75 dishes from fast-food chains, with one big exception. Her burgers, pizzas, wraps, fries, pastries and sauces are dramatically lower in fat than those well-loved fast-food classics from popular restaurants including McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Cinnabon, Starbucks, El Pollo Loco and many others.
Alexander says in an interview from her Los Angeles condo that one person observing her work in her well-equipped kitchen told her, "You're not a chef; you're a mad scientist!"
Alexander says that once a publisher accepted her book proposal – a mere two weeks after submitting it – her first reaction was elation, followed by panic.
She'd wake nights, wondering if she really could deliver on her promise to turn high-fat and highly craved items into more healthy and identically yummy treats. She worked constantly to achieve the expectations set forth in her proposal.
According to one of the converted, Alexander quite possibly surpassed expectations.
"The Cinnabon Classic Cinnamon Roll is my favorite recipe," says Heather Elizabeth Haque, an at-home mom and owner of a new hair-bow business in Yardley, Pa. "It does take time, but [Alexander's] directions are very explicit and right on target. I was amazed at the results; the rolls not only looked like the real deal, but they tasted excellent."
