Lisa Lillien is Hungry Girl, the entrepreneur who turned a daily email blast to friends into a nation-wide nutritional brand that includes cookbooks, TV shows and a partnership with Weight Watchers.“Supersize” is the food-industry buzzword infamously equated with upsized entrees. But when I say that Lisa Lillien, aka Hungry Girl, has supersized her newest cookbook, it’s all good: 650 recipes for guilt-free eating.
“Hungry Girl to the Max!” (St. Martin’s Griffin, $28) hit store shelves Tuesday. Her seventh cookbook takes the recipe exchanges she’s known for – faux fries, egg mugs, jalapeno swappers – and expands on them, as well as including hundreds of new recipes (more than 50 percent of the cookbook).
I recently had the chance to interview her, and I was as excited as if a rock star were calling – well, she is a rock star in the world of Weight Watchers.
A self-proclaimed “mad scientist in the kitchen,” she’s constantly showing her readers how to make substitutions in favorite recipes that will cut calories but not taste. For example, she uses crushed Fiber One cereal as breading in her faux fries. Or she’ll sub a 15-ounce can of pure pumpkin for the eggs and oil in chocolate cake mix in her brownie muffin recipe. Lately, she’s touting the pairing of House Foods’ Tofu Shirataki noodles and Laughing Cow light cheeses for her Fettuccine Hungry Girlfredo dishes.
Lillien said she and her staff worked on this cookbook for a year, but it contains recipes they’ve been developing for seven years.