Skinny Bitch in the Kitch

I first received Skinny Bitch in the Kitch, the cookbook follow up to the New York Times bestseller Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, as a gift. Someone thought she was terribly clever in giving it to me, I can't fathom why. The smash hit offers advice on healthy eating and lifestyle, presenting the facts in an in-your-face manner: "you're ready to hear the truth: you cannot keep shoveling the same crap in your mouth every day and expect to lose weight." Written as a guide to help women to make intelligent and educated decisions about food, the book received critical acclaim for its smart-mouthed approach and even raised a few eyebrows.

I have to admit, when my friend Amanda first read the book years ago, proudly touting her new decree to live a nutritious lifestyle, I was skeptical. I thought, "who has the time to substitute baking ingredients for prunes - I don't want to eat baby food - or Toffuti in half the things I eat? Who can afford it?" Now that I'm embarking upon the world of vegan baking for my dairy-free diet, I've learned that it's actually easier than one would think to make the switch. You just have to acquire the taste for the unfamiliar foods, and start substituting the healthier alternatives into your menu plans gradually. First try soy milk, then experiment with vegan cookies, and over time you will learn to like it. Cooking with primarily vegetables and whole grains (and of course fresh and dried fruit as my all-time favorite snack foods) ultimately makes you feel better in the longrun. And the most important thing here, I want to stress, is not how you look but how you feel. Feeling fresh and energized every day beats the crummy, bloated-I-just-ate-cheese-fries-and-funnel-cake feeling. That's the ultimate point of Skinny Bitch, for me.

Yet Skinny Bitch received considerable backlash from women's rights groups who read into the controversial title and weight loss theme throughout the book, arguing that it's anti-feminist to indulge in one's appearance this way. A male-governed society has constructed the expectations for women to be slender and thus they starve themselves to meet their unrealistic ideals, and this book only fuels the fire, outraged feminists argued. But what about those of us that want to be healthy not to please men, but for our own personal benefit and well-being? Am I any less a feminist because I choose to eat salads rather than adopt a screw-the-world-I'll-eat-a-cheesesteak mentality? I say live for yourself, (which for me includes vegetables,) and once and a while indulge for yourself, and ultimately you'll be as healthy as you want to be.

So I've started trying recipes from the cookbook Skinny Bitch in the Kitch: Kickass Recipes for Hungry Girls Who Want to Stop Cooking Crap (and Start Looking Hot!) because I was looking for tasty vegan baking recipes - dessert should still taste good without butter in it, I say - not because I have weight loss ambitions. So far I've found the recipes to be really good. I tried the carrot cake recipe with my own twist, mini carrot cake muffins, iced with Tofutti cream cheese frosting, and the resounding agreement from my taste-testers was they were really yummy. The secret is apple sauce as a natural sweetener and binding agent - so good. A dessert that is primarily fruit and vegetables (apple sauce and grated carrots) as the main ingredients, which is actually satisfying? How can you not?