Review of Cooking Light

The staff at Cooking Light (or their summer intern) asked us to review the redesign of their magazine. We're not a real target audience for the publication?but we know a lot of people who are big fans, and more who should be.

We'll start with full disclosure. One of us works occasionally as a professional design critic. So let's get the bad news over first. Visually, it's a little busy. Ok, a lot busy. We understand that the readers asked for a photo of every recipe, but that?s why they're reading the magazine, not creative directing it. Personally, we'd tone down the section-appropriate design too. Several times we were halfway through a recipe when we realized it was an advertisement. That shouldn't happen.

But who really cares? One of our favorite cookbooks is a Burmese pamphlet that looks like a comic book gone tragically wrong. It says, with a straight face, that the Burmese prefer cooking with wood fires because they provide handy brands to whack each other with when quarrels arise. And the recipes are wonderful.

The good news is that Cooking Light is busy for a reason: it's trying to pack as much value as possible into its pages. Everything is geared towards providing lots of recipes and tools like shopping lists that organize the mass into something useful. You can't say you're not getting bang for your buck. It'd take you months to cook through one issue.

Recipes themselves? If you're kicking out 100 recipes for a really broad audience, they're not all going to be gems. The good thing is the intent: they really run the gamut. A few are quite sophisticated?smoked mussels, windowpane potato chips, and homemade ricotta, for example. Some are dead simple. There's the predictable lightening up of fatty American classics (oven chicken parmesan and light mac and cheese) and perhaps too many restaurant-inspired, meat -with-relish-type dishes that cost too much and aren't to our taste. But happily, the bulk of it is drawn from interesting cuisines around the world. Morocco, Korea, Japan?and they're not afraid to suggest ingredients that you won't find in your local supermarket (Himalayan salt blocks, anyone?).

Personally, we'd change almost every recipe?but that's our sickness, not theirs. We redo Gordon Ramsay's recipes and almost certainly make them worse in the process. There's also an enormous difference between writing an amateur cooking blog that a couple of hundred people read for free, and crafting a magazine for a large, paying audience. They have to tend towards a neutral palette?we can blast everything with chipotles and Sriracha, and there's no downside.

From a selfish standpoint, we still wonder why cooking publications so rarely address the central problem for a cost-conscious cook: what to do with a fridge that's full of stuff bought and half-used for something else. Why not take five ingredients and make a few nights' worth of completely different meals out of them? Or do a feature on using up the raw ingredients you have lying around from other meals? (To be fair, they did have a section called "Easy Cooking," that started with a single ingredient and gave you several dishes. But they all required so many different ingredients?three kinds of bread alone?that it doesn't really fit.)

In that vein, we thought we'd offer up a couple of recipes that are light, healthy, and use stuff you would probably have leftover if you made some of their recipes. See below.