Stay Slender the Hard Way

Swimsuit season is coming! Not that I care-- I rarely get a chance to swim, and I when I do get to swim, my only preoccupation is making sure that my swimsuit stays UP. I'm super-flat and worried about accidentally flashing my boobs because swimsuit makers assume that we all have enough to keep the top of the suit taut. As long as I won't get charged with public indecency, though, I don't give a flying... fig... about how I look.

The '70s women who were more self-conscious than I, however, might resort to Lean Cuisine: Delicious Recipes for the Healthy Stay-Slender Life (Barbara Gibbons and the Editors of Consumer Guide, 1979).

I'll give you just a taste of the book with a full menu. I'll be extravagant and start with a salad, rather than just the main dish and side.

The title might have made you think I'd accidentally listed dessert first. Banana split! Oh, boy! This is one of the options in the "Sundae Salads" section of the salad chapter, so it is, in fact, a salad. The fact that cottage cheese stands in for the ice cream of a typical salad means even the most dedicated dieter might find it hard to consider this dessert, and it certainly seems more appropriately called a salad than the Jell-O, marshmallow, and whipped cream confections claiming that title in other cookbooks. 

Let's go a bit decadent for the main course, too. How about a big, cheesy pan of lasagna? 

While noodle-less pasta isn't necessarily terrible (The kinds with zucchini in place of noodles aren't so bad.), this has a little layer of scrambled eggs in place of noodles. It's just a mound of eggy cottage cheese with more egg on top, and the plainest, most boring tomato sauce imaginable. (Not even jarred marinara!) On top of having no flavor, this will have no texture-- just a big old pile of allegedly-lasagna-flavored mush. Yum! (You might note that my menu is pretty heavy on the cottage cheese, too, but that's to be expected with '70s diet recipes.)

Since the salad has no actual vegetables and the lasagna only has a little tomato sauce, maybe we should go for a veggie side. 

Yeah-- maybe some broccoli without cottage cheese...

...some broccoli with the saddest mock butter sauce on the planet. I'm not sure how much boiled broccoli is improved by the addition of a watery cornstarch-and-butter-flavored-salt "sauce," but I'm sure that the low-sodium incarnation seasoned only with liquid butter flavoring is even worse.

Let's not despair, though. We can top it all off with a nice dessert.

Fruit juice lightly thickened with a bit of tapioca is a great way to remind yourself that if you're going to blow your carb budget on a dessert, this is a very sad way to do it. I guess it might be worse if you served it out of your sneakers after a workout instead of a nice chilled dessert cup, but even then, it could be only marginally more depressing. 

I know the Lean Cuisine dinners in the freezer case have a bad reputation, but I'd 1000 times rather grab myself one of those than spend my day eating lasagna pudding and tapioca fruit juice.