September Meeting - Copycat Theme Pictures and Recipes

We started the evening with an appetizer plate of T.G.I. Friday's Potato Skins from the book Top Secret Recipes by Todd Wilbur. These were made slightly lighter per serving by using half the butter, substituting low fat sour cream and cheddar for the higher fat ingredients and by using 6 small potatoes instead of 4 large ones. Potatoes, butter, bacon, cheddar, sour cream and chives ... how bad could it be?

- Rebecca


We moved onto California Pizza Kitchen's Sedona White Corn Tortilla Soup. It's a tomato-based soup which automatically makes it "light". Despite the name of the soup, I unfortunately forgot to buy the corn tortillas that go into the soup at the beginning of the recipe, so I suppose I unintentionally made it even lighter by omitting the fried tortilla pieces. The soup turned out well and was super easy. I thought it looked beautiful in Kim's soup bowls.

- Christine




The Red Lobster Cheddar Biscuit recipe can be found here.

I found two recipes for similar cookies, one in Eating Well and the other in Cooking Light. I used the recipe from cooking light as I liked the marshmallow filling better, but I added more cocoa powder and switched 1/2 cup all purpose flour with 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour to add a little fiber and nutty taste. I also reduced the salt to approx. 1/2 teaspoon as it seemed salty at the full 1 teaspoon called for. Finally, I could not find non-fat buttermilk, so I used low-fat. I thought the cookies came out well and I got a couple of good tips from Kim and I think Rebecca on things to do when upping the cocoa powder - remove an equivalent amount of flour to keep it from getting too dry, and using wheat flour - someone said you might need to add more liquid to compensate for this, if I recall correctly.

This was the first time I made marshmallow as well. This was a great item for me to step out of my comfort zone with and I really enjoyed making the cookies.
- Lauren

September dinner - Copycat Theme

Cooking Light published a light version of Moon Pies in their July 2008 issue, which gave us the idea to do an entire dinner devoted to lighter versions of restaurant favorites. It sounded like a great idea and it was a lot of fun, but who knew it would be such a challenge?

The first difficulty I had deciding which restaurant recipe I liked enough to want to clone. I just don’t eat out at all that often. And usually we go to little hole-in-the-wall type of places where no one has developed copycat versions of their dishes. The next problem was finding something that was healthy - most restaurant recipes are not known for being healthy!

When I came across El Pollo Loco's chicken recipe, I knew that was what I wanted to make. I haven’t eaten it in a number of years, but I do remember really enjoying it when my mom brought it home for dinner. My mom was not one to regularly allow fast food for dinner, but it was definitely a step above the usual fast food burgers and fries. Grilled/broiled chicken can be made reasonably healthy so it also met that requirement. I found two clones on Recipezaar: one from Todd Wilbur's Top Secret Recipes Lite and another one on that was not as light. I ended up combining the recipes for a disappointing result. The Lite recipe called for marinating in citrus juices/spices and yellow food coloring. The food coloring was a complete turn off. The other recipe called for basting the meat while it was in the broiler, which seemed too labor intensive. In the end, I used the basting sauce recipe to marinate my chicken for several hours and cooked it mostly according to the directions contained in the non-lite recipe.

I served the chicken with Trader Joe’s Truly Handmade low-fat sun dried tomato and habanero flour tortillas, salsa (El Torito clone), lettuce and sour cream. The chicken did not come out nearly as flavorful as I remember, but it was reasonably good with the accompaniments :)


El Pollo Loco clone from Todd Wilber's Top Secret Recipes Lite

Non-light El Pollo Loco clone


El Torito Pico de Gallo