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
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