Small Plate Diet

A couple months ago, my nano-tech engineer brother-in-law, Matt came up with a great new diet and he lost 15 pounds with one simple trick.

He started serving meals on smaller plates.

He'd figured out that he could trick his brain into not noticing that he was serving himself smaller portions. And it worked!

So I got excited when I came across a cookbook Small Plates: Appetizers as Meals by Marguerite Marceau Henderson, published by Gibbs Smith. Henderson has a around 200 recipes for appetizers that pass as very, very satisfying entrees.

The first recipe I made was Calamari with Fingerling Potatoes and Fennel. I picked that it because I just happened to have all the ingredients in my refrigerator. You scoff. Don't.

My husband is such a stickler for following recipes to the "n" degree that we had an extra bulb of fennel languishing around from something he'd made the week before. We had kalamata olives from a Spatulatta cooking demo and fingerling potatoes looked so good at the farmers' market that I had to get some. So all these great ingredients were hanging around, waiting for an opportunity to be turned into something wonderful.

And then I cheated. It was 6 PM. I'd just come back from a meeting downtown and I wasn't about to go out to the store for calamari. So I thawed out some talapia instead. But that's the joy of cooking for me, improvisation.

I baked the talapia separately with a little olive oil and spices. At the same time I was roasting the potatoes, fennel and olives.

The potatoes came out toasty brown, the fennel nearly carmelized, the olives added a salty hit, and the red pepper flakes gave a little heat here and there. My new favorite dish!

Henderson includes some tapas and traditional recipes from Italy. There are all-vegetable dishes, seafood and meat small plates. Inventive salads like Two Melon and Cucumber Mint Salad really peaked my interest.

And I have to applaud her, she not afraid of spices. She uses plenty of herbs, giving one's taste buds a lot of exercise. I find if a dish is spiced well, its richness will satisfy me in a way that mere volume won't.

Take for instance, Coffee and Spice Lamb Kebabs. What a concept! The coffee and spice rub, which includes cinnamon, cumin, allspice and fennel, gives the lamb a wonderful exotic flavor.

So why not try the small plate diet with a little help from Small Plates: Appetizers as Meals?