The basic concept behind Skinny Spices is that eating on a diet doesn’t have to be boring, if you just use the right seasonings to spice things up.  The book includes 50 spices blends you can mix up and have on hand, with several recipes to make use of each blend.

The Layout

This edition makes good use of the digital format to link between spice blends and their accompanying recipes.  If you want to jump straight to a particular one, this works very well.  However, maybe I’m just too linear in my thinking or too unaccustomed to ebooks, but I found the layout difficult to use for getting a good overview of the book’s contents.

I expected a Table of Contents, followed by all of the spice blends, followed by all of the recipes that use the spice blends, with links inserted where appropriate.  I’m not actually sure where in the book the recipes themselves are located, because all I saw for pages and pages and pages (after the introduction) was a variety of link arrangements.  So I would say that the user-friendliness of the text depends a lot on how you intend to use it.

The Content

So what about the content?  Again, it depends entirely on what you’re looking for.  There’s an introductory section that discusses diet (of the weight-loss variety).  As most of my readers know, I am not personally looking to lose weight.  But I see value in a book like this because healthy food is always the best way to eat, whether your weight is ideal or not!  I hope you’ll also recognize, though, if you’ve been reading here for any length of time, that I do not believe low-fat, low-salt, low-whatever-new-diet-fad-they-come-up-with is a healthy way to eat.  (Natural) fat is good for you, and there’s no need to be eating dry food to begin with!

Moving on…I didn’t find much that was particularly new and different among the seasoning blends.  However, I’m not new to the world of DIY mixes and spice blends.  If this is not something you’ve been doing for a while, you very well might find a lot here that’s new to you.  I did find a few interesting new options, like the “Jamaican Scorcher Blend.” If you believe in eating “real food” instead of substitutes, there are a few you may want to skip, like the “Butter Baby Blend” that relies on Butter Buds, but most of the blends just simply use classic herbs and spices.

The Recipes

Of course, which recipes you can make use of will be determined by which blends you choose to mix up.  Most seasoning blends offer 2-4 recipes for their use.  (I’m sure creative cooks will find other uses for most of the blends, as well.)  There are also tips sprinkled throughout that offer other meal suggestions and/or ideas for other ways to use the blends.

My Take

As is true for most recipe books, there was not an overwhelming amount of content that I will rush to get into my everyday rotation, but I did glean a handful of recipes I can put to use.  I would have found the book more appealing if the Table of Contents had listed the blends and the recipes in linear order, to allow me to get a good “big picture” view of the contents, and to make it easier to jump to a particular recipe once I already know what I’m looking for.

All in all, this was a good read, but it doesn’t make my list of personal favorites.

Disclosure: The publisher provided me with a copy of this Kindle book to facilitate my review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.