Skinny Southern: A Cookbook Review

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With her new cookbook Skinny Southern, Georgia private chef Lara Lyn Carter reinvents classic Southern dishes with clean, healthy ingredients.

If you’ve been reading Biscuits & Burlap for long, you know that our passion lies in Southern food. We love the classic ingredients of Southern food… the pecans, the corn, the okra and tomatoes… These Southern staples are close to our hearts. However if you know anything about Southern food, you know it’s not the healthiest. We love to fry things and we believe there’s no such thing as too much butter. We are convinced that a well-balanced meal includes a big helping of pie, cake, or cobbler. So what is a health-conscious Southern girl to do? We try to eat healthy, but.. Grits! Am I right?

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Enter Lara Lyn Carter. This Southern girl knows what I’m talking about. As a Southern chef from Albany, Georgia, she is no stranger to to the greasy, carb-heavy foods that frequent our dinner tables here in the South. Lara Lyn was so busy with filming her cooking show, hosting cooking demonstrations, and having a new baby at 43 (wow!) that she didn’t notice what was happening until it had already happened. She knew she wasn’t the healthiest, but it wasn’t until she saw a picture of herself that she realized how much weight she had gained.

She needed to make big changes in her habits and if she was going to do that, she needed to change her whole brand. Lara Lyn began developing healthy versions of the Southern food she holds so close to her heart and now, she’s bringing us Skinny Southern, a collection of these recipes.

(photo of Lara Lyn courtesy of Familius, LLC)

Skinny Southern is unique because it has quite a mix of different types of recipes. There are your old Southern stand-by’s done in new, healthy ways. Browsing through the book, I found recipes for some of my family favorites like:

• boiled peanuts
• deviled eggs
• shrimp and grits
• gumbo
• oyster stew
• fried green tomatoes
• fried chicken

To make the clean-eating version of these recipes, you’ll need a few ingredients that you might not find in the typical Southern kitchen. Lara Lyn uses items like almond-based cream cheese, coconut milk/sugar, almond flour, and olive oil mayo to not only lighten up the recipes, but also to make many of them gluten-free and even paleo!

We can’t promise all our recipes are skinny, but we can promise they’re Southern. Click here to sign up for our weekly newsletters.

You won’t just find healthy twists on old classics in Skinny Southern, though. You’ll also find inventive recipes that Lara Lyn cooked up all on her own like Cinnamon and Spice Chicken Wings, Arnold Palmer Quail, and Pumpkin Fudge.

Click here to order your own copy of Skinny Southern. We’re keeping ours all to ourselves!

With Skinny Southern, Lara Lyn Carter proves that you can stay true to those Southern roots and still give your body what it needs.

We followed up our review by making Lara Lyn’s Pecan-Crusted Catfish and absolutely loved it!

The product(s) featured in this post was provided free of cost to me. Please note that, as always, any personal opinions reflected in this post are my own and have not been influenced by the sponsor in any way. Some of the posts on this site, such as this one, contain an affiliate link. This means we may get paid a small commission if you purchase the product or services.

Waiting on your copy of Skinny Southern to get there? Check out these light recipes from Biscuits & Burlap in the meantime!

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