Ingrid Hoffmann Talks Healthy Lifestyle Tips

Getting Ingrid Hoffmann to slow down isn’t easy. The bubbly, Colombian-American host of Simply Delicioso on the Cooking Channel and Delicioso on Univision also has a weekly spot on that channel’s Despierta America. She writes a monthly column for Delta Sky Magazine. She is readying a colorful Latin America-inspired line of cookware, kitchen gadgets, and accessories for launch in the late summer/early fall of 2013. Working around all these commitments, Hoffmann makes guest appearances on popular talk, cooking shows, such as ABC’s The Taste, and does demonstrations at food, wine and spirits festivals.

It’s enough to make you want to sit down and take a deep breath. Not that she does—when we recently got her on the phone for a chat, we asked her one question and didn’t have to prompt her with another one for 30 minutes. Hoffmann is as vibrant and energetic via technology as she is on television.

But slow down she did when writing her newly released cookbook, Latin D’Lite: Delicious Latin Recipes with a Healthy Twist, that, like Ingrid’s show, has a Spanish-speaking edition, Latin D’Lite: Deliciosas Recetas Latinas con un Toque Saludable. In fact, it took her three-and-a-half years of writing and testing before she was satisfied with the results.

“I’m not one of those chefs who puts out a cookbook every year, who’s not doing it by themselves,” she says. “Even when my team is telling me that I need a product out there. It’s about taking the time to do it right. For me, the most fun of what I do is creating recipes and tinkering with them. We test and re-test, then it goes out to a professional kitchen and comes back with comments on it. That way we always know our recipes. It’s the most important thing.”

Hoffmann not only personally tested her recipes while creating the book, she used them to revamp her health—something else she wanted to get right. Diagnosed with an inflammatory illness, the chef “consulted with many doctors, nutritionists. Then I started to do my own thing, to do it by omission. Inflammation is often a reaction to food, so I started to get sugar out of my diet as much as possible,” she says. “It brought me back to eating food made from scratch and not out of packages. It’s the philosophy of how my dad always ate—real food as opposed to chemicals that our bodies don’t recognize.”

Hoffmann says, “People ask, ‘Do you eat everything?’ And of course you do, you always say you eat and eat. And then they ask, ‘How do you do that and keep your weight?’ After so many of those questions, this is actually it: I don’t believe in diets. It feels like I’m setting myself up for failure. I’ve done it all, too, pills and whatever. And I’m a binger; binges could last for two weeks. This [cookbook] is the result of my quest from my entire tinkering with diets to what actually works.”

So what works? Well, for starters she lightens up notoriously fattening Latin treats by making substitutions. Instead of mayonnaise, she’ll utilize yogurt. Instead of a typical arroz con pollo, a recipe she has in her first book, Simply Delicioso: A Collection of Everyday Recipes with Recetas Favoritas con Sabor Latino, she’ll make it with brown rice and three times more vegtables. “Also, no lard. So you’re still having your chicken and rice but it’s cleaner.”

In addition, there are also what she calls “binge recipes” in the book. “The idea is that you eat healthy for five days and then take two binge meals per week,” she says. “So most of the time, I have chicken or fish for lunch and feel that I’m good. But I don’t believe one can live on grilled chicken and salad. For a binge meal, I can have a mega-burger with fries and not feel terrible about it. Sometimes you gotta have it. Balance is the key.”

To keep yourself on track for those five days, she notes, planning is mandatory. Have a well-stocked freezer and pantry. Use a pressure cooker. Make double batches—it’s the same shopping, prep and clean-up time—and freeze half for another meal. Get your starches from tubers; they don’t need to be fried to be delicious.

Hoffmann’s also not above the microwave: Often, for breakfast on weekdays when she’s running late, she’ll whip three egg whites in a mug, scissor in some pimientos (really, with scissors), throw in frozen spinach, and pop it in the microwave for a minute. She might have to eat it in the car—such is her schedule—but it’s better for her than the toast and jam in which she formerly indulged.

“The majority of the this book is about real food. Real food that fills you up, gives you nutrition,” she continues. “It’s going back to how we used to eat. We didn’t know about the TV dinner and the children’s menu. We sat and had lunch and dinner at the table. Ask yourself: Did it have a mother? Did it come out of the ground? If the answer is no, don’t take it home.”

With such a passionate mission statement, you might expect that Latin D’Lite is targeted towards raw, organic vegans who are perpetually on a diet. But Hoffmann says her recipes speak to everyone and are simply about eating healthy and, at the same time, not depriving yourself. In fact, her book doesn’t even reference calories, and the drinks chapter, she points out, is not low calorie.

“A lot of the desserts are done light,” she admits, “but I prefer to drink my calories. The alcohol is something I’m gonna splurge on. If I know I’m going to be drinking alcohol, then I make sure I also don’t have a binge meal that day. But I could not live if you told me I could never have another glass of wine. ”

We hear you, Chef. And with such an inviting manual to follow, we’ll have no problem obeying.