Hungry Girls' holiday diet cards; Rachel Ray's 'Make

Haven’t joined the ranks of iPhone users with an app that links to recipe sites such as epicurious.com, giving access to more than 30,000 food or drink recipes while you’re at the supermarket or on the train?

Recipe decks just might be the next best thing. Popular cooking-world personalities like Rachael Ray and “Hungry Girl” Lisa Lillien are just two of the cookbook authors who have put recipes in carry-around card form.

Lillien offers holiday-season help in her “Hungry Girl: Chew the Right Thing” deck (St. Martin’s Press, $17) with “supreme makeovers for 50 foods you crave.” Consider such figure-friendly fair as “Amazing Ate-Layer Dip” at 105 calories per serving; Sassy SouthWestern Egg Rolls, 181 calories for three; or the 82-calorie Raspberry Mocha Swappuccino.

Lillien, founder of the hungry-girl.com website and known for adding high-fiber cereal to her favorite dishes, includes lots of sweet snacks, drinks and fun foods like pizza, noodle dishes, nachos and chicken fingers, which she coats with Cap ’n Crunch cereal and bakes.

The addition of fresh fruit cuts calories and boosts nutrition for some breakfast and snack recipes, with at least two snacks made by adding canned pumpkin to cake or brownie mix. (For her 181-calorie brownie muffins, add a 15-ounce can of pumpkin to devil’s food cake mix, omit the other ingredients and bake in a 12-cup muffin tin for 20 minutes at 400 degrees.)

‘DELISH DISHES’ Ray’s “Make Your Own Take Out” (Random House, $15) is a scaled-down recipe card-holder with tabs that identify options by cuisine. Categories: Thai, Chinese, Indian, pizza, burgers and “sammies” and Tex-Mex.

Ray streamlines a variety of ethnic dishes, avoiding less common ingredients, such as lemongrass or galangal in Thai dishes, that might require a trip to the gourmet market or Asian grocery.

The recipes, designed to be on the table in 30 minutes, include options such as honey-nut chicken sticks, Thai pizza, bacon and creamy ranch burgers, and sweet and spicy pineapple pork.

FOODIE FLASHCARDS
Want to know more about spices or coffees or wine? Ghigo Press offers a deck of reference cards on each of the topics. The company also makes educational wall calendars ($13.95) on the topics and wine grape posters ($13.95).

Each $15.95 card set includes 45 photo cards with facts and, in some cases, recipes.
Spice: Each spice card details the history of a spice, its origin, with dishes and wines that pair well with its flavor.

Coffee: The coffee cards explore the many coffees of the world with instructions for making them.

Vinifera: Cards for wine-lovers contain descriptions, stories and classic pairings of the “world’s great wine grapes,” including less well-known varieties such as carignan, dolcetto, primitivo and viura.