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Rachel and Barni Alejandro: Spreading the gospel of healthy eating

Marga Deona

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Tis the season to eat, drink, and be merry. With a little help from the Alejandro sisters’ cookbook, guilt-free indulgence might just be around the corner.

SISTER ACT. Sexy Chef is now a book, courtesy of Rachel and Barni Alejandro. Photo by Marga Deona

MANILA, Philippines — It’s almost Christmas, and the holiday festivities are upon us. We all know that the holiday cycle kicks off with a series of gastronomic indulgences and ends with a post-holiday atonement involving diet and exercise.

Fret not, say the Alejandro sisters, who started their Sexy Chef catering business in 2003. It is possible to indulge guilt-free. Rachel, who’s also a singer and actress, has been advocating healthy eating for the past 10 years. Younger sister Barni, a pre-school teacher-turned-chef, attributes her experience to the countless trial and errors in their grandmother’s kitchen and the rigorous training she went through in culinary school.

The sisters are polar opposites, bound by blood and their love for healthy living. Rachel is the more gregarious, impulsive one, and Barni the more restrained and cautious one. Rachel’s enthusiasm is what got The Sexy Chef started, while Barni’s passion for all things practical enabled the growth of their little venture into a full-blown catering service.

To top it all, they now have a cookbook of recipes – tasty enough for the voracious meat-eater and healthy enough not to make diabetics worry about their blood sugar. (READ: Rachel Alejandro cooks up a dream)

Here is a quick chat with the Alejandro sisters about their “Sexy Chef” cookbook, which was launched on December 4:

How long did it take for you to come up with the “Sexy Chef” cookbook?

Rachel: We’ve been kind of writing it since 2008. We wrote the intro and we’ve been putting together and collecting the recipes since then. However, the daily work – photos, layout, copy editing – only started this year. We’ve been writing bits and pieces throughout the years, it was just a matter of who was going to publish it.

Barni: Also, there are these weight loss science stuff that have changed throughout the years, so all the materials we have are more up to date. We also had to make sure it’s the right time to publish.

There are so many books on weight loss and healthy eating. What makes this one different from the others?

Rachel: What makes our book different from other health books is that we actually make use of local ingredients. When people buy these healthy cookbooks, they tend not to cook any of the recipes inside because the ingredients are so hard to find. Most of them are so expensive. I personally have a collection, but I can’t follow any of it. In our cookbook, we use malunggay, which is so easy to find, making our stuff really doable.

Both of you said that a healthy diet is not tantamount to deprivation. What do you mean?

Rachel: What we really espouse is going natural as much as possible – staying away from things that are laden with chemicals, with preservatives. You can use certain substitutions that are made naturally, ayun nga like coconut sugar and stuff like that. For instance, dessert such as chocolate pudding with chia seeds – it’s very tasty, it’s yummy, but it’s low-calorie. It’s very low in the glycemic index, even diabetics can have it. 

Also, I think if you deprive yourself, you will end up making bad choices later on if you feel hungry.. and not just satisfying your cravings. For instance if you eat a diet meal, like a salad that doesn’t make you feel full, you always tend to want to eat again after an hour or two. So you might as well already eat high quality tasty food – more along the lines of what you would normally eat. 

As advocates of healthy eating, is there anything you consider a cheat meal?

Barni: Oh definitely! I love pizza! But at the same time I had to take a healthy pizza class just recently because I love it so much and I wanna continue indulging. I love nachos. I can eat an entire bucket of it! So we created – it’s in the book – a healthier kind of nachos, it inspires me, us. It’s the junk food that inspires us to be more creative. We know we can’t stop indulging so we have to create a healthier alternative or version of it.

Rachel: Later I’m gonna have some wine! Cheese and wine! You know I love it.

Barni: Yes, she does! — Rappler.com

Copies of the “Sexy Chef” are available at all National Book Store branches.

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Marga Deona

Marga leads digital and product management for Rappler’s multimedia expansion. Sometimes, she writes about the intersection of technology, culture, and business, as well as the occasional sports and music features.