Protein for breakfast really keeps you full and satisfied for hours. And it is easier than you think to have it ready in the morning. One of my favorite ways is in casserole form. Eggs, skim milk, chopped fresh spinach, a little Parmesan or 2 percent sharp cheddar cheese, mild rotel, and a little chopped turkey bacon if you like. Bake it in an 8 x 8 casserole dish and now you have 6 large squares that are easy to warm up in the microwave all week. Another favorite is to make a scrambled egg mixture with a small amount of 2 percent cheddar cheese, onions, garlic, peppers, and chili powder. Put your southwest scramble into whole wheat tortillas, roll, and refrigerate or freeze. Very easy to warm up in the microwave.
Another thing we don’t often think about is how perfect that leftover piece of chicken or salmon is to start out our day. An adult pb & j is another great starter. I buy a natural peanut or almond butter and either mix it with some honey or use an all-fruit jam and put it on a whole grain bread, thin bun, or mini bagel.
Try starting your day with some protein and whole grains and see how your energy levels stay constant and how many hours you feel full and satisfied.
People ask me all the time to help them “healthify” a recipe and I’m happy to do it. Apparently I’ve had enough experience messing up recipes that I know the pitfalls to avoid when substituting.
While some recipes cannot be redeemed - Deep-Fried Snickers Bars, for example - most can either be made healthy or can be re-worked to keep the same flavor elements you love, but in a new recipe.
Here are a couple of practical suggestions:
Make it healthier and smaller. Grandma’s cheesecake can be made with 1/3 less fat cream cheese, half the sugar, topped with real fruit, and made in a half-batch when having company over. Everyone enjoys a big piece, and then it’s gone.
Rework the proportions. Use the largest amount of the healthiest ingredient and the smallest amount of the unhealthiest. In a cheesy chicken and broccoli casserole, use a huge amount of broccoli, then a reasonable amount of brown rice, then some chicken, and top with a little cheese. This concept works in most casseroles and soups.
Experiment with new brands to use. There are tons of pastas, breads, crackers, and cereals made with whole grains. The ones with the most nutrition have “whole” wheat or oats, etc as the first ingredient in the list. They all have a different taste and texture, so experiment until you find ones you like and then use whole grains.
If you have a favorite recipe that you would like to “healthify” but can’t figure it out, email it to me and I’ll be glad to tell you how I would do it.
I like to add some flavor to brown rice, quinoa, and pilaf type dishes. In addition to onion, garlic, celery, carrots and such, I usually add bouillon. But what kind should you use? I would say that depends on what you currently eat.
If your taste buds are accustomed to fast food, restaurant food, and pre-packaged gravies or sauces you are used to large amounts of sodium and msg (monosodium glutamate). And while there is lots of evidence to support that msg should be avoided, you might not want to quit cold turkey. So when you cook rice, quinoa, or barley you may want to use a teaspoon of Wyler’s instant bouillon or a store brand bouillon. If you decide in the future you want to eliminate msg from your diet, you can change to a healthier (and also more expensive…) bouillon.
If you have already eliminated msg from your diet by avoiding prepackaged meals, sauces, dressings, soups, etc, you may want to use Herb Ox bouillon, which is labeled msg free. It has the same flavors of regular bouillon, but without the chemical that tricks your brain into thinking that what your are eating is good for you, tastes amazing, and you want more.
If you are concerned about excess sodium, you could use Herb Ox sodium free, msg free bouillon. It is made with potassium chloride (salt substitute) and sugar. In fact, sugar is the first ingredient listed. (Many things that are low sodium add sugar to please your taste buds and counteract the bitter aftertaste of salt substitute.) This one is a toss up for me. I’m not entirely convinced that sugar with chemicals is a better alternative than salt.
Boxes or cans of stock come in all varieties - low sodium, low fat, etc. You can read “Store Bought Chicken Stocks, Reviewed: Which are the best?” by Michele Humes at Serious Eats. The comments on that article also provide some good input. I personally think canned or boxed stock tastes like slightly flavored water, which is why I lean toward bullion. I also often want concentrated flavor without additional liquid.
Which brings me to my latest idea. What if I stewed some bone-in chicken (or the leftover carcass from roasting a whole chicken), sea salt, fresh pepper, parsley, a bay leaf, and some thyme, with tons of onion, celery, and carrots all day in the crockpot in a small amount of water? I could food process that mixture (minus the bones and bay leaf), freeze it in ice cube trays, and then add one or two to a recipe instead of the bullion granules. It might even be cost effective if I plan it for the day after I’ve roasted a chicken with vegetables and already have it all on hand. Hmmm, I’ll let you know how it works.
We all like to know the secrets of success - how to have a happy marriage, how to save money, or how to lose weight. And while there are not short cuts, there are some tips and tricks that will help us reach our goals if we apply them consistently.
We all understand how this works in reverse. None of us got into trouble overnight in our marriage, our finances, or our weight. So we know that lots of little choices over a period of time produced the troubling results. Lets apply that principle and make it work for us.
The folks at Weight Free Life have a short article with 3 secrets for weight loss. But brace yourself - they are simple. We often think we have to use some complicated, difficult program to get results, but that is not true. Slow and steady really will win the race. Often, eating the right foods combined with making some simple (but consistently applied) changes brings the long term results we are wanting.
So go check out their secrets, and instead of blowing them off as too simple, try them for a month - along with eating a mediterranean type diet and see the results.
I recently did a “Lunch and Learn” event using recipe “make-overs”. We took several familiar recipes and gave them a healthy make-over by accentuating healthy ingredients, minimizing unhealthy ones, and strategically using others to our best advantage. Our recipes lost hundreds of calories and significant amounts of fat. For example, a Spinach Artichoke Dip appetizer from Chili’s, Ruby Tuesday’s, O’Charley’s, or Red Robin is between 905-1248 calories with 55-116% of your total recommended fat for the day. Our make-over of that appetizer was 130 calories with 9% of your rda of fat. While we were eating our great looking and tasting recipes, we learned how to apply the same tricks to give healthy “make-overs” to other recipes at home.
I think the saying “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” is true. I just tweak it slightly to be “a spoonful of something yummy makes the nutrition go down”. At an event like that, people enjoy a healthy meal and realize that with a little knowledge of nutrition, some good ingredients, and a few tricks they can easily cook healthier at home.
If you have a group interested in having a Lunch and Learn event, feel free to contact me using the link in the sidebar or email me at healthycookingbydesign at gmail.com.
The other day, I was shopping with one of my daughters. We saw a bottle of beautiful pale green colored Grapeseed Oil and I mused aloud, “I wonder what it smells like.” The words had barely left my lips when I heard the seal breaking on the cap as my daughter excitedly exclaimed “Let’s see!” Her excitement quickly faded as she realized we now needed to purchase that bottle because we had opened it. So I thought it was a perfect opportunity to research as well as taste a new oil.
Here are some things I found online about grapeseed oil. In Posh Gourmet’s article “Choosing Gourmet Oils” they say there are three oils no pantry should be without - olive, grapeseed, and canola. The Gourmet Retailer says grapeseed oil has a higher smoke point (better for high temp cooking or frying), holds together well in sauces or mayonnaise, and has an unobtrusive taste. The article at Suite 101.com, “Alternatives to Olive Oil” won big points with me by saying the three most commonly used fats in Italy are olive oil, butter, and grapeseed oil. (I personally still think butter has a place in our diets.) Grapeseed oil has antibacterial properties and fights free radicals. A Yale-New Haven dietitian recommends that grapeseed oil be used in addition to olive oil as part heart healthy diet, but not to replace it.
Those things reinforce my belief that there is NO ONE MAGIC ANSWER. Just because we discover some great properties in soybeans doesn’t mean that eating soy everything is beneficial. Or because olive oil has proven health benefits that we should use it to the exclusion of all other oils. Or when we see benefits to eating vegetables or raw foods, that we should only eat those foods. I don’t believe that our bodies were designed to eat only from a few categories or use only a few cooking methods. I think important keys to healthy eating are variety, moderation, and a basic understanding of the nutrition in foods.
As to the taste, I found it light and easy to combine with any flavor. I fried quite a few chickpea and rosemary patties in a couple of tablespoons of it and never had any smoke or burning. I will definitely use it for high temperature cooking or for recipes that don’t need an olive oil flavor. Yea! One more healthy food in my pantry. Try it, you might like it too - although you don’t have to open your bottle in the store. Just some food (or oil) for thought…
I have a few tricks up my sleeve that will help me not feel miserably full during Thanksgiving week. I think my word for the week is going to be moderation. No way am I depriving myself of the goodies, just using moderation to enjoy them.
Here’s my “before, during, and after” strategy:
While cooking-
Roast the turkey, not deep fry it
Skim the fat well off the drippings before thickening into gravy
Make mashed potatoes with milk instead of cream
Cut a stick of butter into teaspoon-sized pats for easy serving control
Top sweet potatoes with brown sugar, pecans, and slivers of butter instead of marshmallows
Cut the sugar in half in all recipes
While serving and eating-
Limit my appetizers
Put one spoon of everything that I want on my plate
Skip the roll and butter (or only have one with one pat of butter)
Eat slowly and enjoy the conversation
If I drink calories (soda, eggnog, etc.), have only one cup
If I go back for seconds (because it’s optional), choose the 2 items I’d like another spoon of
If I want pie, choose which type (probably pumpkin), and cut one slice in half (that way I can have the other 1/2 slice later in the day).
After the meal-
Send other guests home with servings of things I don’t want a lot of left in the house (pies, etc.)
Give myself full permission to enjoy all those same things again at the next meal
If there’s too much food left the next day, pack some up and take to the local firehouse and tell them how thankful I am for their service.
Using these tricks will allow me to enjoy all of my favorite foods but never have to loosen my belt, eat tums, or feel any guilt. Sounds like a plan to be thankful for to me.
My grandmother seasoned using a dash or a pinch. My mother just sprinkled and tasted until it seemed right. I learned to cook well without measuring, but little did I know I would have to learn to measure in order to communicate my recipes. Just because I can measure doesn’t mean I like it.
Now maybe you have several sets of measuring spoons and cups that are always clean and in the right drawer, but I don’t. I guess this adds to my frustration when measuring. So yesterday, using five minutes and a little ‘outside the box’ thinking, I came up with a less frustrating way to measure.
Instead of trying to locate the few things in my kitchen marked with measurements, I found the actual measure of some common utensils in abundance in my kitchen. Now I know I have about 20 spoons that measure exact teaspoons, 6 that are exact tablespoons, 2 serving spoons that are 1/4 cup, and 3 ladles that are 1/2 cup. Think how quickly I can grab small spoons to measure with and how much simpler it will be to spoon over measured amounts of broth and then serve the soup with the same ladle. I’m not suggesting we throw out the measuring cups or those cute little spoons on a ring, but add another simple, readily available way to measure.
Here are a few more tips that make measuring a little easier. Measure all the dry ingredients first, so the measuring cup (or ladle) doesn’t need rinsing. If measuring something sticky, first measure any oil the recipe calls for because it coats the cup and the sticky ingredient slides right out. I also never stir dry ingredients together until they are all added. That way if the phone rings, or a child needs me, when I come back I can look at the pile of dry ingredients and see what I have added. Feel free to comment tricks you use to make measuring less of a chore.
