Among other things, a proper diet is important for health. What are everybody's favorite decently healthy recipes?49 responses total.
This response has been erased.
I've been making soups which are meatless and lower or non-fat. Soups that normally are rich with cream, now cream-less but still have the same texture (hint: canned evaported *skim* milk). Soups without meat. Soups with more beans. Also, I've been again putzing with my crock-pot, putting together lower-fat meals that will cook while I'm at work and be ready to serve without hassle. Most of these recipes are working just fine but crock-pots are a little unpredictable, so there have been a couple of disposal masterpieces.
I learned early on that uncooked beans, rice or pastas don't cook well in a slow cooker or crock pot and these seem to be the staple or filler in many lower fat recipes...simply use canned beans or cook up your beans, rice and pasta ahead of time to be added as needed. also larger chunks of vegetables don't cook well. and raw fresh vegetables and quicker cooking ones combined don't work one is mushy the other too hard..:) If you are converting a recipe simply adjust a bit and it should turn out great and much more conveinent...
You are right, crock-pot recipes are not easily converted from oven recipes. So I bought this little recipe book that does all translating, and so far so good. We've also been experimenting with homemade pizza. Cheeseless vegetable pizzas, focaccias, Boboli shells with non-fat cheeses, and goat cheese on pita pizzas. Fun stuff.
This response has been erased.
thankyou for linking it, valerie....i've been being brainless lately. :) have you figured out how to make a foccia with less oil? much as i love the stuff, it's just got so much.... red beans and rice....YUM!!!!! :) and low fat and everythng!!!
No trick, really. Just omit or use less oil. With focaccia it's all added to the top, along with salt, and I just don't add what I don't want.
Everytime I hear the word "focaccia" I smile.
Eh? I don't think I quite got that ...
I still use boxed brownie mixes, but I never use the oil they call for...I always use water and the brownies always turn out just dandy!
That was a "no fat" comment by remmers.
This isn't a recipe, but I find that I'm a lot more apt to eat carrots if I buy the bags of pre-peeled carrot pieces. I go through a bag of those pretty quickly, while unpeeled carrots sometimes turn colors other than orange before I throw them out.
freida, I have been told you can substitute lowfat mayonase or applesauce for the oil in a devil's food cake or brownie mix and the results will be moist and delicious.
hey headdoc, the applesauce sounds good, but not the mayo...
Applesauce works, and so does prune puree - the cookbook I have with that sort of translation infoormation recommends baby food prunes. I've tried a cake made with applesauce, I think, and it was nummy. (Applesauce will work in anything baked, just about, but the prunes need to be masked by the dark color of the chocolate.)
Cathy what is the name of the cookbook you use? mayonaise doesn't have that mayonaise tase besides most is made with egg and oil I don't know what low fat is made with however.
hi cathy!!!!! :) i wondered if that was you, but marc never told me that you had shown up, so now i know. :) (wave!!!) i;ve seen things with prune puree, but i haven't tried anything yet, due to lck of time....:) on the other hand, i did try my hand at bagels again...and it seems to be fairly healthy, as it only contains 1 egg....:)
The cookbook is 'Healthy Homestyle Cooking' by...umm...Evelyn Tribole (not sure on the first name but the last is right). I haven't had a chance to try much from it, but I'd recommend it based on what I have.
This response has been erased.
with egg whites i believe you are susposed to whip them a bit before adding or add water to it..in cake recipes when you use egg whites in place of oil and yolks of he eggs they usually add water. now on some recipes subsitutiing lower fat items doesn't always work..like a low fat butter doesn't work in some baked goods with out some adjusting. don't know about low fat mayo or even fat free.. all in all it tekes taking the time to experiment or prepare something I have been lazy about..:(
I have read that Applesauce can be used to replace I believe the eggs in some recipes...or maybe...oh I forget...I'll have to ask my wife... bbl
This response has been erased.
Honey needs to hunt up her applesauce subsitute recipes cookbook for bubu and anyone else who needs a recipe
Can somebody give me a calories list?
Calorie lists can be hundreds of pages long. Your most comprehensive source is the USDA list, The Nutritive Value of Common Foods. Other, smaller lists are available at every supermarket checkout counter. There are probably websites that list calories as well (help me here, you advanced technology types). A word of advice though: Calorie counts are not very helpful when choosing foods. If I could only get one piece of information about a food, I would ask for grams of fat per serving. And usually you will want to know the carbohydrate and protein content as well. A 100 calorie potato chip is NOT an equal alternative to a 100 calorie apple, or carton of yogurt.
Try http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/ You can get calories for different quantitites of practically any food you can imagine. Also, all other nutritional values of that food. (1 kumquat = 63 kcal...)
I must be misreading that.. A single kumquat = 63,000 calories? With that much energy I'd think there'd be some way to use them as a weapon..
kcal = kilocalorie = Calorie. The calorie is the "natural" unit of measure in physics and the defined scientific standard worldwide, but the kcal is more convenient in dietary usage. Things get abbreviated with use, and calorie has come to mean kcal when the subject is food.
Exactly. I was pleased that that site has adopted correct terminology. A calorie is 4.184 joules (exactly). The use of the term calorie for the kilocalorie in diet needs to be abandoned. Perhaps the best thing would be to just go directly to stating energy quantities in joules, and avoid the confusion of calorie vs kilocalorie completely.
Given the bigger numbers that would result and America's generally high stupidity inertial coefficient, I'd look for that change to be made about the same time as the conversion to 100-minute hours...
btw... here's another good site for food/nutrition info:
http://www.phys.com/
re:0, I'm not sure that I have a favorite 'healthy' recipe yet. But in the past few months, I've been doing a bit more cooking from 'scratch' instead of strictly frozen, canned, or premade food items. I've also cut way down on my pop and instead, am drinking a lot more water. So in the past couple months or so, I've lost about 10-12 pounds. Which means I need to keep on cooking on my own on a regular basis. Oh, and I've cut down somewhat on my fastfood meals as well. :-)
Another grex lost even more than that by giving up pop and getting some exercise. Congratulations on making these changes and sticking to it.
congratulations denise!
Thanks! :-) This is partly why I've been posting/asking so many questions about cooking and food lately! Once I get a couple other projects out of the way, I'll try and spend a bit more time trying to focus on the exercise thing, too.
Muscles burn fat.
That "fact" has recently come under scrutiny and is now being questioned.
"Another grex lost even more than that by giving up pop and getting some exercise." I'm sure there probably has been. :-) But as long as I'm not gaining any more and even better is the losing some is fine with me. I'll be even happier if it continues, even if its at a somewhat slower rate so the weight will stay off. In time, I'll be trying to incorporate more exercise in my day to day life. But for now, one step at a time [no pun intended]; I want/need to be comfortable with my current goals [more goals than just the food aspect] and keeping them going before I add something else. I'm prone to getting overwhelmed pretty easily and then I'm apt to do nothing at all.
Sounds like an excellent plan, Denise. I could do with a bit of your philosophy.
resp:39 I'll echo Mary and say that your 'one step at a time' approach is great. :) And- "they" say that kind of approach means you're much more likely to succeed.
Thanks for the feedback and I do hope this will continue to be successful. Though I do know it'll take a long time to lose the weight I should do to be more healthy. However, it IS hard sometimes not to eat as I should during times of stress, depression, or other rough times. Then I go into a not-caring mode.
Denise, you might wish to look into the "Health at Every Size" philosophy. It is kinder because it doesnt put a huge focus on what, for many, is an unobtainable goal: weight loss. The HAES approach is that if you get your body moving and eat a healthy diet, you will gain pretty significant health benefits even if you dont happen to lose weight. I know that when I am eating well and moving around, I feel a lot better anyways :)
Thanks for the suggestion, Lynne. I went and looked at a website that had a lot of this information--and I plan on going back to read more of it when I have a bit more time. I do now that just food and exercise play a role in what someone weighs. I'll have to enter a separate item about this sometime soon so that this item can stay on track with 'Food' and not just about what a healthy size and/or dieting is. :-)
[I was planning on entering an item sometime about health/diet/weight stuff especially/including stuff on obesity and other overweight related issues. But for now I'm going to hold off while the discussion that's going on in the current Agora conference. I might still post something in the future; though if anyone else wants to go ahead and post something on this topic here and/or in the health conference-and I can link it here- please feel free to do so. I'd still participate.]
I read an article in the NYT last weekend which distinguished between eating and "nutritionism". Essentially, the author claimed that nutrition had become an "ism", a belief system that focused on such small elements of eating that believers had unbalanced behaviors around eating. I'll try to find the article and do a better summary.
You're thinking of the article "Unhappy Meals" by Michael Pollan (author
of the books _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ and _The Botany of Desire_).
Pollan views nutrition trends like "low fat" and "low carb", and crazes
for particular nutrients like "oat bran" and "omega-3 fatty acids", as
fads that miss the big picture and do little or nothing to promote
health. His article begins:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
The rest of the article elaborates on this theme. By "food" he means
things that your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food,
which rules out a lot of the things that people stuff in their mouths
these days.
Full article is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html
Sounds similar to the 'if you can't pronounce the ingredients don't eat it' kind of meal planning.
Yes, remmers, that was the one. Thanks for the url and great summary. One of the things I liked in his article is that meal times are important parts of human interaction, and that those interactions themselves have health impacts.
You have several choices: