Cooking

Cooking Healthy: Do the Numbers

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I get asked about healthy cooking now and then since I’m kind of obsessed with it. And by that I mean actually cooking healthy and delicious, which really isn’t too hard once you get into the swing of it.

The thing is that healthy cooking often involves goals, even if the goal is “eat less crap” (since you measure your crap-consumption numerically once you figure them out). That can make the situation boring or confusing as you juggle proteins, sodium, meal counts, and the like.

However, it’s really pretty simple – you just need to look at the right numbers.

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White Bean Chili

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This was an unexpectedly successful recipe – not perfect, but one that probably only needs a little tweaking to make it work.  It’s derived from a recipe from Taste of Home, a magazine that isn’t exactly focused on healthy cooking, but is focused on tasty home cooking – and many recipes can be modified to be vegetarian or healthier.

So what this is is a white chili – basically white beans in a spicy broth.  More on how it came out after the recipe:

Ingredients:

  • 2 Tbsp Olive Oil, divided
  • 1 large, white onion, chopped
  • 1 Tbsp crushed garlic
  • 3 cans (14 oz ea) low-no sodium white beans, about 5 cups
  • 1 1//2 cups low sodium vegetable broth
  • 2 oz chopped green chillies, drained (you can find 4oz cans easily, just divide it an freeze the rest)
  • 1 Tbsp Soy sauce
  • 1 tsp ground cumin
  • 1/2 tsp dried oregano
  • 1/8 tsp ground red pepper
  • 1/8 tsp ground black pepper
  • 1 Tbsp dried Cilantro
  1. Sautee the onion in one Tbsp Olive oil until softened
  2. Add garlic to onion, stir regularly until onion and garlic begin to brown.
  3. Add all other ingredients except remaining olive oil and dried cilantro. Mix thoroughly.
  4. Bring to simmer, and simmer covered for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
  5. Add remaining olive oil and cilantro, stir thoroughly. Bring to simmer.
  6. Remove from heat and serve.

And the results?

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Cooking With Steve: Sauces

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Sauces are awesome.

Admittedly no one’s going to argue on that directly. We’ve all had great sauces, from powerful barbecue to mild bechamel. But I not only like a good sauce, I think they’re a key to healthy cooking.

Now we don’t often think of sauces and healthy. Usually we think of sauces as fatty or rich or spicy, and always excessive. Some store bought sauces may freak you out if you read the label. But actually there’s three ways sauces can be healthy – or at least cook healthy.

One, you can tweak a sauce to be at least neutral. Substituting ingredients (vegetable spread over butter), finding ones that compensate for removing others (in some black pepper makes up for removing salt), trying different forms (crushed tomatoes over sauce) can work wonders. Once you’ve made a sauce to be at least not UNHEALTHY you can enjoy it more.

Two, you can actually find sauces or make them healthy or to have some nutritional benefit. I’ve found some home made tomato sauces or those using crushed tomatoes are, despite all the past jokes about School lunches, basically a vegetable. A little work and luck and you can make a sauce that actually ads to the meal and is still healthy.

Third, and finally – sauces let you eat a wider variety of food. Even if the sauce is the worst part of the meal, if you don’t overdo it, it can work magic.

This is where sauces are awesome and why even a “neutral” sauce has benefits.

You can take a giant pile of food, dump the right sauce on it, and you have a delectable healthy meal. Even food you’re normally not fond of can suddenly become delectable with the right sauce, and an uninteresting food can be suddenly interesting. If you can manage to do that with an actual healthy sauce, then more’s the win.

That’s one of the reasons I quest to develop my own lower sodium, lower fat Japanese Curry. If I can get it just right then I’ll have a decent sauce that is neutral to mildly good for you that I can put on ANYTHING and have an instant, delicious meal.

It’s one of the reasons cooks amateur and professional try to get the perfect pasta sauces – a neutral-tasting plate of pasta becomes a wonder with the right sauce.

So when you’re learning to cook, work on your sauces. Make them delicious, make them healthy, or at least make them so you don’t need too much of them. It’s a key to turning food that’s good for you into a delicious meal.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.