As you know, I used to post my food pictures and recipes here, but after the appalling quality of my food-photography skills left much to be desired, I decided to stop that. Turns out, my new cell phone actually takes better food pictures than my camera! Go figure! So I have been posting many of my recipes and pictures of the food to Facebook.
I have been asked several times, and again just recently, how it is that I can make food that is so good and still lose weight. Well, there's a lot of give and take. Portion control is really the number one contributor to my success. I do tend to use lighter versions of many ingredients, such as lean meats, light breads, light sour cream and mayonnaise (to Hell with the fat free versions! I'd rather go without. But the light versions are usually pretty good.) Some ingredients, such as butter and oil there are no lowfat substitutes. Well, there's light margarine, but you're really only getting water added to it, and the final product is less than satisfactory. So in such cases, you must use those items sparingly.
Look at it this way: you could easily cut half the calories out of a food simply by cutting it in half and eating only that half. You could also use a reduced calorie version of something, or try to find a happy medium between the two. This is pretty much what I do.
Take any recipe that you love. What I do, is scan over the ingredients and decide what can be reduced without sacrificing flavor. Know your high calorie ingredients: meats, fats, sugars, and grain-products (bread, rice, flour, etc.). This is where you start. Also, pay attention to the number of servings.
Let us say that a particular recipe for a meat dish calls for 2lbs of meat, and say it says it serves 4. Well right there in your head, you can see that that works out to 8oz meat per person. That is absurd. A typical serving size is 4-6 ounces each. So start there, and reduce that down to 1.5lbs if you want to go with the larger size. Also make sure you're using lean cuts and lean ground meats. For ground beef, I always use 7% fat/93% lean. Any less than this and you sacrifice flavor and moisture. Any more than this, and you're just adding too much fat to the meal. Again, however, there is a trade off. Sometimes, you really want a juicy burger that has a higher fat content. If so, then you have to have a smaller portion. And I do this from time to time, but generally, I use the 93/7.
Next, look at the fats in the recipe: butter, oils, shortenings. Here's a little secret: there is no magic to the amount called-for in a recipe. Oil is primarily a cooking medium that adds body, richness, and flavor to the dish in addition to providing adequate lubrication to the cooking pan. I have discovered that for most seared items, I can get away with 1 teaspoon per portion. So if I'm cooking, say, 4 chicken breasts or 4 pork chops, I can get away with using as little as 4 teaspoons of oil. So look and see how that oil is being used and look how much is called-for and how many people the recipe serves. So it says 3 tablespoons and it serves 4?! You don't need that much; cut it down and move on.
Grain products: Again, pay attention to portion sizes. For something like rice, I use 1/4 raw (which equals 3/4c cooked) per person. That is actually a lot. Sometimes, I even use only 1/2 cup cooked, which is roughly 3T raw per person. What I usually end up doing in that case is making a cup of rice and dividing it by 5, putting one serving away for another meal (lunch for myself the next day).
Flours and bread crumbs and all that jazz: I have discovered that 2-3 tablespoons of these per portion is a good starting point.
And then, I like to give things a good dose of veggies. Does that recipe call for 1 carrot, 1/2 onion, a quarter cup of diced green pepper..? Again, there is no magic to what is called-for in the recipe. Double it up. I'll also add a cup of frozen peas and carrots to many simmered meals just for a little "sumpin-sumpin" extra.
Finally, portioning the final meal. This isn't always easy, I admit. If I make a big pot of stew or soup, how do I know how many servings I'm really getting out of it? I measure it, that's what I do. Yep. If I make a big pot, I'll take my 1-cup ladle, and I will transfer it to another pot, counting out the cups. Then I know how many 1 cup servings I get out of that. And for this, I only really need to know this for myself. In addition to my husband, I have to feed two teenage boys, and they can put away a lot of food. So in these cases, this lets me know how many servings the recipe made. Then I measure out my own portion and let them have at it.
Nutrition calculation. I use a recipe software called Mastercook. When you enter the ingredients and the amounts into it, it can compute the full nutritional profile based on its food database. Here's the trick: not every ingredient you use will be in its provided database; however, you can add ingredients. And I am religious about doing so. Once you have all that in there, and you know the number of servings, it will divide the whole meal up by the number of servings you entered (because remember you just got done counting out those ladles of soup) and return the per serving nutrition information.
Substitutions. As I mentioned before, you can usually use a light or reduced calorie version for some of the ingredients called-for without compromising the taste and texture of the finished product. There are also technique substitutions. For example, oven-frying instead of sauteing. I often will bread items, spray them with olive oil or canola oil spray and bake them. Usually 375 to 400* F is a good temperature for oven frying items. Thicker items, such as thick pieces of chicken, use the lower temperature so that it can have time to cook fully through before the breading becomes over-browned. Thinner items, such as eggplant slices (which makes an awesome lowfat eggplant parmigiana, btw) can bake at the higher temperature.
This reminds me of eggs, and I want to mention using these. For baked items, I really like using egg substitutes. These are also great for dipping items to be breaded. Don't be afraid of these. They are real egg product made from egg whites colored with beta-carotene. But on their own, they don't always taste so great. So for things like scrambled eggs, I like to use 1 whole egg plus 1 egg white per person. Spray the pan with butter flavor Pam and go to town! I swear you won't notice a difference over your regular full-yolked eggs.
Finally, write it down! If you've used the mastercook program, then you have accomplished this, but once you've gone through the trouble of crafting this recipe, you need to document the
changes you made so that the next time you make it, you don't have to go through it all again. I will often keep a notepad of the ingredients and amounts I'm using as I'm making the recipe. Then I go and mess with figuring it all out later.
This is all I can really think of right now. Remember, if you already know how to cook, these little changes really shouldn't be too difficult. If you don't know how to cook, well...I'm sorry, but that's more than I'm willing to take on with you at this time LOL...
Anyway, give it a try. Life is too short to eat bad food. You don't have to, even when you're trying to lose weight!
