Healthier Mac & Cheese

Elizabeth Williams — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:25:13 +0000

After the complete disaster that was Baked Chicken with Noodles, I was pretty sure I was through with The alli Cookbook and the plan in general. I mean, that first meal was just awful — several dozen photographs couldn’t even make it look good, and not even liberal amounts of hot sauce would improve the taste. There was just so much wrong with it — the lack of spices, the lack of sauce, the way the cheese just curdled and drooped over everything it touched. Ug!

Still, I’d shelled out quite a bit of money for the Alli Starter Pack, so I intended to take every last pill, even if that meant cooking more boring, bland, unappetizing crap in order to do so.

Good thing there actually are some good recipes in The alli Cookbook, and mac & cheese is one of them.

There’s a basic formula to mac and cheese: roux, milk, cheese, pasta. (My own recipe — which is my personal favorite, even if I am a bit biased — follows this same formula, though it’s structure is modified because is baked and loaded with fat.) Some recipes also have an added ingredient — usually a vegetable or two that adds a healthful spin on a classically fattening, totally American dish. This recipe is basically no different. Take a low-fat roux, add low-fat milk and cheese, then add your pasta and serve over a veg. It’s why, unlike the God-awful Baked Chicken and Pasta fiasco (I’m not getting over that nightmare any time soon) this is a pretty good substitute.

I’ve added salt to the recipe, because reduced-fat cheese is usually reduced sodium, and salt is helpful not only in thickening the final sauce but also in pulling out a cheesy flavor from an otherwise mild cheese sauce.

Still, it beats Kraft Mac & Cheese hands down for creaminess, cheesiness, and healthiness. I suppose the latter is obvious, but you’d be surprised how many college kids think Easy Mac is “healthy” because there’s so little of it.

Healthier Mac and Cheese

Adapted from The alli Cookbook

2 teaspoon flour, all-purpose
1 tbsp teaspoons spread, buttery, low-fat
1 cup milk, 1% fat
1 cup cheddar cheese, low-fat, low-sodium
1/4 teaspoon each salt & black pepper
3 cups rotini pasta, cooked (I used Barilla Plus elbows)
1 1/2 dry cup broccoli florets, fresh

Bring pan of water to a boil and begin cooking pasta according to package directions.
Melt butter in a separate pan, then stir in flour and cook for about a minute.
Add milk to the roux and continue to cook over medium to medium-low heat until white sauce thickens and coats the back of a spoon
5 minutes before the pasta is finished, place broccoli in a steamer over top of the pasta and cover. Cook for remaining 5 minutes.
Once white sauce has thickened, add in fresh-cracked salt and pepper and cheese. Cook until cheese melts.
Drain pasta. Stir drained pasta into cheese sauce. Serve over broccoli

Baked Chicken with Noodles: Why My Dad Doesn’t Eat “Diet” Food

Elizabeth Williams — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:53:54 +0000

I’ve never played coy about the fact that I’m a chubby girl. I have a rather unhealthy love of all things fatty, sweet, and salty — the three worst things things you can crave according to David Kessler, author of The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite Dr. Kessler spent plenty of time dumpster diving at his local Chili’s after hours in order to get the prized nutrition labels off the boxes of food sent to the restaurant. (You didn’t really think the “chefs” at your local family chain restaurants actually cooked, did you?) Turns out, we eat too much because everything we buy — that is, that we don’t make ourselves — is loaded with crap. For example, the Southwest Egg Rolls that I love to death? Those bad boys contain 910 calories, 57 grams of fat and 1,960 milligrams of sodium per serving. YUM!

Of course, the thinking for me has always been that the good stuff tastes like crap, so let’s just be fat and happy instead of skinny and miserable. This is a food tradition passed down to me by both sides of my family, but especially my father’s. See, my mother’s entire family struggles with weight issues because their father instilled in his three girls the idea that all of life’s problems can be solved with a big bowl of coffee ice cream, potato chips, or beer — just not at the same time, of course. That would be gross. My father’s family, however, is comprised of rather thin Southern women and rather heavy gentlemen from both sides of the Mason Dixon line. My paternal grandmother, as I remember her, was probably anorexic; her relationship to food was emotional, but in the “the way to a person’s heart is through their stomach” sort of way. She had this rather Southern habit of cooking every meal as if an army would pop by at any moment, and the troops must be fed — there were always leftovers that she’d whip into something at the next meal, though she never seemed to actually eat. In memory, she sits at the head of the table, encouraging my rather hefty father, bloated mother, and my young, ballooning self to eat more, dishing out more to us, but never to herself.

Did I mention she was Southern?

Because of my late grandmother, who I loved dearly, I have very fond memories of running around on an open farm in western Pennsylvania, and of food that was only properly cooked when it was smothered in sausage gravy or deep fried to a crisp brown. Biscuits were made with buttermilk and lard, and of course there was always dessert, which you always ate if you finished your meal. And you always finished your meal, because the country-fried steak and fried potatoes and greens were so damned good.

So I learned that skinny women cook fattening food, which tastes delicious.

And, it is assumed by both sides of my family, that the converse is therefore true: health food sucks.

Of course, if you go through this blog, you’ll find that I don’t particularly subscribe to the notion that all health food is evil. I do a lot of vegan cooking so that I can cook food that is at least sustainable, if not healthy. I’ve played with dishes from The South Beach Diet series of cookbooks and found some that are not just palatable, but down right delicious. Because I’m a heavier girl, and because I know it, I try to eat healthy, get some exercise in, and otherwise work on bringing down the weight that years of sweet potato pies and green beans fried up in pork fat with bacon have padded on.

So, I started taking Alli.

If you weren’t aware, Alli! is an FDA-approved weight loss drug that works as a fat-blocker, preventing your body from absorbing fat. You have to limit yourself to 15-17g of fat per meal, because that’s all Alli will allow you to absorb normally. What happens if you eat more fat than your body is prevented from absorbing? Well kids, that’s why Alli has the lovely and colorful nickname (with me, at least) of “The Shit Yourself Drug”.

But let’s not get too technical on that, shall we? We are all about the food here.

So yes, the food on the Alli plan. Where to begin?

I’ll begin, I suppose, by saying that I was skeptical of the food in the The alli Cookbook, but decided to give it a whirl anyway, just to see how bad healthy eating under 15 grams of fat per meal could be. First, I tried the Hoisin-Sauce Chicken, which was actually rather good, since it was low-fat and all. It was sweet without being too sweet, and just savory enough to feel filling. I checked out the mac & cheese recipe too — all of the ingredients from my classic mac and cheese were there, but in smaller portions, and all low-fat or fat-free.

Feeling a bit more brave, I decided to grab a bunch of recipes and just start cooking.

Damn if the second one I tried after the Hoisin Chicken success didn’t suck ass.

I’m not even going to bother with a recipe. Essentially, you take 12 fresh mushrooms and slice them. Put those in a bowl with two fresh, thin-sliced stalks of celery. Toss with about a 1/4 c. of cheese and 1 c. of chicken broth. Pour that over 4 oz. of pasta in a baking dish, put raw chicken on top, and pop into the oven for 30 minutes.

Now, this sounded really freakin’ bland to me, so I decided to up the ante and salt and pepper my chicken first (crazy, I know!) I even added a bit of onion powder to the chicken broth, just to spice it up. It was still bland, dry, and just everything that I always knew diet food is. So I ended up smothering that sucker with a LOT of Chinese hot sauce (hey, it’s fat free and 4 calories per tablespoon!) and washing down the entire nightmare with a bottle of Pepsi Throwback.

Because, you know, that’s High Fructose Corn Syrup free, so it’s healthy, right?

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Healthier Mac & Cheese

Healthier Mac and Cheese

Baked Chicken with Noodles: Why My Dad Doesn’t Eat “Diet” Food