Nom-Able » Healthy Cooking

Healthier Fettucine Alfredo

Elizabeth Williams — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:27:22 +0000

It’s hard to write a piece about anything when you have a belly full of Thierry & Guy Fat Bastard wine and you’re watching Eddie Izzard, which is the situation I find myself in right now. Oh, and I’m rather stuffed to the gills with a pretty good summer version of Fettucine Alfredo.

“Alfredo sauce? In the summer? You’re joking!” I hear you say. And I’d usually say that you’re right. But, in the words of Buzz Lightyear, “Not Today!”

The secret to the sauce is light cream cheese and Parmesan cheese — I used Grand Padano, but let your preference guide you — which thickens the white sauce of butter, flour, and milk that you make before hand.

From boiling water to the table, the entire recipe took half an hour, which was perfect, since I felt pretty damn lazy last night, especially with allergies killing me and the Zyrtec-D I took to fend off those allergies leaving me a little loopy.

Healthier Fettucine Alfredo

Adapted from The Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook

1 tbsp butter
2 cloves garlic minced
1 tbsp flour
1 c. milk
1/4 c. Parmesan cheese
1/4 c. low-fat cream cheese
1 c. broccoli, fresh
1 carrot, thinly sliced
1 red pepper, sliced in long strips
fettucine (4 cups, cooked)

Get the water boiling and start the pasta according to package directions. (I used Barilla pasta, so that’s 12 minutes)
With 6 minutes left to go on the pasta, melt the butter in a separate sauce pan medium heat
Cook the garlic for about 30 seconds, then add in the flour. Cook for another 30 seconds.
With about 4 minutes left on the pasta, put the veggies, in a steamer, over the the pasta pot. Cover.
Add in the milk. Cook, stirring frequently, for 2 minutes
Add in the cheese & cream cheese, plus about a 1/4 tsp each pepper and salt. Continue to cook.
Pull steamer basket off of pasta pot when pasta is finished, and dump steamed vegetables into sauce. Drain pasta, then toss with sauce and veg and serve.

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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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Dry Grilled Chicken with Ginger, Chinese Greens, and Noodles in an Herb Broth

Elizabeth Williams — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:18:44 +0000

It’s strange the way I decided to make this recipe. On Friday, I was working out my menus for the rest of the week, and at some point my attention deficit got the better of me, and I ended up on the webside for The Guardian, a UK publication of mixed reviews — some love it, some loathe it. My feelings about the authors, editors, and readers aside, my attention was immediately captured by one piece in particular, essentially calling for the knighthood of Jamie Oliver.

Honestly, I’d never heard of Mr. Oliver until I lived in England in 2005. During that year, repeats of Jamie’s School Dinners (in which he visisted several public schools and decried the “food” being served while trying to dish up some nutritious food under budget and palletable to student tastes) were very popular, but my husband was one of those Britons who do not particularly care for Mr. Oliver. So, we never watched it. Then, during an ad break — probably while watching CSI, House, or another American inport on 4 or 5 — I saw an ad for Sainsbury’s in which Jamie Oliver — in the time it takes for one commercial to air — showed the viewers how to prepare roasted new potatoes with rosemary and garlic, and suddenly my interest was piqued. I gathered the ingredients at ASDA, and the next night made the potatoes for my future in-laws. There was some smoke where the olive oil slightly over-heated, and some of the garlic stuck to the pan, but the potatoes were still delicious, and I’d begun to soften my husband to the “Naked Chef” as Mr. Oliver’s show was called.

I took that potato recipe to heart, as my own, and made it any time I needed a starch and had new potatoes (or in a pinch, cubed red potatoes) at hand. As a present, years later, my husband purchased Jamie’s first cookbook — The Naked Chef — after I went on about Jamie’s School Dinners when it finally aired in the US and continued to make the new potatoes recipe whenever I could. I was so excited to receive it — my first real cookbook from a real celebrity chef — that I leafed through it eagerly upon unwrapping it, only to put it on a shelf and forget its existence until we moved.

You’ll notice from the photos that I, in fact, used a George Foreman Grill for dry-grilling the chicken instead of a cast-iron or hard adonized grill pan, and there’s a very good reason for this. I don’t own one. The closest I have come to owning one is when I was trying to figure out how to spend a $20 gift card from my boss in Marshalls/Home Goods recently, and I stumbled across a $40 calphanon griddle/panini pan with heavy lid/press. But that’d be an extra $20 plus tax out of my pocket, and honestly, I really needed that bathroom scale I purchased for exactly $20, which meant I only had to pay sales tax.

Honest.

And, there for example, is why I’ve only recently cracked open the Jamie Oliver cook book — I just don’t have the equiptment or access to the foods he wants. Until recently, when we moved into an area with a Wegmans, we didn’t have the money or the super market really needed to buy some of these items, and now that we have access, we have the problem of equiptment. (And my finicky eating which means that I only eat chicken and fish — which cuts out about 60% of the recipes in the book.)

But George Foreman to the rescue.

A few thoughts about his recipe. One, it cooks very quickly — if you have enough hands, or your husband is handy in the kitchen — you can put this whole thing together in ten minutes hands-on time; slightly more to prep, and if you use pre-minced garlic like we do, it’s that much faster. I started the broth and the water for the noodles at the same time. By the time the chicken was finished grilling, the noodles and veggies went on at the same time. One minute before the veggies finished, I cut the chicken, and then it was all about assembly.

Second, this recipe does not make a lot of broth; it says “dry-grilled” in the title, but it is meant to be a soup, and yet it wasn’t particularly soupy, since most of the broth went toward steaming the veggies. If I’d known it’d drain so much, I’d have cooked the broth separately in a deep pot and used the shallow, wide steamer pot to boil the ramen water — then boil the ramen in the pot and steam the veggies above.

Did we enjoy the first meal out of Mr. Oliver’s cook book? Oh yes. Sure, it was no Brooklyn Pad Thai, but it was warm and comforting and just spicy enough to take the chill off a bone-chilling, 10 degree, snowy day. Should Mr. Oliver be knighted, as the Guardian suggested? Um, that’s another question that this recipe didn’t exactly clarify for me. Maybe I’ll have a bit more of an epiphany when I’m eating the leftovers tomorrow for lunch.

Dry Grilled Chicken with Ginger, Chinese Greens, and Noodles in an Herb Broth

Adapted from The Naked Chef by the (future Sir) Jamie Oliver

Ingredients

4 chicken breasts
salt & pepper
4 cups chicken stock (Jamie says make your own — I used the stuff out of a box)
1 heaped teaspoon finely sliced fresh ginger (I grated mine.)
1 clove of garlic, minced
11-14oz Chinese greens (I used napa cabbage left over from another dish and fresh broccoli)
1 lb Asian rice noodles (I used ramen)
1 or 2 medium/large fresh red chillies, seeded and finely sliced (I used chili sauce instead)
1 handful of cilantro leaves, torn
1/4 c. soy sauce
1 lemon or lime

instructions

Bone and skin the chicken breasts, trimming off any excess fat (I used boneless, skinless, thin-sliced breasts to avoid this step.)
Get a ridged griddle pan (or your Foreman grill) very hot, add the chicken breasts, and cook both sides until done. (I find if you turn the breasts 90 degrees when you flip them, you get an awesome criss-cross pattern that rocks, and ensures a more even color overall if you’re using a Foreman grill). Remove to a board and allow to rest for 3 minutes, then slice at an angle, around 1/2 inch apart.
Meanwhile, bring the chicken stock, ginger, and garlic to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. I like to steam my Chinese greens above the stock until tender (which is how I did it — about 3-4 minutes time), or in the broth if you prefer.
While the stock is simmering, cook the noodles in boiling, salted water, drain, and divide between 4 deep broth bowls. Divide the greens among the noodles, then place cooked chicken slices on top, and sprinkle with chili, cilantro, and soy sauce.
Finally, check the seasoning of the broth and pour it over each bowl (you could serve it at the table, as mentioned in the introduction). Finish with a squeeze of lemon or lime juice.

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Chicken with Apples and Cider

Elizabeth Williams — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:00:22 +0000

Okay, okay, I can hear you now: I thought you were going to update this daily, and it’s been a week since your last update, you bitch! I know, I know — if I were you, I wouldn’t read this blog any more either, since I’m a rather selfish woman who won’t drag herself out of bed when afflicted with an upper respiratory infection unless a massive mountain of email requests sends her flying to the kitchen.

Okay, that’s not exactly true — if no one reads this blog, then how can any email requests compel me to the kitchen? But I am battling a nasty upper respiratory infection, which was not pretty and not particular condusive to cooking, especially not nice meals for a blog. But, fearless readers, I have perservered, and still slightly under the weather now come to you with a recipe that I made last week.

Oh, you should feel special!

One of my goals (we’re not calling them resolutions, just like we don’t use the zed word when watching Shawn of the Dead) for this year was to lose weight and eat healthier — one of which should lead to the other, it would seem. So I went out and spent some hard-earned cash on a copy of Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook. To be honest, most of the recipes in the book aren’t particularly inspiring for someone like myself, who thrives on flavor, most of which is usually derrived from fat. Want me to be vegan, macrobiotic, or even raw? I’m all over any eating system you can throw at me — even Atkins if necessary — as long as I can have FLAVOR! Unfortunately, most healthy recipes are sorely short on this oh-so-crucial element of cooking.

That is, until this recipe.

This recipe is full of yummy apple goodness — if you’re like me, the kind of girl who loves fall because of the perfect, crisp weather and the abundance of your favorite foods which are only in season in the fall, then this is your recipe. There’s apple cidar, apples, and apple cidar vinegar — if it has the word “apple” in it, there’s an apple involved. In fact, to cook this recipe, I had to listen to Fiona Apple while reading the recipe off of a MacBook and say the magic words “Pomme manzana ringo”₁ over and over again in order to get the recipe to turn out right.

Oh, and there were some other ingredients too, but I don’t remember what they were.

Honestly, my biggest issue with Weight Watchers recipes is usually exactly what most people like about them — the simplicity. I don’t really want to take something from a package, mix it with something else from a package, and end up with something that’s kind of food-like. I want to take raw ingredients and get food. My last experience with a Weight Watchers recipe went something like this: canned fruit plus box of cake mix equals muffins.

Um, no. Flour, sugar, spices, binding ingredients, leavening ingredients, and flavor equals muffins. One can of something manufactured plus one box of something manufactured equals, “I should have just bought the damned prepackaged Weight Watchers muffins.”

Yet, I was pleasantly surprised by this recipe — enough recipe to make me feel like I was actually creating a meal from raw ingredients — which were surprisingly inexpensive because it was all basically in season (Then again, isn’t everything always in season somewhere? Isn’t it also five o’clock somewhere, so I should be drunk now?). And yet, the recipe was simple enough that I was done cooking within an hour, able to kick back, relax, and sip a snifter of apple schnapps while listening to the Beatles recordings from their Apple record days and recall trips of my youth to farms to pick pumpkins and drink apple cider every year around my birthday.

Not that this made me obsessed with apples or anything.

Chicken with Apples and Cider

From The Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook

Ingredients:

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 Granny Smith apple, cored and sliced

1 tbsp packed dark brown sugar

4 (4 oz) skinless, boneless chicken breasts (I used skinless, boneless chicken tenders)

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp freshly ground pepper

1 medium onion, thinly sliced into rings

1/2 c apple cider

1/4 c apple cider vinegar

2 cups hot cooked wide noodles (I used No Yolks egg noodles)

Instructions:

In a large, non-stick skillet (I used a seasoned cast iron skillet) over medium heat, heat 1 tbsp of the oil. Saute the apple until lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle with brown sugar; cook, stirring frequently, until tender, 3-5 minutes longer. Transfer to a plate.
On a sheet of wax paper, sprinkle the chicken with the cinnamon, salt, and pepper. In the skillet, heat the remaining 1 tbsp oil. Saute the chicken until browned, 4-5 minutes on each side. Transfer to another plate.
In the skillet, cook the onion, covered, until tender, 6-8 minutes; stir in the cider and vinegar. Reduce the heat and simmer 2 minutes. Return the chicken to the skillet; simmer, spooning the sauce over the chicken, until chicken is cooked through and liquid is reduced by half, 4-5 minutes.
Return the apples to the skillet; cook until heated through, about 2 minutes. Arrange the noodles on a platter; top with the chicken mixture, pouring any remaining juices over the chicken

Serves 4; Points Value: 8.

_{1: These are the word “apple” in French, Spanish, and Japanese, respectively}

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