How To Cook Healthy Without Letting On?

potato PancakesSometimes it is the very concept of healthy cooking that may put off one or two of your family members.

If its veggies, there is likely to be a disdainful response to them, however with a little creativity, you can dress up the food in a way that does not let on that one really making it healthy.

One way to do it is to slip the veggies into regular food in a puree form that won’t let the veggies be detected and will not even alter the taste of dish.

Deceptively Delicious is a recipe book written by Jessica Seinfeld that seeks to disarm the mealtime battles with vegetables.

Here one finds a bunch of ‘sneaky’ recipes that lets you enrich the nutritional quotient of a meal by upping the vegetable content of it in an undetectable manner. So here you have recipes such as,

  • Meatloaf, with carrot
  • The eternal favorite of chicken nuggets but with broccoli, spinach or sweet potato
  • Chocolate cake with, hold your breath, beets!
  • Pancakes with sweet potato
  • Blue berry oatmeal bars with, guess what? Spinach
  • Scrambled eggs with cauliflower
  • Brownies with carrot and spinach

If that sounds interesting, you can read more about the book here.

So using sneaky ingredients is one way to cook healthy, another way is the modus operandi: how you cook, what you are cooking in, what you use for cooking are all as important. For this you can use the following tips:

  • When grandmother’s recipe said, ‘fry’ try grilling instead. Using a fraction of the fat that you would for frying you can try simply basting.
  • Or there is the eternal favorite, stir frying. This is a great way not to overcook the food, and retain just the right amount of crunch. Stir frying is a great way not to get too much into the food.
  • Don’t boil; instead steam. When you boil veggies, they tend to lose their color, crispness and tend not to look that appetizing. Also boiling means that you drain away the water, and along with that, a lot of the nutrients of the veggies and that crisp bite that the veggies can retain by steaming or stir frying
  • For all of us who love chicken, ditch the skin. That is where most of its fat is. There are lots of ways in which to cook chicken without the skin. You retain the protein and not the fat.