Cooking at home is an important part of any healthy eating plan. It allows you to not only save money but to control what and how much you eat. Restaurant food can be filled with enormous amounts of saturated fat and sodium—and is expensive. Plus, huge portions are not uncommon. The good news is that with some small changes to your full fat recipes, you can eat your favorite foods more often.
Fat is probably one of the most undesirable ingredients in many recipes. Some of the more obvious changes you can make are to exchange full fat cheese with reduced fat cheese, or regular salad dressing with a reduced fat version. Always look for reduced fat or low fat versions of high fat ingredients.
Here are some other ways to decrease the fat in your recipes:
For 1 oz of baking chocolate exchange 3 Tbsp of cocoa powder; 1 cup of heavy cream exchange 1 cup evaporated fat free milk; 1 whole egg exchange 2 egg whites; 1 cup of any type of fat (such as butter) exchange 1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce or some other type of fruit puree, such as plum puree (This is especially good in brownies); 1 cup sour cream exchange 1 cup plain nonfat yogurt.
Healthy Action Step: Try one or more of these substitutions in your favorite recipe.
