If some of the great Chef Escoffier’s famous dishes can be updated and remain delicious, lighter and more nutritious by his professional heirs and – bonus! – made healthier as well, why not do the same with your favorite recipes?
Lightening up your ingredients will not only improve your health but ease the weight on your gallbladder – which, as we will remember, according to Eastern medicine, is the meridian associated with migraine headaches. Any improvement there will benefit the rest of your body. Any gout sufferer will understand.
Here are a few tips that work in my kitchen.
Air fryers are amazingly efficient. I am now enjoying formerly deep-fried foods. I like making crinkly potato fries and not having greasy fingers when I pick them up.
As for ketchup, I am slowly experimenting and developing my own homemade version, using lime or lemon juice instead of vinegar – aside from being perhaps more easily digestible, the extra vitamins are a plus.
Instead of so much salt, I find a powdered mix of dried herbs works just as well.
Steamed asparagus, fresh out of the steamer, still piping hot, instantly drizzled and tossed with a generous amount of lemon or lime juice, and the latter allowed to evaporate – I find the citrus juice, evaporated, leaves a tangy, salty taste behind. Works with other steamed vegetables as well.
Do you like a big dollop of sour cream in soup or with potato pancakes? Replace half the sour cream with an equal amount of yogurt, left in a cheesecloth for a few hours so the whey can be removed. I use the whey to water outdoor flowers, knowing I’ll be watering them with pure water the next day to cut down on any insect pests and yet give my plants extra nutrition.
Try using tofu as a replacement for some of the cream in recipes. Unless you are a trained professional chef or a rare individual with a fine palate, you probably won’t notice much of a difference.
Want your soups more creamy, more unctuous? Blend cooked potato or cannellini beans and add them to a dish or sauce. You will be surprised.
When I clean my spice grinder or mill, depending on whether these are savory or dessert spices, I put in some fresh bread cubes and reduce them to fine breadcrumbs, bag and freeze them until I have enough to thicken a sauce or soup or add to a cake batter. It not only thickens the mix, but the extra flavor is very nice.
Steam vegetables as much as you can. Not only is steam hotter than boiling water, so vegetables will cook more quickly, but they retain their firmness, color and flavor more. Add the remaining water to vegetable cuttings to make your next broth.
Replace oil with water whenever you can. There is a delicious dish called Hammarah (a mix of ground walnuts, breadcrumbs, spices, oil, and other ingredients, eaten with pita bread) – a Middle Eastern friend of mine prepares it with quite a bit of oil. I’ve discovered that if I replace most of the oil with water, there is still enough oil for the dish to be full of flavor, moist, yet it contains fewer calories and respects the tradition.
Do you like to brown your onions in oil before adding the other ingredients? I use very little oil, and add a half cup or a cup of water, allowing the onions to release their sugars into the water, yet soften, and then only at the last minute will they caramelize with less oil.
Make sure your vegetables are thoroughly cleaned and scrubbed before doing anything further with them. Vegetable peelings and cuttings? Onion skins? Stems and seeds? Seeds and cores? If you can’t cook them in a broth right away, bag and freeze until you have enough to fill a big pot with water. Then put through a cheesecloth over a sieve and use the broth or freeze it until needed. You control the quality of the ingredients, and there are no additives such as are found in commercial broth cubes.
Hands down, the best applesauce I ever made was when I added a bit of fresh pineapple puree to the apples. I added the peel to the apples, to get a pink hue to the applesauce, and removed the peel at the end. I had also added some whole cloves and cinnamon sticks, some raisins brought to the boil in a bit of rum the night before, then set aside to soak, removed from the rum with a slotted spoon, and added to the apples before simmering the lot. The rum was added as liquid to a fruit cake loaf.
Trying to cut down on refined sugar? Can you replace it with pineapple or mango puree in a jam recipe? One thing I have not tried yet, but which I will experiment with are the new freeze-dryers – I intend to put various fruit in them, pulverize, and use instead of sugar in dessert recipes and jams. I anticipate the results will be delicious.
There are so many mayonnaise replacements found on YouTube – I don’t know where to start! With, without herbs and other ingredients. Without eggs or with far less oil, yet full of flavor.
Here’s where the Internet is so useful once again – look up “replacing (fill in the blank) with another ingredient” – and allow yourself to be surprised.
It’s the holiday season – the children are all around. Ask any 8-year-old to do some research. They are better computer experts than most adults, and they will be contributing to your being able to set a better table for family and friends.
Bon Appétit – and Happy Holidays!
