The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal
Creating healthier food choices
Here’s another way to liven up some dull chicken breasts — stuff them with spinach and artichokes.
The recipe is fairly straight-forward and includes nutrition information so you can monitor salt, fat and sugar intake from this dish. I’m a little surprised it isn’t higher in sodium given the cheese used. Hopefully the reported numbers are correct.
Click through to get all the details.
Continue reading “Love artichokes? Love spinach? Try this spinach and artichoke-stuffed chicken”If you’re like me, you’re growing tomatoes in your backyard this summer. Here’s a recipe to turn them into a tasty side dish — roasted tomatoes. I’ve written about making a roasted tomato sauce in the past, if that interests you, click here to read about it.
The roasted tomato recipe comes from the Food Network site and chef Ina Garten. While the recipe details roasting in an oven, you could easily do this on an outside grill as well.
12 plum tomatoes, halved lengthwise, cores and seeds removed
4 tablespoons good olive oil
1 1/2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 large garlic cloves, minced
2 teaspoons sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt (leave this out or substitute Mrs. Dash salt substitute)
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Summer grilling season is here and we can always use a new heart-healthy grilled chicken recipe. So try this, Grilled Caprese Chicken. The recipe comes from EatingWell.com.
While you can make this on an outdoor grill, it would probably work best on a grilling pan put on the grill to keep all the juices from dripping down into the fire source, be it gas jets or charcoal. Using a charcoal grill would add that charcoal-ly flavor as well.
Here’s the recipe and instructions. I’d leave out the salt and get the lowest-fat mozzarella you can find. Some stores may still have fat-free mozzarella. I was able to find it pre-Pandemic, but haven’t seen it since Covid hit and stores starting cutting the variety of items they carry.
Note that the recipe calls for chicken cutlets, which are very thin and cook quickly. If you use regular chicken breasts, either pound them down to a thin consistency or cut them into thinner pieces to avoid under-cooked chicken. A meat thermometer is a must here.
I’ve always been a giant tomato fan, perhaps because we always had them handy in the Italian-American household of my youth. I’m always on the lookout for fun tomato dishes, and this one, Tomato Salad with Lemon-Basil Vinaigrette, fits the bill.
I like its use of heirloom tomatoes. If you’ve never had those, find some and enjoy. Their flavor is so much more intense than most store-bought tomatoes. And, as this recipe notes, you can find them in different colors and combine them for a colorful salad.
This salad uses heirloom tomatoes and English cucumber. It also has a simple recipe for a lemon-basil vinaigrette. I’d leave out the salt and use low- or no-fat feta instead of regular feta to get the salt content down even more than the 213 mgs of sodium per serving noted in the recipe.
The ingredient list is:
You can watch this video for assembly instructions.
Tuna steak is a great lean alternative to beef steaks. I regularly grill them in the summer months. Here’s a basic recipe for grilling tuna from the Food Network. Leave out the salt, of course.
And here’s how I recently went beyond the basic recipe to add even more flavor to our tuna steaks. I added some low-salt mango salsa I bought at Trader Joe’s. You can see on the TJ nutrition information page the salsa has only 35 mgs of sodium per serving, much less than most pre-made salsas. It also has no fat and only 3 grams of sugar per two tablespoons, enough to coat the tuna.
To go even more tropical, I added slices of fresh pineapple. Pineapple sales has been plentiful this summer in the Chicago area. A whole pineapple is going for 88 cents, so I’m using it in more recipes than ever before.
With food prices rising because of the “Pandemic, look for every deal you can find and adjust your no-salt, no-fat, no-sugar recipes accordingly.
No-Churn Strawberry-Lemonade Sorbet sounded like an easy, fat-free dessert that anyone could make easily at home. It has only two ingredients, strawberries and lemonade mix. How difficult could it be?
Harder than it sounds, I discovered. Here’s the recipe”
Ingredients
16 ounces (about 4 cups) frozen strawberries
3 tablespoons frozen lemonade concentrate
The three tablespoons of frozen lemonade concentrate stopped me because my concentrate was frozen and liquid. I measured out three tablespoons of the frozen part and added some extra liquid, which proved to be too much lemon (and I love lemon flavor). So I’d recommend dialing down the amount of lemon you use to suit your taste.
I’d also probably opt for fresh strawberries next time. A pound of frozen ones cost me $3.99 but this time of year, fresh ones are often on sale for less ($2.50) and they likely will be more flavorful.
With all those tweaks in mind, this can be a tasty July 4th fat-free dessert option. It does still have sugar (the amount is difficult to determine without nutritional info in the original recipe).
Tilapia has become a fish you can easily buy in most supermarkets these days, I’ve included several rcipes for it already on my recipe page, such as Greek Roasted Tilapia and Tilapia with Chilis. But I’m always looking for more recipes, so was intrigued by this one for Jamaican-style lime-poached fish. The recipe suggests several types of white fish work in it, including tilapia.
Here are the ingredients, I’d leave out the salt, there’s plenty of flavor here without it.
Ingredients:
½ bunch fresh Italian parsley
4 cloves garlic
2 small, fresh jalapeños
2 cups no-salt-added vegetable stock (or broth), divided
¼ cup lime juice (plus additional for serving, optional)
1 cup diced yellow onion
½ teaspoon pepper, divided
3 oz sliced green onions, divided
2 (6 oz) white fish fillets (such as haddock, snapper or tilapia, about 12 oz.)
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
The instructions:
If you try it, let me know how it turns out.
When I see a headline like “9 Amazing Broccoli Recipes Everyone Will Love” I have to stop and read it. AS I suspected, however, most of these ‘amazing’ recipes were high in salt, or fat, or both. I did find one, however, that would fit our low-salt, low-fat, low-sugar criteria, roasted garlic lemon broccoli.
The recipe is simple to make as well:
Memorial Day cookouts should be a little more special this year as families become fully vaccinated and so gather again. You can grill and eat relatively low-salt, low-fat and low-sugar, just check some of the recipes on my recipe page. Or try this new recipe I found recently for stuffed turkey burgers.
This burger is basically healthier take on the Minnesota classic jucy Lucy, which is two burger patties squished together around a center of cheese.
For the turkey burger, the creator (she has a video you can watch) suggests lean ground turkey and part-skim mozzarella. I go farther and get either fat-free mozzarella or reduced fat mozzarella which has even less fat than the skim kind.
You stuff your turkey burgers with mozzarella and roasted red pepper, seal them, and then grill like you would any other burger. The full recipe is here, just click.
Lean ground turkey is a great substitute for ground beef. I use it in meatballs, tacos and even meatloaf, as well as for burgers.
With summer just around the corner, I’m cleaning out my in-bin of several cookbooks sent to me over the past year that can help you eat healthier.
The first is The Clean & Simple Diabetes Cookbook by Jackie Newgent, which is backed by the American Diabetes Association. As the name implies, it uses simple, whole ingredients to crate a full menu of dishes that avoid or minimize sugar.
Secondly, check out the American Heart Association cookbook page for 17 cookbooks aimed to provide heart-healthy recipes. I thin the AHA often doesn’t go far enough in eliminating salt, fat and sugar from many of the produces and recipes it endorses, but these recipes are a good starting point, modify them further to eliminate more of the evil big three as you cook. I reviewed one of these books, Cooking in Color, just click here to read what I said about it.
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The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal 