Lightening up your favorite recipes: A guide to recipe substitutions
Everyone has a recipe or meal that is a favorite. Unfortunately,
sometimes those foods do nothing to help your heart or your
waistline.
Recipe substitutions can help you enjoy your favorite foods while
decreasing the amount of fat, sugar, salt, and calories. When changing
your recipes, you may want to eliminate, reduce, or replace.
Eliminate
When you look at your favorite recipe, ask yourself, “which of these
ingredients is essential?” For example, salting or adding fat to
water before cooking pasta, rice, or vegetables is not essential to
the finished product. Try to identify any ingredients that can be
left out or substituted without affecting the food.
Reduce
Sometimes you can reduce the amount of fat, sugar and salt in a
recipe without affecting taste and texture. For example, you can
sauté vegetables or meat in cooking spray in a non-stick