Good-bye to the Old Year; Welcome to the New

It’s that time of year when many start thinking about New Year’s resolutions which frequently include losing a few pounds or starting a healthier diet. Jean is here to help with some tips on how to ...

Make Your Favorite Recipes Healthier
If you’ve had any lifelong special dietary needs due to conditions like juvenile diabetes or celiac disease, you’re probably pretty good at making your own recipe substitutions. Eventually almost all of us are advised to watch something in our diets. It could it to lower our salt intake, cholesterol or calories or to avoid whole milk, chocolate or caffeine.

You can buy cookbooks like Lisa Lillian’s Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the Real World where you’ll find healthier versions of onion rings (Lord of the Onion Rings) and eggs Benedict (Eggs Bene-chick) and lots of other yummy things.

Lisa is the queen of food swaps. You can sign up for her free newsletter at Hungry Girl.com for a heads up whenever new healthier foods are introduced, as well as where to find them.

But what can you do with old family favorites, those personal treats you grew up with but now avoid because they contain too much fat, cholesterol, whatever? Take a lesson (or two) from Lisa’s book and create your own recipe swaps!

The Internet puts all the information you need at your fingertips. Take a look at your recipe and decide which ingredients you want to swap out. You can quantity the benefit of your new healthier version using an online calorie counter. I use The Calorie Counter.

Here’s a favorite family recipe that I recently updated. As a breakfast in itself (without a smorgasbord of other food choices), this recipe serves twelve. Each serving contains one slice of bread, 1 egg and two slices of bacon – a whole Breakfast in a Pan!

Happy New Year to all and Thank You for your continuing support!

Tags: Hungry Girl’s book, breakfast casserole, brunch recipe, recipes, healthy diet, recipe substitutions