Unthaw Yourself With These Healthy Cooking Alternatives

Do you often wish you could make delicious and flavorful meals at home but you assume that the recipe must incorporate a lot of butter, salt, and fats to taste good? Well there are ways to cook delicious, flavorful, and most importantly healthy meals throughout the week. I must say that it's easier just to pick up a frozen pizza or a "healthy option" frozen dinner at the supermarket, but you can make a much better version of these meals without taking much time.

The frozen dinners (even the supposedly healthier options) in the supermarket are loaded with fat, chemicals, calories, sugar, and most importantly salt. In order for these frozen meals to last and stay on the shelf they "need" these preservatives and chemicals in order to have a longer shelf life. Now I put the word need in quotes because honestly the food manufactures don't have to add a whole laundry list of chemicals and preservatives to preserve shelf life because these items are being purchased within a week, not years, or even decades! In my opinion there really isn't a need or purpose to add high fructose corn syrup or any other scientific chemical compound to preserve these frozen meals. The more preservatives the more sodium there is in the food. On average a frozen meal is over 50% of your daily recommended amount of sodium for the day and with many products the average amount of sodium is close to 100% of your whole days worth of sodium.

So in order to unthaw yourself from the frozen chains of the food manufacturers you have to learn and create healthier cooking alternatives. The most popular meals that I have at my house are pizza, chicken, salmon, and pasta. Now all of these meals are typically associated as being labeled as unhealthy food, but that's only because of the way the majority of the public prepares it. A lot of people enjoy cheesy pizza loaded with pepperoni and greasy sausage, deep fried chicken, farm raised salmon, and white pasta. You can still enjoy these foods and not feel the guilt that goes hand-in-hand with the fatty truth.

When you purchase a prepackaged frozen pizza it's convenient but you also have no control over what the ingredients are or how much of those ingredients are on the pizza. You can buy a package of multigrain or whole wheat dough from Whole Foods Market, that is loaded with fiber and only a few natural ingredients. After you roll out the dough you can make a great Margarita pizza. All you need is fresh basil, one whole onion, some fresh mozzarella (preferably the baseball form), and a can of no salt added crushed tomatoes. A lot of people use tomato sauce on their homemade pizza but the problem I have with jarred tomato sauce is the incredible amount of sugar in the sauce. When you pour almost a whole jar of tomato sauce you're getting a ton of added and hidden sugar and salt that you didn't expect to get. The can of crushed tomatoes gives the pizza a nice fresh, light, and refreshing taste.

Chicken is a very popular dish in many households but you have to be careful with the preparation of this bird. The one thing you want to avoid eating is the skin because it's just pure fat. When you're eating a chicken that's been deep fried you're eating all that fatty skin. In order to avoid the sinful skin of the chicken you can buy Belle and Evans organic skinless chicken breasts and bake it in the oven. You're probably thinking you still crave the crispy sensation from the deep fried skin, well you can still get that sensation without the fat! All you have to do is coat the chicken breasts with olive oil and then cover them with a mix of breadcrumbs (preferably Ian's Panko breadcrumbs), parsley, black pepper, and chopped garlic. Then all you have to do is bake the chicken in the oven and enjoy a great tasting and flavorful chicken dish without the added fat. If you're tired of having chicken you can always make falafel which is basically crushed chickpeas and parsley.

Salmon is a very healthy meal but if you're buying farm raised (Atlantic) salmon you're not getting all of the nutrients such as Omega 3 fatty acids as you would if you ate the wild salmon. Farmed raised salmon is very popular in restaurants but you can buy wild salmon in the frozen fish aisle in your supermarket. It's usually not much more money than farmed raised salmon and it has more Omega 3 fatty acids and less mercury and other potentially harmful compounds. I find it easy to buy and cook the wild salmon burger patties (found at Whole Foods Market). You can simply have it as a sandwich or in a salad (filled with fresh vegetables of course).