"healthy cooking" news and stories

At George Brown College in Toronto, cooks who work in community kitchens and local schools got a lesson in healthy cooking from trained professionals, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported.

The program is called Community Health Education through Food -- or CHEF -- and hopefully students will take what they learn back to their organizations to spread the gospel of healthy eating.

There's an entire library of books out there to help busy parents cook for their families, who are faced not only with the problem of time, but also health. Some of them focus strictly on lunches, other on a whole days of foods from breakfast to school lunches, to snacks, and dinner. These are just a few I've come across that look helpful:

1. Quick Meals for Healthy Kids and Busy Parents: Wholesome Family Recipes in 30 Minutes or Less
2. The Healthy Lunchbox
3. Family Fun Fast Family Dinners
4. Beyond Macaroni and Cheese (but really, is there anything beyond a good macaroni and cheese?)
   
5. Kid Favorites Made Healthy from Better Homes & Gardens
6. The Sneaky Chef
7. Lunch Lessons
8. Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food
   

For every calorie you ingest on any given day, there are probably just as many diets, tips, how-tos, and recipes for salads and protein shakes. I don't believe there is an end-all be-all list anywhere, and I am somewhat skeptical about "tips" from so many experts on every website.

However, I do have all kinds of respect for the Mayo Clinic, which has a list of five ways to "makeover" your recipes to make them healthier (not just for dieting, but overall health). They aren't simple one-liners like "reduce the amount of fat" which we already know. The Mayo Clinic article gives us more information on how to do it, where, and by how much. Details are on their site, but the five tips are:

1. Reduce the amount of fat, sugar and sodium
2. Make a healthy substitution
3. Delete an ingredient
4. Change the method of preparation
5. Change the portion size

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Forbes.com recently ran a spread on healthy meals by celebrity chefs. I'm not quite sure I identify with the opening sentiment: "Just as we like recognizable brands for our clothes, our technology, our cars and our music, we like recognizable chefs informing us about what to eat." But still, some of the offerings from chefs like Lidia Bastianich, Wylie Dufresne and Nobu Matsuhisa are fun to browse. Dufresne's dish of course involves sous vide. Others, like Suzanne Goin's salad of blood oranges, dates, almonds and Parmigiano are much simpler. Emeril, even when pushed to cook under the guise of health, still manages to incorporate heavy cream and half a pound of butter.

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