We are back from our trip. With all the good food at the various restaurants we went to, we didn’t eat particularly low fat. We didn’t go completely overboard. We never ordered dessert. And we did buy some fruit (bananas and grapes) to keep in our hotel room for snakcs. I did gain a couple pounds over our trip.
But now we are home. Last night I made Linguine With Clam Sauce. That is very low fat. I work today. So I will be taking several Healthy Choice or Lean Cuisine meals to work with me.
I continued to workout on our trip, running most of my scheduled miles, and doing some swimming too.
I had a meal at one restaurant that they called Linguine Chicken Tettrazini. I was going to try to make a low fat version of it, but the recipes I have found sound different than what I had in the restaurant. I think what I had in the restaurant was closer to a pasta alfredo. But the alfredo sauce was a little more liquid. I don’t know. I will dig through my cook books for something interesting to make.
Looking for a low-fat snack? Think pretzels. They are relatively inexpensive. The bag I have in front of me is made by Rold Gold. They are small pretzels about an inch and half across. A serving consists 16 pretzels. A serving has 110 calories and only 10 of those come from fat. The source of the other 100 calories is the 2 grams of protein and the 23 grams of carbohydrates. And if you think those carbs look scary, sugars make up less than 1 gram of them. That means most of those carbs are the good complex starchy kind!
The downside of pretzels is the 450 mg of sodium. That’s a lot of salt! An average Healthy Choice meal seems to have around 600mg. That’s for a whole meal. And 16 pretzels can be wolfed down in no time.
But pretzels are a convenient snack food. They don’t need to be heated or cooled. They really don’t go bad quickly.
My wife and I are celebrating our 13th wedding anniversary. We are currently staying in a hotel overlooking Niagara Falls on the Canadian side. We actually came to the hotel yesterday. We had brought some pretzels with us, and but no other snacks. Our room has a small fridge with overpriced drinks (liquor, beer, wine). We were not interested in there alcoholic beverages at all, but we did load it up with Diet Pepsi, and Diet A&W Root Beer that we had brought with us. We went out for an overpriced dinner last night at TGI Fridays, but we wanted some snack foods. We headed off in search of a grocery store. But they were closed as it was now 7:30 on a Sunday night. We took note of where it was, and head back to the hotel. We just snacked on the pretzels.
Today after a quick trip back to the US side to mail off our taxes, we headed to the grocery store. I wanted some bananas. I thought about bringing some with it, but was leery of trying to cross the border with produce. In the grocery store, we bought 3 bunches of bananas (a little green), and 2 bags of red grapes. I found some tapioca pudding made with skim milk. Each pudding has 120 calories and 3 grams of fat. The Canadian packaging doesn’t list calories from fat, but at 9.5 calories per gram of fat, that works out to 28.5 calories or about 24% calories from fat. The chocolate and vanilla flavors each had 4 grams of fat. I would have preferred fat-free pudding but didn’t see any. Too bad our hotel didn’t have a microwave. We could have maybe found some fat-free hotdogs, gotten some buns, and ketchup. Yum! We do have a coffee maker. I wonder if I could cook the hotdogs by letting them sit in the carafe of heated water? That could be interesting to try. We will be here for a couple more days.
LOL! I just realized that I don’t have spoons for the pudding.
At home, it is easy to stock the fridge with low-fat food. But while traveling, you are usually limited to eating in restaurants. And most restaurants have a limited choice of low-fat food. And when looking through the menus, there are so many delicious looking choices. The handful of low-fat healthy choices are usually buried. Some restaurants will mark the low-fat, or healthy choices with some sort of symbol like a heart. So you can look for these. But even if they have the healthy foods well marked, it is hard to pick the good-for-you stuff over the not-so-good-for-you stuff. If you are on vacation, it makes it that much easier to eat the not-so-healthy stuff. Well, try to use some restraint. You are on vacation you can relax a little. You don’t need to kill yourself eating healthy ALL THE TIME. But try to use some restraint. Don’t order an appetizer, AND a full meal, AND a dessert. Skip the appetizer, and skip the dessert. And when you order the meal, if you aren’t going to order one the healthy things, then at least don’t order the least healthy things. Skip choices that are full of fat. Skip the Fettuccini Alfredo which is full of heavy cream and cheese. Skip the deep fried foods. And just because you get a plate full of food, doesn’t mean you have to eat it all. Think moderation. Just because you aren’t going to eat as healthy as you normally eat, doesn’t mean you need to go overboard the other direction.
I am always trying to eat low fat when I can. I have some friends who are also trying to eat low fat. But in my house, there is just my wife and I. My friends each have spouses and a couple kids to feed. One of them brought up the fact that cooking low fat can be more expensive. Boneless skinless chicken breasts are more expensive than a pack of legs and thighs. Extra lean ground beef is more expensive than the cheaper 80% ground beef, etc. It’s true. It can be more expensive to prepare low fat foods. And when you are feeding a family of four… And if you are on a budget, things can get worse. I played with the idea of gathering a collection of cheap low-fat recipes, and maybe even publishing a book of them. But what is cheap? And I don’t know how to do all that stuff of listing grams of fat, and calories and stuff. I guess I could find out how many calories and grams of fat are in a chicken breast, but what about after cooking? Whatever.
Anyway, I was researching, and I found a book already exists that is filled with low-fat low-cost recipes. It is titled Prevention’s Low-Fat, Low Cost Cookbook. It has 220 recipe plus twenty $2 dinners. Each of the recipes lists the cost per serving. But since prices change, I don’t expect that they will be enitirely accurate. But the recipes should still be relatively cheap to make, and give you and idea of about how much they cost compared to other recipes in the cookbook.
There is another book titled Prevention’s low-fat, low-cost freezer cookbook that has recipes that you can cook and freeze. I have the first book, but I am going to order the freezer version of the book as well. I love cooking larger batches, and then dividing and freezing them. Actually the part I love is being able to come home, pull something out of the freezer and just heat it up and have ready to eat.