
Boring Menu: Ways to Healthify Your Favorite Recipes
What’s on your menu this week? Do you have a list of go-to recipes for your family? Are you ready to healthify your favorite recipes?
Do you feel like a healthy diet consists of a daily grilled chicken salad? Rabbit food anyone? Carrots?
I remember my son asking me one evening “What’s for dinner?” And my husband sarcastically replied, “Chicken, chicken, or chicken?”
Ok, so I could get by with eating the same thing everyday. I don’t mind that my daily meals are pretty much the same, but my family wants a little variety. So how do you keep some variety and stick with healthy choices?
No more boring menus. Ideas on how to healthify your favorite recipes. #healthyliving Click To Tweet
Protein and Dairy Options
Besides chicken, you have turkey, pork, and lean cuts of beef. Starkist tuna has so many different flavors of tuna in their ready-to-go packets. I love the new buffalo flavor, and the sweet and spicy has been a longtime favorite of mine as well. My husband and son deer hunt, and we enjoy venison. Bacon, anyone? You haven’t had bacon until you’ve had deer bacon…just sayin! We get most of it ground, so I use that in meatloaf, chili (well, my husband makes chili, not me!), tacos, spaghetti, hamburgers.
Low fat cottage cheese is a good source of protein as well as nonfat plain greek yogurt. In recipes calling for cream cheese, you can use lowfat or nonfat cream cheese or greek yogurt. In recipes calling for sour cream, you can use plain greek yogurt.
When it comes to milk, you can gradually switch from whole to 2% to 1% to maybe even skim eventually. And now there are several alternatives. I use unsweetened almond milk in cooking a lot. Again, big reduction in calories and the lactose in regular milk can have negative effects on some tummies.
Salad Menu
You can do so much with a salad. After your lettuce, you can toss in all kinds of cut up veggies, maybe even some fresh fruit (grapes, strawberries, or oranges), dried fruit (raisins, tart cherries), low fat cheese, lean protein, a few nuts (slivered almonds or walnuts).
Dessert Menu
I love baking with oat flour these days. There’s also almond flour and coconut flour as well as whole wheat flour. (Be sure to read about measuring adjustments if you use a different type of flour.) For sweeteners there’s stevia. Honey and pure maple syrup can be used in some recipes. Coconut oil is very popular these days in both solid or liquid form to replace oils or butter in a recipe. Protein powder is also an option to add a little flavor (vanilla or chocolate) in the place of the sugar and/or flour.
These are just a few quick ideas to get you thinking about how to make small changes to recipes to either add nutrition or lessen the fat, calories, and processed stuff.
Get creative! Don’t be afraid to try some new things and new tricks when you’re in the kitchen!
Learn ways to healthify your favorite recipes and links to some of my favorite foodies! #recipes Click To Tweet
For more inspiration, visit the following websites! I refer to them often!
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I get sick of just chicken so I try to do lots of other lean meats too.
i couldn’t do just chicken, chicken, chicken like you.
My poor husband is all I can say 😉 He likes all the spices, garlic, onions, etc added to dishes and I like none of that. He and my son hunt deer and turkey, so we eat a lot of that. I love venison!
Love this! We get sick of chicken meals so often… it seems like that’s all there ever is!
Thanks Alyssa!
I think anything can be made healthier with a little creativity!
Totally! Just a slight change here or there and a willingness to try new things.
Sounds like my husband! We do eat a lot of chicken. Beef doesn’t agree with me, so we rarely have it here.
They’ll thank us for it when they live well into their 90s 😉
These are great ideas! I like varying it up with different types of lean proteins! (And yay for throwing all sorts of things into salads!)
Thanks Farrah! I love a big salad!