Whole Grains

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1. Shift Your Focus
Make vegetables and complex grains—not meat—the meal's centerpiece.
Grocery Checkout Line

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2. Vote With Your Pocketbook
If those tomatoes or melons that you buy out of habit consistently look good but taste awful, reject them. If other customers do the same, the grocer will have a compelling economic reason to change his wicked ways.
Cow

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3. Treat Yourself to Better Meat
Buy a little bit of good meat rather than a lot of cheap meat. Naturally raised meat requires less fat-trimming and has more marbling, making it fulfilling even in small amounts.
Vegetables

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4. Think Fresh
Whenever possible, buy local, seasonal, and organic.

6 steps to local and sustainable eating
Vegetable Stock

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5. Choose a Healthier Stock Option
Use vegetable stock instead of chicken stock.
Potatoes

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6. Get a New Roux
Use potatoes, rice, cornstarch, or barley—not cream, butter, or flour—to thicken soups and sauces.
Rosemary and Mint

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7. Fresh Flavors
Add flavor to a dish with fresh herbs and spices rather than fat.
Applesauce

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8. No! More! Hydrogenated! Oil!
Substitute applesauce or prune puree for oil in cakes.
Egg White

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9. Yolks Be Gone
Use egg whites rather than yolks as much as you can.
Latkes

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10. Small Potatoes
Don't change a thing on your mother's mouthwatering holiday menu—except the portion size.
Cake

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11. If It Gets Sprayed Out of a Can, Don't Eat It
Instead of whipped cream, try organic yogurt with vanilla beans and maybe some fresh mint. If, on occasion, you feel like treating yourself to whipped cream, by all means do so—but don't go near that ghostly, greasy white stuff that's sold as whipped topping.

Get 6 healthy and delicious recipes from Chef Cary Neff
Published 01/01/2003