Scale It Down

Everybody's favorite go-to food arsenal? The drawer where they keep their collection of take-out menus.

Half the work of cooking is figuring out what you're going to make in the first place. How many times has, what's for dinner?, transcended into, pizza or Chinese? The biggest cooking saboteur, as far as we're concerned is time deficiency. Combine the lack of time with stress and frustration and you get a recipe for take-out foods. Coming up with ways to help control the take-out dependency took some doing. After much experimentation, the combination of speed, creativity and lower cal foods/ingredients provided a new outlook on an age-old food nemesis - or as we like to call it: Dunch, Garbage Cooking, Switcheroos & Recipes.

It occurred to us that the same premise we began using in stocking our shelves with better alternative go-to foods should also apply to cooking meals. It was time to start replacing take-out temptation with speed sensations - not to sound like an ad slogan for Kraft, but we needed all the help we could get. Most importantly, the success of this cooking equation had to be recipe free. We know there are thousands of recipes out there that boast fixin' times of 20 minutes. And while 20 minutes is a short time to produce a meal, it's not quick enough to battle the take-out urge - let alone for the fact that having to measure out ingredients makes cooking all the more tedious and time consuming to begin with.

We expedited the whole process by creating a very small (that's 3x5 index card small) checklist of quick fix meals for lunch and dinner and called it: Dunch . Using the microwave and ready-to-eat produce, we clocked ourselves from fridge to table in 10 minutes or less, longer for za, of course. Set all the ingredients out on the counter and make a buffet out of it and you'll shave even more time off the clock. We know, many of you out there still aren't convinced. Butt, the amount of time it took to choose a quick fix meal and make it, was no longer (and many times shorter) than the amount of time it took to order-in or pick up fast food.

Dunch Menu

Veggie or Soy Burgers / Turkey Dogs / Frozen Thin Pizzas Lean Cuisines, WW & Healthy Choice Entrees / Deli Sandwiches / Soup

WITH:

Low-cal Breads or Buns / Salads / Slaws / Fruits / Cooked or Fresh Vegetables Relishes & Olives / P.C. Chips, Pretzels or Crackers

P.C. means portion controlled

Incorporating Dunch and Everyday Eats into a daily regime helped make the process of weight reduction and control easier because all the low-cal homework was already done. There's nothing worse than having to deliberate over what each food and/or brand is the best caloric choice before you put them on the table. Ultimately, eating better foods the majority of the time eventually (and that is a long 'eventually'), becomes an instinctual process.

Turning Point >>>> To those who protest that using ready-to-eat foods are too expensive to buy, we wonder… how much are you spending on pizza deliveries and at drive-thrus?

The how and where of money spent always comes down to personal choice - and justification. We can justify just about anything when we have a strong desire to. The funny thing is we've all bought excessively priced things without thinking twice about it. If the truth be known, we cringed at the thought of paying $1.25 for an orange at the airport and then turned right around and paid $3 for a large gourmet cookie. Pathetic, isn't it?

We agree that ready-to-eat foods are pricey, but the good news is grocery stores have sales. Stocking up on frozen entree sales and buy-one-get-one-free promotions, helps defray the monetary pinch to save your bod an inch. Of course, you can also rely upon slicing, dicing and bagging your own produce beforehand - that is if you can find the time and energy to do it.

On those rare occasions when you have the urge to cook, not the Sunday dinner kind of cooking, but the inkling you get when you want to put a little effort into a meal (ie 20-30 minutes), we find Garbage Cooking is a must. This is a process of working from memory and using whatever you have on hand to put together a meal…kinda like Grandmas who cooked with a pinch of this and a handful of that would do. (Did they do most of their cooking freehand simply because that's the way they did it in the "old country" or was it because they made everything from scratch, and the last thing they needed to worry about was following a recipe when it came to baking 20 strudels at a time?) In other words, cooking a la garbage happens when you're not following recipes. No recipes means, no measuring tools and no fuss!

Kitchen Quip: Executive chefs cook like old grannies too…but when they cook, they create. When we were in the GMA fat house, the only paper we ever saw our chef follow in the kitchen was an outline of the day's menu with a few scribbled notes. Amazing! When pressed to pass out recipes for some of the wondrous dishes he'd made, it took him several hours to reconstruct them into words.

Our culinary garbage was lacking in a big way as far as calories go. Once we thought about it - twice - we realized we'd been garbage cooking very high caloric meals. Further consideration on this point led us to the conclusion that to build an effective low-cal garbage repertoire, thought had to be lent to what garbage was being cooked and how it was prepared.

Grandpa used to love telling people he was having "mustgo for dinner…[because] everything must go!" (Silly, yes, but coming from a grandfather it was cute.) Of course, he was referring to leftovers. Sometimes the best meals are created from leftovers and miscellaneous ingredients. The trick to making successful low-cal Mustgo is matching up the right stuff in the right blend through creativity, trial and error.

Meats - Believe it or not, we've actually rinsed gravies and sauces off of dinner meat, sliced it for sandwiches and/or cut it up for soups and salads days afterward. The same goes for restaurant doggie bags. If it keeps, it's eats! When time's a squeeze, freeze!

Poultry - Gone are the days of standing over the sink cutting and trimming the bones, skin and fat away from chicken. (Our Mothers used to do this for what seemed like hours - the un-plucked feather remnants made it an endless job.) Thank God, for chicken steaks!

Chicken Steaks are like Mustgo-in-waiting because they're one of the best staples to have on hand. When you forget to defrost them, it takes minutes to do so in the microwave. They're portion controlled and there's just no limit to what you can do with them: grill, bake, nuke, fry, chop, slice, dice, shred, reheat, serve cold - you name it. When we grill or bake them, we always make extra for sandwiches and salads during the week. When we get real industrious, we'll even cut them into strips and freeze them for stir-frying later. And the best part is they're featherless.

Vegetables & Fruit - Versatility, in as far as serving veggies hot or cold is key to creative low-cal cooking. Stretching this premise to the limits, we've come up with some very unusual and tasty combos for salads and side dishes using a variety of ingredients in the same bowl. If you never thought of combining certain things before, that's exactly the type of thing we're talking about. A can of mandarin oranges combined with leftover (not over cooked) vegetables, makes a great sidecar. Add slaw, raisins, canned beans and/or olives and it becomes a great salad. We even went as far as to open a can of mangos up one day, slice them into thin strips and serve them up as a tortilla filler for chicken fajitas. The sweetness added great flavor.

Rice & Pasta - Everything we love to eat always seems to have tons of calories. (It's that whole flour thing…) The good news is small amounts of leftover rice and pasta can go a long way in salads, soups and vegetable dishes. We don't care if we have to spritz a little water and nuke our noodles and rice to get the stickiness out first. It's well worth the fix to do it.

Cooking Methods Many of the directions on boxes of foods now include a statement that goes something like this: low-fat method - reduce oil or margarine by half, substitute skim milk or water for whole milk. Believe it or not, this concept really works. We know, it's tough to break that urge of cooking with butter and oil, but the pay-off is worth it. Rule of thumb: reduce cooking oils at least by half and/or use cooking sprays, seasonings and butter spray in lieu of them altogether.

How you cook your garbage is paramount to its low-cal success. Baking, grilling or stir-frying, of course, are the best ways to go. The beauty of stir-frying is it's mindless and quick. What you put into the pan, is what makes or breaks the meal. A good balance is 3:1 - that's a minimum of 3 parts vegetables to every one of meat or poultry. In the past, we allowed the lack of proper ingredients to prohibit stir-frying. Somewhere along the line we thought only fresh ingredients should be used to stir-fry, or was it that we were just looking for a good excuse to order out? Fresh, frozen and/or canned ingredients get dumped into the pan now, in addition to all those cans and boxes of unusual or new products (we just had to try) collecting dust in the cupboards. Timing is the most important thing - figuring out when to put what type of ingredients into the pan and for how long.

Have you ever read through a low-cal or low-fat cookbook and said to yourself, 'these recipes would drive me nuts!' This is exactly what we said upon receiving a hard covered annual edition of Lite Cooking. It was a beautiful book with gorgeous illustrations and way, WAY too many long-winded recipes.

Our fat mentality just seems to be on automatic hi-cal pilot when it comes to cooking: if we're going to put effort into following recipes then they better be good and fattening ones. Forever battling this mindset led us to believe there just had to be alternative ways of doing things. Focusing in on trying to turn our favorite cooks into lower calorie and quicker versions seemed to make more sense than adding new and lengthy recipes to the mix. In other words, substitution cooking, or pulling the old Switcheroo.

In the simplest sense, substituting ground turkey or Boca crumbles for ground beef does calorie wonders for spaghetti, sloppy joes and burgers. When it comes to recipe cooking and baking, the challenge gets tougher. There will be a difference in taste, but trial and error brings about an acceptable version of an old favorite. The process can be tedious, but well worth the effort to build a dependable low-cal cookbook of your own.

When we began revamping our own recipe files, the notion of cooking what was already familiar into a lower calorie version became an intriguing quest. How many desserts in our recipe boxes could be made less fattening? What would we have to do to our dips to make them more dipper friendly? Could we possibly create a reduced-calorie slice 'n bake cookie dough? The possibilities were endless! Here's a sample of what we're talking about…

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