Healthier Home Cooking

Nowadays, we're all trying to save money. One of the top ways to do this is by cutting down on restaurant eating and preparing food at home. With our busy lives, many of us have become so accustomed to eating out that we've unlearned or lost the skills needed for healthy home cooking. So, it's time to regroup and regain those skills of meal planning, grocery shopping and cooking at home. It's a great way to save money and calories.

There's a lot that goes into home cooking, in what I call a 3-part skill set:

Meal planning
Food shopping
Food preparation/cooking

In some households, one person has all three skills. In others, it's divided up in multiple ways.

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Planning and shopping go hand-in-hand. Make a list and stick to it. But what about cooking? Whether you're comfortable with the basics, or ready for your own show on the Food Network, healthy home cooking is all about healthier ingredients (to reduce fat, salt, and calories) and portion size.

Portion distortion is an ongoing problem in our country, and only seems to be getting worse. So, what is a portion anyway? The answer is anything you want it to be. You'll want to pay attention to how many servings per recipe - and adjust them when needed. A recent study compared recipes from the same cookbook, with a current and older (by more than 20 years) edition. Take The Joy of Cooking for example. The older edition had far less fat in many recipes and served more people per recipe when compared to the same recipes in the new, updated edition. I think that reflects our impressions of what a serving is based on restaurant servings, where the food is flopping off the plate. No, a half chicken is not one serving: It's two... and 3 cups of pasta is 3 servings: Not one. You see where I'm going with this. We've lost all sense of scale when it comes to serving size.

Plus, our salad plates are now the size of older dinner plates. And dinner plates are the size of platters. Big plates cause us to load them up with more food, so you've got to make a conscience effort to downsize you plates, silverware, and glassware. Now that's a change that doesn't take a lot of effort, but is a big part of the picture.