Cooking Hacks: How to Make your Favourite Dishes Healthier

Having a healthy diet doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. You just have to be savvy in the kitchen. Here are seven ways to make your favorite dishes with more nutritious without changing their taste or composition radically. 1. Use organic oats. Love having bowls of steaming hot oatmeal, garnished with fresh fruits, for breakfast? Want to make it even healthier? Use organic oats! Not only are they loaded with fiber and antioxidants, but they also aid digestion and weight loss. You can get some from just about any organic shop in Singapore. 2. Increase the veggie components of your dish. If you like a particular veggie ingredient and adding more to the dish won’t alter its overall taste, then don’t be stingy. Add more of it to your dish. Don’t treat the veggie as a garnish or a flavor enhancer. Treat it as one of the main components of the dish when you cook and eat it. 3. Swap refined sugar for more natural alternatives. You don’t have to reduce your favorite dish’s sweetness to cut back its sugar content. You just have to use healthier sweeteners. Instead of sugar, use honey or syrup. If you want to make sure you’re sweetener is extra healthy, use naturally sweet fruits or any available organic sweetener (e.g., organic maple syrup). 4. Be mindful of your salty seasonings. Almost all sweet and savory dishes require a certain amount of salt. And, that’s expected. It is, after all, one of the simplest and most effective ways to enhance a meal’s flavor. But, that doesn’t mean that you can’t use alternative seasonings to brighten your meal. Instead of plain salt, consider using lemon juice or vinegar. If you’re having guests over for dinner, give them the chance to season their own food. Have a lemon slice or a salt shaker on hand. 5. Regulate the fat and oil content of your dishes. If you’re frying on a pan, use as minimal oil as possible. Using a reliable non-stick pan helps. If you’re deep-frying, which means using huge amounts of oil is unavoidable, use healthy oils like canola, olive, and coconut. Not only are they more forgiving to your overall health, but they also add more flavor to the dish. Another great tactic to cut down on fat is to use less than what the recipe requires. Or, if you’re cooking a particularly oily dish, make it a point to pause and remove excess oil whenever you can. Is your dish is drying out? Don’t re-hydrate it with oil. Add a little water, reheat, and stir. 6. Ramp up the fiber. Instead of using white flour and rice in your dishes, opt for their whole wheat and brown counterparts respectively. You can buy these organic products from shops in Singapore. Doing so will have you producing dishes that will keep you full and satisfied longer. 7. Cook meat strategically. Avoid methods that use a lot of oil. As much as possible, poach, boil, roast, grill, bake, or microwave your meat. When cooking mincemeat, drain the excess oil out of it once it’s browned before adding any other ingredients. When roasting, make sure the fat drips away from the meat by using a grill rack or spit. So, what are you waiting for? Reduce the fat, sugar, salt, and calorie content of all your homemade dishes from now on to enhance your physical and mental well-being!