Miscellany: Learning to Eat Healthy, Part 3

A big part of eating healthy is cooking healthy. I don't really know how to cook beyond the bare basics, and it was flat-out intimidating to think about not only cooking a decent meal, but cooking a decent meal that was good for you.

Thankfully, Ellie Krieger's cookboook, "The Food You Crave," contains a boatload of recipes and tricks to get the most out of food without piling on butter, mayo, and oil. Krieger hosts the popular Food Network show "Healthy Appetite," and while she doesn't have any formal culinary training, she was an adjunct professor of nutrition at NYU, so she knows what she's talking about.

In Ellie Krieger's book, there are no "off-limits" foods; instead, some ingredients are to be used "sometimes" or "rarely" instead of "often" (red meat, for instance, is a "sometimes" food, and butter is a "rarely" food). The book is big and well-produced, with some 200 recipes covering breakfast, desserts, main dishes, pastas, and salads. There are color photos and little tips scattered throughout, so it's a lively cookbook.

I tried out two of the salads - a spinach, mushroom and bacon salad with an apple-cider vinaigrette, and a Thai-style beef salad made with flank steak, red leaf lettuce, and shallots. Both were pretty good (aside from the fact that I overcooked the flank steak pretty badly on my George Foreman grill - more about that later), but the spinach salad stood out in particular as being healthy without being bland:



Ingredients

SALAD
10 ounces pre-washed baby spinach (kinda pricey, but it's convenient)
2 slices bacon, finely chopped
3 ounces Canadian bacon, finely chopped (you can go all bacon if you want a richer taste, or all Canadian bacon for an even leaner salad - hard-boiled eggs can be subbed in for vegetarians)
2 teaspoons olive oil
1/2 red onion, sliced (about 1 cup)
1 pound button mushrooms, coarsely chopped (since these will brown, don't cut them too small otherwise they'll get lost in the shuffle)

DRESSING (I'd advise making more than this - when I made the recipe, I barely had enough dressing to put over the salad)
1 cup apple cider
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
Salt and pepper

Directions

Place spinach into a large bowl. Cook bacon in a large skillet over medium heat for about 4 minutes, or until it is just crispy. Add Canadian bacon to the skillet and cook for 2 more minutes, stirring frequently. Remove meat from pan and place on a plate lined with paper towels. Drain any remaining fat from the skillet. Add olive oil and onions to the skillet and cook for about 2 minutes, or until onions soften slightly. Add mushrooms to the pan and cook, stirring frequently, for 2 more minutes. Put onions and mushrooms on top of the spinach.

Add apple cider and vinegar to the skillet and turn the heat up to medium-high. Stir to scrape up any bits that are stuck to the bottom of the pan and cook for 8 to 10 minutes or until cider is reduced to about 1/2 cup. Whisk in mustard, salt and pepper, to taste. Pour warm cider dressing over the mushrooms and spinach and toss until the vegetables are well coated. Sprinkle the bacon on top and serve.