Miscellany: Learning to Eat Healthy, Part 4

Most diet books recommend cooking with canola or olive oil instead of solid fats like lard or butter. Even the healthy oils pack a lot of fat and calories, though, so it's important to try to not use added oil whenever possible. One of the ways to go about it is to use a line of contact grills aggressively marketed by boxing legend George Foreman:



The basic "George Foreman" electric grills are pretty inexpensive (they should be, considering they're all made in China). I bought a stripped down 50 square inch "Super Champ" model for about $20 from Target. It's a pretty bare-bones affair - the unit lacks a temperature control. Heck, the thing doesn't even have an on/off switch.

It works as advertised. The dual contact plates cut most cooking times in half. It's very easy to overcook meat if you don't know what you're doing, of course, but that's not the grill's fault. Most of the drippings are neatly collected in the included plastic drip tray.

One problem is cleanup - you're going to use a lot of wet paper towels to scrub out the grease from the grill surface. The unit also gets fairly hot, so once it's going, you'd better not move it around (in particular, the back of the clamshell becomes quite dangerous). Most problematic, though, is the lack of that classic charcoal flavor. All in all, the bottom-tier GF grill is decent for indoor use, but you definitely get what you pay for.