low fat – The Unknown Chef

Well I hope you all had a good year in 2008 and if not that the year ahead is going to be even better.

Life holds so many new things for me in the year ahead. Im hoping to be a bit more on to it when it comes to posting stuff on here, so keep coming back regularly and check it out.

Went over to some freinds house last night and I cooked a 3 course low fat dinner silly blonde thing that I am forgot to take pictures of the entire meal but let me create a word picture for you. You can check out the recipes in the recipe section here.

we started off with a vegetable and dip platter

which had yellow capsicum, cherry tomatoes, mushrooms which i marinated in fresh lime juice and black pepper,courgettes, pita bread crunchy bits, with a cottage cheese and sundried tomato dip and a pea and basil dip .

The Main course was skinless chicken which was stuffed with a little of the cottage cheese dip and slices of sundried tomato, that was then seasoned with black pepper,balsamic glaze, smoked paprika, and a very small drizzle of olive oil and then bbqed ,I served this with bbqed corn cobs seasoned with black pepper and a small drizzle of olive oil again. A salad of tomato, red onions , cucumber tossed in a light balsamic dressing and minature baked potatoes stuffed with baked beans, wholegrain mustard and potato were served on the side.
For Dessert I made a low fat chocolate cake ( I got the recipe from Taste magazine see the links page)

It was a recipe from the latest issue and it had cherries in it, I switched the cherries for fresh raspberries,fresh blueberries and fresh strawberries , and added a little vanilla to it, it was incredible and with only 5gms of fat per slice, I served this with low fat custard, and low fat greek yoghurt and decorated the top with fresh berries.

My freinds just loved it , we are all doing low fat stuff so I wanted to show how we can make a meal from start to finish using all low fat products and producing great food that if you didnt know it was low fat you couldnt tell

A few weeks ago I went to the Doctors for a general check up and He checked my blood pressure

It was a bit high oooppsss scary, In my family on my Dads side there is a genetic predisposition to bad things happening from high blood pressure, this scared the bejeebies out of me big time and I have changed my eating habits and lifestyle.

Getting out and doing regular exercise , using a low sodium alternative to salt , not that I ate much salt anyway,Eating foods that are low in fat, I have reduced down the amount of red meat I was eating before, increased my fish intake , and my vegetable/fruit/pulses intake and cut out things that I was eating before, bad bad things that tasted so good and indulged my sweet tooth. Im feeling so much better and have so much more energy now. The NZ heart foundation has endorsed a huge range of products with the heart tick on them which means that they are low in saturated fats, low in sodium and sugar and designed for the entire family to be good for them and a really great way to get a good balance in the diets of New Zealanders.

I have been experimenting with lots of different ideas that I have had about making low fat foods and have been able to try some of these out on others , things like heart healthy savoury muffins, heart healthy low fat lasagne,pasta dishes, etc and am currently in the process of making some recipes for low fat low sugar fruity muffins, they just need tweaking a wee bit before they are perfect. I will keep you informed as to how they are going. I have a great group of volunteers willing to be guinea pigs errrr taste testers, people from the gym (instructors), chef freinds and of course Bruce my champion supporter.

High Blood Pressure is the silent disease , it creeps up on you with out you being aware of it , and Im too young to go off this planet just yet….. I want to grow old disgracefully and besides only the good die young so I will be around forever. So let me just say get yourselves checked regularly even if you think your as fit and healthy as a thoroughbred horse on speed injected carrots because its better to find out if theres a problem and be able to fix it early than to not find out about it and pop off before your ready.