Healthy cooking tips

My mignons

The most common request I get are healthy cooking tips so here are some suggestions to keep you occupied.

-Instead of butter use olive oil (I assume you all know that)
-Focus on spice rubs and mixes for your flavoring as opposed to butter and cream or fattening alternatives
-There are many flavorful pastes one can use to rub on meat or vegetables or use as a dip.  For example, check the recipe for chermoula in my blog under the 'recipe' label.  That is wonderful with a number of items.  I will also be posting more healthy dips and marinades like that.
-I have found the reason that some or many people don't like eating healthy is because of poor food preparation.  If you overcook your vegetables, chicken or fish, of course no one will like it.  Focus on the basic cooking techniques because it doesn't matter what kind of sauce or accompaniment you use, nothing will hide poor preparation.
-Avoid processed foods.  This is hard because in any supermarket it is filled with processed foods but you can avoid it.  When I was staying in a small town in France I saw people eating anything and everything.  Wine, cheese, cure meats, fattening food, desserts, you name it.  What I didn't see was a bunch of fat or obese people like we have in America.  There were no fast food restaurants and while processed and convenience food was available in this town it didn't play a dominant role in people's eating habits.  A majority of what people ate was prepared fresh.
So what I am getting at is if you want to eat apple pie or chocolate cake, eat it; just don't buy it.
-Focus on more raw foods.  I will do a blog on just this later on