In this episode of Simple Shifts: Conversations on Food, Life, Weight and Mindset, Martha McKinnon and Peter Morrison discuss practical ways to lighten up favorite recipes while maintaining flavor and satisfaction. They share personal anecdotes, tips for ingredient substitutions, and techniques for healthier cooking and baking. The conversation emphasizes the importance of making healthy eating enjoyable and accessible, encouraging listeners to experiment with their own recipes.
Key Takeaways
- Lightening up recipes can be easy, fun and satisfying.
- Greek yogurt is a great substitute for sour cream.
- Bulk up meals with vegetables to reduce calories.
- Cutting sugar by 25-30% often goes unnoticed in recipes.
- Using applesauce or pumpkin puree can replace oil in baking.
- Cottage cheese can be blended to replace ricotta cheese.
- Cauliflower rice is a great low-carb alternative.
- Experimenting with sweeteners can reduce sugar intake.
- Making healthy food choices should be enjoyable and satisfying.
Favorite Ways to Lighten Recipes Podcast
Video Transcript
Martha McKinnon (00:00)
Welcome to Simple Shifts, conversations to fuel your body, mind and soul. I’m Martha McKinnon from the blog Simple Nourished Living and with me is my brother and partner, Peter Morrison.
Peter Morrison (00:17)
Hi.
Martha McKinnon (00:21)
Hi, how you doing?
Peter Morrison (00:28)
I’m doing fine, how are you today?
Martha Mckinnon (00:38)
I’m doing wonderfully. It’s good to be here. It’s good to catch up with you. It’s been a little bit of a time since we last talked, at least a whole week. So today what we’re going to explore is ways to lighten up your favorite recipes. But before we jump into that, I’d like to check in and ask you, put you on the hot seat. What’s new and good in your world?
Peter Morrison (00:48)
Right? Well, our middle sister turned 60 recently, so we had a little, unfortunately you weren’t able to join us, but we did have a birthday party celebration at home. She wanted to do something at home rather than out. So she picked the meal and did most of the grocery shopping, which was very kind.
Martha McKinnon (01:25)
She loves to shop. It wasn’t a challenge. She loves to shop.
Peter Morrison (01:38)
Yeah. And she picked seared sea scallops, something I’ve never done. We’ve grilled scallops, but I’ve never seared them. So I made the dessert, the salad, but I let her man the stove for the searing. And they came out wonderful.
Martha McKinnon (01:59)
And I got to be there sort of virtually because you shared photos and video with me. So I appreciate that very much. Yeah. So that was good. I felt like I was there and I loved the candles that wouldn’t blow out.
Peter Morrison (02:11)
I didn’t even know! They were supposed to be sparklers and they didn’t really sparkle, but yeah, they didn’t blow out easily. So just an added birthday surprise, I guess.
Martha McKinnon (02:23)
Right? So ways to lighten up recipes is I think a great topic to explore in a little more depth. The reason this came to me was that I was reviewing one of the really popular recipes on the site, which is a Pioneer Woman recipe that I lightened up. It’s a recipe from Ree Drummond for Chicken Spaghetti. I don’t know how many, a lot of people I’m sure are familiar with Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond. She’s got tons of cookbooks. She’s on the Food Network, but she’s really known for her comfort food recipes.
And a lot of us have favorite recipes that we don’t really want to give up as we’re trying to lose weight and eat healthier. But the truth is there are lots of ways to take a recipe and lighten it up and make it a little more healthy. And so I thought that that would be fun to explore with the re-recipe for chicken spaghetti.
One of the first things I did, she sometimes makes a lot of food because she has a really big family. So one of the first things I did was make a smaller batch. Because we know from the Mindless Eating book that the more food we have around, the more we’re apt to eat. So making a smaller batch, cutting a recipe down in half or quarter is one thing you can do, especially if you’re a small family.
And then, the other thing I did with the chicken spaghetti was to change up the ratio, so I used a lot more chicken, which is a zero points food, a good source of protein, and less spaghetti. And I do that often when I’m doing pasta recipes. I find it helpful to cut back on the pasta, bulk up with vegetables, bulk up with the protein, and that way I find I get the satisfaction of pasta, but in a lighter, healthier, more Weight Watchers sort of friendly way.
I also used less cheese. And another option is to use a reduced fat cheese. The recipe called for cream of chicken soup and cream of chicken soup is available in healthier versions in lower fat, reduced fat, lower sodium versions. So that helps to make that ingredient healthier. And it turned out in my mind, of course I had never made it the regular way, but it made us really happy. It was comforting and delicious. It gets a lot of good reviews on the website. It’s really very popular.
And in fact, there was a comment from one of our readers, Beth, who basically said she loves Ree’s recipes, but they tend to be pretty high in fat. And so it was great for her to see what I did with the recipe, because it really then inspired her to think about ways that she could take some of her favorite recipes or other recipes from the Pioneer Woman and make them, you know, lighter and healthier.
Peter Morrison (06:01)
I’ve never made that. Are you using ground chicken or uncooked chicken or is it already cooked shredded rotisserie chicken?
Martha McKinnon (06:10)
I used shredded rotisserie chicken. I think Ree might start by actually maybe poaching a whole chicken. And I, of course, am always looking for easier. So this is another recipe where I wouldn’t typically make it if I didn’t have leftover chicken around. I would have probably eaten the rotisserie chicken and then this is a recipe I would make with the leftovers. Again, because I’m always looking to make things as easy as possible.
And so for me to cook, having to cook chicken to then make a casserole seems a little too much work for a lazy girl like me. But it’s a great way to use leftover chicken.
Martha McKinnon (06:35)
So that just brings up the whole concept of like what are some of the other things you can do to lighten up recipes? What are some of your other tips and hints for substitute ingredients that work for you? Do you have any favorite go-to ingredient substitutions for higher fat?
Peter Morrison (07:03)
It’s not a higher fat substitution, but I would say as much as we love bread and I love pasta, we just try to be careful with the carbs. And I’ve been substituting, not only substituting, just using in general, riced cauliflower or even, I think I’ve seen broccoli rice, in place of rice in dishes.
Martha McKinnon (07:14)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And so we can link out in our notes too because we have quite a few recipes on the site using cauliflower rice. And I remember when we first started doing this, you had to make the cauliflower rice yourself. But these days, it’s so readily available in the frozen section. Everybody’s making it now, right?
Peter Morrison (07:53)
And oftentimes you could find it, or in some stores it’s available like near the shredded carrots and bagged. You could even find it, well, I guess it’d be fresh, not frozen. So it sort of maintains a little bit more crunch and a little, it kind of holds its shape.
Martha McKinnon (08:14)
Okay. And if you can’t find it, if you live in an area where your stores aren’t as well stocked, it’s not really that complicated to make either. You can grate it on a box grater (affiliate link), can pulse it in a blender (affiliate link) or food processor (affiliate link). And what I found amazing was just how different the flavor is of regular cauliflower versus rice cauliflower. It’s just incredible to me how much it really does seem like rice.
Peter Morrison (08:31)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (08:34)
How about Greek yogurt for in place of sour cream or that’s a big one for me, I know. I just turned to Greek yogurt in so many recipes now and it’s a big savings over sour cream.
Peter Morrison (08:51)
Yeah, I’ve used it in like, if you’ve got a spicy taco soup and you want to maybe tame it down a little and skip the sour cream, but a little dollop of Greek yogurt kind of adds a little cream or even with enchiladas. It works really well.
Martha McKinnon (09:09)
On a baked potato anywhere you would use sour cream. You know greek yogurt is a great much lower calorie lower fat substitution and another one is cottage cheese. If you take cottage cheese and you blitz it in the blender (affiliate link) and it gets really creamy that can be replacement in recipes for like cream cheese ricotta cheese that works
Peter Morrison (09:33)
Really?
Martha McKinnon (09:38)
Yep. Again, bulking up with veggies is always a great idea, right? Just to bulk up your recipes, your soups, your casseroles, your stew. Yeah. You know, you can make your meat go further with fewer calories – you can also use lentils to stretch your meat. You can also use finely chopped mushrooms. And again, people don’t even know when they’re finely chopped that way.
Peter Morrison (10:01)
Yeah, mushrooms, chopped zucchini, corn. Mm hmm. And with the lentils, they’re quick to cook, unlike the dried bean. But many stores carry pre-steamed vacuum packed lentils that you just need to heat them up and they’re good to go.
Martha McKinnon (10:18)
Right. That’s true. So a lot more healthy products readily available on the grocery store shelves these days, which makes it so much easier. Things we used to have to do from scratch are now right there for us. mean, the other one that just pops into my mind is the steamed beets. It used to be you had to roast the beets for an hour, and now often you can just find them in the produce section already cooked for you in the plastic vacuum sealed.
Peter Morrison (10:49)
Mmm. Mmm.
Martha McKinnon (10:56)
With packages just ready to go, you can have them in an instant.
Peter Morrison (11:04)
Yeah, I’m not a big beat fan, but I do try to incorporate them into our salads and meals, because I know they are very good for you. So it’s an, I’m working on it.
Martha McKinnon (11:16)
Well, yeah, and I think there’s so many foods out there. We don’t have to eat what we don’t like. I feel like, you know, I go back to sort of that concept from James Clear, Atomic Habits, where he talks about you’re going to have most success in changing your habits if you can make it obvious, easy, attractive, and satisfying. And so if you’re trying to eat healthier, it’s best to find foods that you actually like instead of forcing yourself to eat things that you don’t. I think maybe some of the health benefits are even lost if we’re gagging to get it down.
Peter Morrison (11:40)
Hmm. Well, it’s not that bad, but I actually like raw beats, shredded beats, that’s something of the flavor texture. It’s I think it’s the flavor.
Martha McKinnon (11:48)
Well, and that’s really cool because we can link out, because I just shared a recipe for a Beet Salad that I like very much, and it’s just a combination of shredded beets and shredded carrots in a very simple lemon honey vinaigrette. And I find that just, I love shredded crunchy slaws and salads. I like that you can make them and they’ll last for several days in the fridge. So you’ve always got something there to grab when you need a little.
Peter Morrison (12:01)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (12:03)
When you’re feeling a little hungry and if it’s sitting right there in the fridge it makes it much more likely that you’re going to choose that versus the bag of chips from the pantry.
Peter Morrison (12:23)
Right. So say you’re a lasagna lover. What are some ideas you could do to lighten lasagna?
Martha McKinnon (12:46)
Well, again, we could do the whole cottage cheese or creamed cottage, you know, pureed cottage cheese in place of the ricotta. You can, you know, you choose if you’re using a meat, you know, if you’re making a meat lasagna, you could choose, of course, a very lean for turkey. Again, if you were making the sauce from scratch, you could, like we said, chop up the mushrooms to make that meat extend further and take calories away that way.
You could actually even play with substituting thin layers of like eggplant, roasted eggplant, roasted zucchini for some of your noodles. I’ve seen recipes that do that, which so you would just thinly horizontally slice your zucchini, your eggplant, roast it, get it tender and then use that for all or some of your noodles. And that would lighten it up, you know, significantly.
Peter Morrison (13:29)
That reminds me, I don’t know if she mentioned when you were talking to her, but recently Brenda was watching PBS and saw an Italian cooking show and it was sort of eggplant parmesan, but it was the preparation I guess was a little different. It was sliced, the eggplant was sliced lengthwise very thin. And I think, I wanna make it for the website because it was really good. I wanna say dipped in, you’d think it would be egg then flour but it was reversed or something. It was like flour and then egg and then it was like stacked. And rather than mozzarella I think it was Parmesan or Pecorino Romano and it was sort of layered in between and stacked.
Martha McKinnon (14:06)
Mm-hmm.
Peter Morrison (14:09)
And then they were baked, not as a lasagna as a casserole, but like individual stacks. So you just had to like lift each stack out of the pan and it was very good.
Martha McKinnon (14:22)
I think we have an old recipe (Baked Eggplant Parmesan Melts) on the site which is a more simple version of that and it wasn’t, it was just sliced the traditional way, not like long, but it was just, and it was grilled eggplant that were just layered with a little bit of sauce and just a tiny bit of light cheese. And I think it’s called like grilled eggplant stacks or something. So it sounds a little, maybe a little more complicated than the version that already lives out on Simple Nourish Living, but sounds yummy.
Peter Morrison (15:00)
Mm-hmm
Martha McKinnon (15:02)
And I love eggplant but it can get heavy. And so it’s fun to play with ways to lighten up these dishes. But I think we’ve given a lot of good ideas on the cooking front. What about baking? Do you have any secrets for maybe using less, know, lightening up when you bake?
Peter Morrison (15:14)
Secrets, no. But I have been trying, I’ve been really trying to pay attention to sugar intake. So I’ve really been enjoying experimenting with Truvia baking blend (affiliate link) and all you low more natural sweeteners. Sometimes it’s a one-to-one replacement and sometimes it’s like half of what you would normally use for sugar.
Martha McKinnon (15:48)
Uh-huh. Right. Yeah, so you’re right. So when you are using a sugar replacement, one thing you can do is just lighten up on the amount of sugar. Most recipes, recipes like American recipes, tend to be really sugar heavy. And I think I was talking with mom one time and she worked way back in the day in the school system. And one thing she learned from the cooks there was that you could you could cut back the sugar easily, usually by at least 25 to 30 percent in most recipes and barely notice it.
So that’s one thing you can do is just play with cutting back a percentage of the sugar and just using less. If you’re liking the sugar, some of the sugar substitutes, like you said, you’re going to want to pay attention to what the label of that package is saying because sometimes it’s a one-to-one replacement. I think Splenda is like Truvia (affiliate link) and you use half as much. So if the recipe calls for one cup, then on the package of Truvia (affiliate link), you’re told to use half. And I’m not really sure. I haven’t used monk fruit. I haven’t used Swerve enough to know without always checking the label to see what it’s telling me.
But using and finding those sugar replacements that work is one good strategy for lightening up your sweet treats if you’re watching your sugar intake. And sugar has a lot of points on the Weight Watchers Plan. So that’s something that a lot of us are paying closer attention to.
Peter Morrison (17:05)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (17:07)
In terms of lightening up recipes and using less, finding a substitution for the butter or oil, one thing that comes up a lot in lighter baking is using unsweetened applesauce or pumpkin puree or mashed bananas in place of all, or part of the oil. And again, you’re just going to have to sort of pay attention to what’s going to work best depending on the recipe.
Applesauce I think is probably the choice that offers the, it’s going to be closest probably to using the fat. You know, if you’re using pumpkin puree, it tends to be heavier. So that’s often better in, brownies, chocolate cakes, things like that, where it will be a little less noticeable. Some people are using Greek yogurt for all or some of the fat in recipes and that can be another good substitution.
Peter Morrison (17:58)
Would you have to use full fat Greek yogurt?
Martha McKinnon (18:04)
No. Not necessarily, no? Nope.
No. No. No. And the other one that comes up a lot, I first learned of and it’s been around now forever. Everybody knows about it now, but it’s the PB, the peanut butter flour (affiliate link), the powdered peanut butter (affiliate link) PB2 (affiliate link). I mean, that can be a great replacement for people who love the flavor of peanut butter, but who don’t want all the fat and calories that come from it.
Peter Morrison (18:37)
Hmm.
Martha McKinnon (18:39)
So that’s a fun one to play with in baking, stirring together to make in sauces. I have a soup that I really like a lot that calls for coconut milk and broccoli and peanut butter. And I will often use some of the peanut butter powder (affiliate link). So you get the flavor of the peanut butter in place of the real peanut butter and because it’s in a soup, you don’t really need all that fat, especially when you’ve got some coconut milk in there. And so that can be another substitution that works really well.
Peter Morrison (19:12)
I think, it’s not really, it wouldn’t be really saving as far as Weight Watchers points are concerned, but I know some recipes also use honey or maple syrup. But again, those are gonna be higher in points, but it’s a natural sugar at least. It’s not the processed refined white sugar.
Martha McKinnon (19:34)
Right. And again, and that, I mean, that gets a little trickier. It’s when you’re replacing a liquid sweetener, you know, that gets a little more tricky. You have got to do a little more research to figure out, you know, do you have to add a little bit more liquid or just subtract a little more liquid depending on which way you’re going – if you are adding honey when the recipe called for sugar or vice versa.
Peter Morrison (20:02)
Hmm.
Martha McKinnon (20:05)
Because baking especially can be complicated. There’s quite a lot of chemistry involved with baking. It’s fun to play, but you just got to know and do a little research on how to do that substitution and get the best results.
Peter Morrison (20:29)
Yeah, and I’ve actually been using my kitchen scale (affiliate link) more, especially for flours and whatnot rather than, I feel like, I don’t know something about getting it right in the measuring cup is just seems tricky too.
Martha McKinnon (20:50)
Yeah, in most of Europe, most European home bakers use a scale and have used scales for years. That’s just how they grew up. And it’s something that’s much less common here. But you’re right. I mean, if you’re baking and you’re just depending upon cups, there really is a technique where the intention is that you fluff up that flour, and you spoon it, and then you gently spoon it into the cup and then and level it off.
And that’s going to give you a much different result than if you just take the flour that’s been sitting for a while and it’s packed down and like scoop it up. There can be a big difference. And so if you’re finding that when you bake and you’re dissatisfied with the results because they seem heavy, dense, dry, there’s a good chance that you’re just getting more flour than you realized. And you’re right. Using that kitchen scale (affiliate link) can be a life changer and it’s easier.
Peter Morrison (21:46)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (21:48)
You know, you can just put the bowl on the scale and then, you know, toss your flour in there, hit that tare button and just keep adding other ingredients so it can speed up the process and result in dirtying fewer dishes and utensils too.
So one more ingredient that’s popping into my mind is unsweetened cocoa powder in place of chocolate because it’s fat free, it doesn’t have sugar so that you can use the sweetener of your choice when you’re using cocoa powder instead of chocolate chips. That can be a good savings.
Peter Morrison (22:46)
I occasionally add cocoa powder to my smoothies if I feel like I want a little extra treat. It looks more chocolatey.
Martha McKinnon (23:00)
Right? I love the combination of a dark chocolate cherry smoothie. It really feels like dessert for me. I have a favorite chocolate protein powder and then frozen cherries. And sometimes I will boost it with a little more unsweetened cocoa powder because the points are very low. And it does just give you this delicious chocolate cherry flavor. You know, I feel like it’s just like a cold frozen chocolate covered cherry, but nutritious. It’s got some nutrition in there, which is a bonus.
Peter Morrison (23:53)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (24:01)
So, I think we’ve done a good job about exploring some of the most common ways that you can take one of your favorite recipes either for cooking or baking and lighten them up, make them healthier, lighter, with less fat and lower calories. For those of you who are reading and watching this, if you have ideas of your own, suggestions and tips that we’ve failed to mention here, we’d love for you to leave those for us in the comments.
And if you’re enjoying the content we’re sharing here, I would love for you to like to subscribe to our channel and to leave a review. That would just be so helpful as we continue to try to grow our podcast subscribers.
Peter Morrison (25:28)
Very good – this was very helpful, thank you.
Martha McKinnon (25:49)
All right. Thank you. And we’ll be back next week with another episode.
Peter Morrison (26:04)
Bye everyone.
