I just got back from the grocery store picking up items for my attempt at Chinese food tonight and I wanted to share some insight on how to make any recipe Eat Clean friendly.
While perusing my cookbooks last night, I noticed that several of the recipes called for white or brown sugar, to balance the bitter or sour ingredients. At first I was a bit unsure of what to do. I certainly did not want to add process/refined sugar to my meals but I also did not want to end up with bitter food. So, a quick google search later and I turned up some Eat Clean approved all-natural sugar substitutes. I ended up with Sucanat for the brown sugar replacement and Stevia for the white sugar. Problem solved!
Or so I thought.
Chinese food requires a number of different sauces and oils, including soy sauce, oyster sauce, and sesame oil. If you thought all soy sauces were created equal than guess again! I checked the ingredients of a bottle of Kikkoman low sodium soy sauce and I could not believe the amount of random (aka not clean) stuff in there. Things like lactic acid and sodium benzoate. No wonder Kikkoman tastes nothing like the soy sauce you get in little packets from a Chinese takeout place. I scoured the shelves and found a cleaner soy sauce. This one, also reduced sodium, only had water, soybeans, wheat, salt, and alcohol (for freshness) in it. No weird sounding words in there and there's less sodium per serving as well!
I did the same thing for each sauce or oil I bought. I looked at the different brands until I found one that had the most natural and unrefined ingredients. For example, I chose unrefined sesame oil with one ingredient: sesame oil! I had to do the same thing last week when shopping for bbq sauce for my pork chops. Almost every brand had high fructose corn syrup as the second ingredient. It took about 10 minutes (there were a lot of brands to look through) before I found one without HFCS and it was delicious! The only items today that I could not find a cleaner options were the wonton and egg roll wrappers. They only had one brand of those in the freezer isle and both items contained refined flour rather than whole grain. Bummer. I think next time I'll see if I can find an Asian specialty store to look for wrappers with higher quality ingredients. But everything else is clean eating approved so it will be a much healthier meal than if I had gone to the local takeout joint.
Moral of the story: read ingredient lists! Always check the ingredient list on anything packaged food you buy and look for brands or items that have both the fewest overall ingredients and all natural foods (no weird additives, chemicals, or preservatives). If an ingredient looks like it came out of a science lab, put the box down and walk away!
One last note about meat. I know people have widely varying views on meat, whether or not you should eat it and if so what kinds. For me, I try to stick with lean cuts of chicken most of the time and lean beef on occasion. Sometimes I'll sub ground turkey for ground beef in pasta dishes. It just depends. So today, I'm changing the beef and broccoli dish to chicken and broccoli and using ground chicken in my wontons. I opted to leave meat out of the egg rolls (although they aren't vegetarian since they have oyster sauce in them).
I hope that helps you feel more confident when making recipes healthier. If you have any tips to do the same, please feel free to leave them in the comments section.
Stay healthy!
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