Dessert or Disaster: Cooking Healthy

As a pastry chef, foodie, and food writer, it's pretty obvious that I love, LOVE, LOVE to eat good food. Of course, with good food comes extra hips, ass, tummy, thighs, and that awkward under-the-arm fat that never goes away. About 9 months ago I started on a serious journey to lose weight. At this point I've lost 50 and gained back about 10, and am trying to lose about 20-30 (adjusted for weight gain) more pounds. I'm doing this all the natural way--through diet and exercise. Because of this, it has kinda become my mission to cook healthy food and make it delicious enough that I don't crave fantastic things like ice cream and french fries as much as I otherwise would. I'm writing about those meals because they're my reality right now. If they inspire people to eat healthy, awesome. If not, no big deal. Yes, there will also be shots of artery-clogging goodness on here, but 99 percent of the time, I've got to eat pretty healthy.

Last night after class, I was craving pasta in a big way. Now pasta, as we all know, is the devil. It is good with butter and cheese, drowning in creamy sauce, and in big, giant family sized bowls. Not the best diet food. My solution to the pasta dilemma is to make dish that's heavy on vegetables and good, lean protien, and light on pasta.

So last night, I made pasta with Turkey sausage and a whole ton of vegetables. Notice how little Pasta there is in the picture above, and how much good stuff. The dish ended up being very loosely reminiscent of a puttanesca sauce, tangy and savory with lots of capers and (just a few--they're not so healthy) olives. This sauce also had a ton of asparagus, zucchini, eggplant,and onion in it, and ended up being a really really filling dish.

I'm a big fan of the concept of mise en place--Everything in its place. Having all my ingredients all set like this before I even start cooking makes the process more streamlined and efficient. Yes, it means i have a ton of teeny tiny dishes to wash, but having a calm cooking process makes it totally worth it. And so, we go to the pan. Since I'm not using a concrete recipe, I'm just showing a series of pictures with a little bit of writing. A picture is worth a thousand words, you know.

First, I sweated the onions with some chile flakes, fennel seeds, and salt. Then I added the garlic, cooked until my whole apartment smelled garlicky, then added a turkey sausage, casing removed.

Next, I added the eggplant (salted first, to draw out the moisture), then zucchini, then asparagus. I like my veggies a little al dente so i'm very careful not to let them cook too long. I'm careful to taste everything for salt ever step of the way.

Next, I added the capers, olives, lemon zest and de-glazed the pan with a bit of lemon juice. Then I added cherry tomatoes, at the very end so they don't overcook, and a little bit of chicken stock to de-glaze the pan. At this point there was lots of brown, crusty goodness cooked onto the bottom of the pan and I wanted to make sure all of that ended up on my pasta.

Finally, I added my cooked and mostly strained pasta and a little of the pasta water to thicken the sauce up and make it silky. I had cooked the pasta pretty al dente and let it finish cooking in the sauce. It makes it that much more flavorful. YUM!!!

At the end of the day, there's nothing quite as comforting as a big bowl of pasta. Of course, forgoing the bread and butter is a struggle, but it's proving to be well worth it.