Notoriously Unhealthy

Maybe it's just me but I've always thought of Mexican food as bad for you. Maybe it's the loads of greasy beef. Maybe it's the salt in the beef, on the chips, in the salsa...Maybe it's the cheese in it's ooey gooey must-have-in-moderation goodness. Whatever it is, something about mexican food is notoriously unhealthy.

But I love mexican food!

So I set about this week trying to find a mexican-style recipe that wasn't terribly bad for you. I managed to find a good one for chinese sweet'n'sour chicken (the ultimate challenge in my opinion) but I had yet to come across a good mexican dish. Then, as I pulled out all my cookbooks and brought up all my recipe source websites, I stumbled across my 'Starving Student's Cookbook'. It's full of very simple meals with few ingredients. I flipped through the pages and found 'Beef Mexicana'. I added up the calories on the ingredients and found that it'd actually be okay to try!

I'm learning as I go that subbing ingredients will go a long way to making your favorite meals much much healthier. I can also usually put in quite a few spices without increasing the calories hardly at all! So I took this simple recipe and added/subbed a couple things. Firstly, the ground beef I traded for ground turkey. Ground turkey has half the calories and 1/10th the fat of even extra lean ground beef. And you never taste the difference especially when it's in a meal like this one.

But I digress. The other thing I substituted in Beef Mexicana was the onions. Matt doesn't particularly like them. He likes their flavor but he doesn't like the onion. And I'm willing to work with that because I hate chopping onions. I don't know if I'm sensitive to onions or what but I have a really hard time with them. Sure they make me cry but it's more than that. They make my eyes sting and my nose gets all stuffed up so I can't breath through it. OMG there I go on a tangent again! So I replaced onions with 2 tbl onion powder. This is great too because onion powder has that kind of saltiness to it without actually being salt. So I skipped the salt.

Since I wanted it to be kinda mexican I also tossed in a dash of my favorite spice in the whole wide world....Cumin. It's the most fragrant of the spices they put in those taco seasoning packets and in the ground beef at Taco Bell. Mmmmm Yum! So a couple tbls of Cumin and I left the rest of the ingredients alone.

It turned out delicious! We rolled some of it up in tortillas with a sprinkle of cheese. It was nice and spicy because I'm generous with the hot sauce. And it was messy like good mexican food should be. We just used the tortilla chips to scoop up what fell out of the burrito shells. What made it taste even better though, was the fact that it was a reasonable calorie amount and it was low-fat.

The moral of the story is, SUBSTITUTE! You can always make your favorite foods healthier by subbing! You don't have to forever shut out those notoriously unhealthy dishes. A little ground turkey here, a little extra spice and part-skim mozzarella there and you can eat healthier and get your fixes in.

I think next week I'm gonna try to find a good tamale recipe that I can alter. Mmmm tamales.