Has it been over a month? I guess that makes sense...I'm coming off some sort of tendon issues in my right foot. What's weird is I get what I think are tendonitis symptoms in my triceps periodically. Right at the time I started having foot tendon problems my tricep symptoms also flared up. Maybe I ate something or am not eating something?
The calories are about the same, but you can see the ratios are different. I prefer to get less fat when I can because it's so easy in our western diets to find it somewhere else.
There really isn't that much in the way of veggies; it works out to about 2 servings of spinach for the whole dish, or about a 1/4 serving of veggies per serving of mac and cheese. It certainly can't hurt and I think it tastes good. You could try adding more, but you risk making it ponderously Popeyed. I don't think I'd mind, but it may wind up half salad/half pasta if you try to get more veggies through this dish. Just have some carrot sticks on the side?
Also, you'll notice that the topping is more cheese and breadcrumbs. You can do without either or both of these things. Most of the time when people top casseroles with breadcrumbs they mix a little butter in to help them brown. Tonight I tried half with butter and half without in the topping, and honestly I liked how it tasted better without the butter so that's how I'm going to do it from now on. You can see the difference in this picture (non-buttered bread crumbs are by the spoon):
Speaking of noms, this post is mostly about nutrition. I know a little about nutrition nowadays, and while I'm certainly not an expert I look healthy enough that people ask me for advice occasionally. There's a lot of conflicting advice, but my one biggest tip is to eat more veggies. Lots more. This does a few things for us:
Make sense? That's why I tried putting shredded spinach in my mac and cheese. It was delicious. Then I started doing more experiments to make it healthier. I wound up with a delicious and relatively nutritious dish, and I'm going to prove it to you. At this point we're going to get slightly more technical...it's not difficult if you want to come along for the ride, but if you trust me that this is a fairly healthy version of mac and cheese and you just want the recipe, scroll to the bottom. I will explain it as simply as possible (which is the best I could do anyway because my understanding of nutrition is fairly simplistic).
The title of this post has the word 'macronutrient' in it, which is just a fancy way of saying fat, carbohydrates, and protein. These are the three things we eat that have digestible calories. Well, there's also alcohol, but it's not really considered a nutrient so it's kind of its own thing. Did you ever wonder how they figure out 'calories from fat' on the label of your foods? It's quite easy. Each gram of macornutrient is a certain amount of calories:
So, if a thing has 1 gram of fat, 0 grams of carbs, and 10 grams of protein it would have 49 calories. It would have 9 calories from fat, and fat would make up 18% of the food (9 divided by 49). Easy enough so far?
A lot of diets are analyzed by their ratios of macronutrients by calorie. A 25-50-25 diet, for example, would get 25% of its calories from fat, 50% from carbs, and 25% from protein.
There are lots of ideas out there for the ideal ratio based on activity level and type. Hal Higdon, a well-respected marathon coach, says that marathoners should get about 50% of their calories from carbs, 30% from fat, and 20% from protein. That's about what the FDA recommends for normal people, though in the past they recommended more carbs and less fat because they thought fat was the ultimate evil in dieting for a long time. Then Dr. Atkins came along and said bull crap, you need more fat and less carbs. Then he died and people said, "Well, that was dumb. Too much red meat." It's usually recommended that bodybuilders get more protein. There are people who advocate the Paleo Diet which is really high in fat.
Aside from the Paleo diet (which I think is dumb anyway), most diets seem to top out at about 30% for the fat piece of the ratio. But even if the Paleo diet isn't dumb, it certainly doesn't recommended that the fat one does get is from cheese. Far from it. They would say it should come from dead animals and nuts and never from dairy. So one of my main goals with my culinary experiments was to reduce the typically abysmal percent of fat in macaroni and cheese.
The fat in mac and cheese comes chiefly from three places:
So, put all that together, and this is what we get:
If you happen to find the 75% reduced fat cheese, it looks like this:
- Provides lots of nutrients and antioxidants
- Is filling without being calorie-dense
- Replaces processed foods we could eat instead
Make sense? That's why I tried putting shredded spinach in my mac and cheese. It was delicious. Then I started doing more experiments to make it healthier. I wound up with a delicious and relatively nutritious dish, and I'm going to prove it to you. At this point we're going to get slightly more technical...it's not difficult if you want to come along for the ride, but if you trust me that this is a fairly healthy version of mac and cheese and you just want the recipe, scroll to the bottom. I will explain it as simply as possible (which is the best I could do anyway because my understanding of nutrition is fairly simplistic).
The title of this post has the word 'macronutrient' in it, which is just a fancy way of saying fat, carbohydrates, and protein. These are the three things we eat that have digestible calories. Well, there's also alcohol, but it's not really considered a nutrient so it's kind of its own thing. Did you ever wonder how they figure out 'calories from fat' on the label of your foods? It's quite easy. Each gram of macornutrient is a certain amount of calories:
- 1 gram of fat = 9 calories
- 1 gram of carbs = 4 calories
- 1 gram of protein = 4 calories
And, in case you're wondering:
- 1 gram of alcohol = 7 calories
So, if a thing has 1 gram of fat, 0 grams of carbs, and 10 grams of protein it would have 49 calories. It would have 9 calories from fat, and fat would make up 18% of the food (9 divided by 49). Easy enough so far?
A lot of diets are analyzed by their ratios of macronutrients by calorie. A 25-50-25 diet, for example, would get 25% of its calories from fat, 50% from carbs, and 25% from protein.
There are lots of ideas out there for the ideal ratio based on activity level and type. Hal Higdon, a well-respected marathon coach, says that marathoners should get about 50% of their calories from carbs, 30% from fat, and 20% from protein. That's about what the FDA recommends for normal people, though in the past they recommended more carbs and less fat because they thought fat was the ultimate evil in dieting for a long time. Then Dr. Atkins came along and said bull crap, you need more fat and less carbs. Then he died and people said, "Well, that was dumb. Too much red meat." It's usually recommended that bodybuilders get more protein. There are people who advocate the Paleo Diet which is really high in fat.
Aside from the Paleo diet (which I think is dumb anyway), most diets seem to top out at about 30% for the fat piece of the ratio. But even if the Paleo diet isn't dumb, it certainly doesn't recommended that the fat one does get is from cheese. Far from it. They would say it should come from dead animals and nuts and never from dairy. So one of my main goals with my culinary experiments was to reduce the typically abysmal percent of fat in macaroni and cheese.
The fat in mac and cheese comes chiefly from three places:
- Milk
- Butter
- Cheese (duh)
There's not much you can do about the calories from butter (with the exception of the topping) because in baked mac and cheese it's used to make a roux (butter or other oil cooked with flour; it's used as a thickening agent). But what could we do about the milk and cheese?
Milk is a pretty clear-cut choice: use skim. Baked mac usually calls for whole milk, but it's still delicious when made with skim. Check. Next.
The cheese then...what do we do? I go with this:
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| Nom. |
Actually, I prefer the even leaner 75% reduced-fat cheese made with 1% milk, but I can't get it around here. Wal Mart generally carries at least the 50% reduced fat version. I was skeptical at first as reduced fat versions of store brand or Kraft taste chemically and fake...I'm not sure if that's because they don't generally offer them in brick form and need to put in anti-caking agents to keep the shreds from sticking together or what. On top of the fake feel and taste, other brands of shredded cheese in the quantities required for this recipe did not want to stay in wife's and my body for very long, whereas Cabot's cheese usually plays pretty nicely with our digestive tracts. It seems to be, near as I can tell, cheese that's just made as naturally as possible with less fatty milk which in turn ups the protein content to compensate. The texture is a little different but it's still pleasant, and it tastes like cheese.
If you think it's inconvenient to grate all that cheese, you could just do what I do:
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You can't really go with a fat free cheese, by the way--they don't melt so don't try. I'm not sure if veggie cheese or something would work. That's beyond my experiments to date, and I'm not sure I'm willing to try.
The other trick I do is trade out some of the cheddar cheese for cottage cheese. I love cottage cheese. It tastes great and has a ton of protein. People use it as a healthy filler in many dishes. I get 1% milkfat cottage cheese these days...I was buying fat free until I realized our brand replaced the lost calories from fat with more sugar--that is, the 1% milkfat and fat free cottage cheese had the same number of calories, it's just that the fat free cottage cheese gets some calories from sugar which is worse than just getting it from fat to begin with.
The other trick I do is trade out some of the cheddar cheese for cottage cheese. I love cottage cheese. It tastes great and has a ton of protein. People use it as a healthy filler in many dishes. I get 1% milkfat cottage cheese these days...I was buying fat free until I realized our brand replaced the lost calories from fat with more sugar--that is, the 1% milkfat and fat free cottage cheese had the same number of calories, it's just that the fat free cottage cheese gets some calories from sugar which is worse than just getting it from fat to begin with.
So, put all that together, and this is what we get:
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If you happen to find the 75% reduced fat cheese, it looks like this:
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There really isn't that much in the way of veggies; it works out to about 2 servings of spinach for the whole dish, or about a 1/4 serving of veggies per serving of mac and cheese. It certainly can't hurt and I think it tastes good. You could try adding more, but you risk making it ponderously Popeyed. I don't think I'd mind, but it may wind up half salad/half pasta if you try to get more veggies through this dish. Just have some carrot sticks on the side?
Also, you'll notice that the topping is more cheese and breadcrumbs. You can do without either or both of these things. Most of the time when people top casseroles with breadcrumbs they mix a little butter in to help them brown. Tonight I tried half with butter and half without in the topping, and honestly I liked how it tasted better without the butter so that's how I'm going to do it from now on. You can see the difference in this picture (non-buttered bread crumbs are by the spoon):
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Oh, and yes, I realize it's not really macaroni and cheese because it's shells and cheese...whatever. We like it that way.
Here's the recipe. Stay hungry, my friends.
Healthy-ish Baked Mac and Cheese
based on Alton Brown's recipe
Ingredients:
One 16oz box of favorite whole wheat pasta
40g (approx 3 Tbsp) unsalted butter
30g (approx 2.5 Tbsp) flour
2 cups skim milk
1 egg
6 oz shredded 1.5% reduced fat cheddar cheese (or whatever's available; subbing asgiago for an ounce or two is uh-maze-ing)
1 cup 1% cottage cheese
4 cupsish shredded baby spinach
12 oz diced ham
Desired spices (perhaps 1/4 tsp of ground mustard and/or paprika, pepper, garlic powder; don't need too much salt if you use the diced ham; my favorites are rosemary and thyme)
Procedure:
Preheat oven to 350 and boil water for the pasta
Heat the butter in a saucepan over medium/medium high until it's melted (let it get a bit nutty if you'd like)
Add the pasta to the water (cook al dente)
Add flour to the butter and whisk constantly for 1-3 minutes (traditionally a roux is equal parts butter and flour by weight but I find a little more butter works better for me)
Add the milk to the butter with spices you enjoy and whisk to combine. Stir constantly until it thickens (5 minutes or so, you'll know). Your pasta should be about cooked by now so go drain it.
Remove the milk from the burner and temper in the egg, then slowly incorporate the cheese.
Mix together cooked pasta, spinach, diced ham, milk, and cottage cheese.
Spread in casserole dish. Top with more shredded cheese and then breadcrumbs if you wish.
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