Giada
de Laurentiis:
Why I'm Cooking Italian Food With Less Oil, Salt
By FBWorld Team
Giada
De Laurentiis cooks up some lightened up fare on TODAY
Tuesday, serving up noodle paella and a pear arugula salad.
Eat
well, and eat light at the same time. How? Giada De Laurentiis
shares her tips with her readers.
Giada
De Laurentiis cooks up some lightened up fare on TODAY
Tuesday, serving up noodle paella and a pear arugula salad.
Lightening
up Italian food? It might just make Nonna gasp. But that's
exactly what Giada De Laurentiis is doing with her new
cookbook, "Giada's Feel Good Food." Here, we
chat with the petite celeb chef to get the dish on what
exactly she's doing differently and why.
What
prompted you to want to do lighter fare?
The
reason I wrote this book and decided to go a little lighter
is because the first question out of people's mouths every
time they see me is, "How do you stay so
trim and eat all this food?"
And
I always tell people I don't eat a lot of anything - I
eat a little bit of everything, and not a lot of anything.
I thought it'd be fun to do a cookbook that has juices,
and vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free recipes to help people
in their daily lives feel good - not necessarily a diet,
but feel good.
Video:
TODAY contributor Giada de Laurentiis shares a delicious
noodle paella recipe that ditches the rice, and also demonstrates
how to make a radicchio, pear and arugula salad.
What
were some of the biggest issues the nutritionist found
in going through your recipes? Was there a particular
calorie bomb?
What
I learned from going through all this is the amount of
olive oil and salt I use in my food. Basically, when I
need flavor, I add olive oil and salt. I always thought
that I wrote recipes that were light in sodium and pretty
light in calories, but it's amazing how much even just
a tablespoon of olive oil can jack up those calories.
I had to really scale back. And I had to retest to recipes
to make sure that they still had flavor, and if they were
lacking flavor in one way, I had to add it on in another.
Recipes:
Guilt-free
sweets: Giada's fig bites, smoothies, crumble
I
also realized how much salt packaged foods have. Pasta,
flour or whole wheat tortillas, grains - they all carry
their own sodium. Moving forward, I will write recipes
that I think will be more mindful of stuff like that.
As
a replacement for olive oil, I now sometimes use grapeseed
oil, which has less fat and less calories. So if I need
the oil, then I can go to that.
Can
you give us a before/after comparison? How much have you
cut down?
I
now use less olive oil and less salt in daily life. Usually
I would just use two tablespoons just to start out a recipe,
to sometimes three to four tablespoons. Just to start!
I have found that's way too much. I've now reduced it
down to 1/2 a tablespoon. With salt, I would usually do
a couple teaspoons, and I've now gone down to 1/2 a teaspoon,
sometimes a 1/4 teaspoon.
Recipes:
Giada's
noodle paella, radicchio and pear salad
What
was the most difficult change to make?
The
most difficult change to make was salt - and I replaced
a lot of the salt with lemon juice. Salt was tough because
I don't add a lot of ingredients to my food, so the ingredients
that I do use, I use often. But I found that lemon juice
that can do the trick. And minimizing parmesan cheese
was also very difficult, because I'm used to a certain
flavor and there's not really a substitute for parmesan.
Pasta
and healthy diets almost seem like an oxymoron. How
can you incorporate pasta without feeling guilty?
It
does sound like an oxymoron but it's not the pasta itself
that we're gaining weight from, it's how much of it we
eat. I think that's what we have to change - our relationship
w food. It's not about the pasta itself, the bread itself
or the dessert itself - it's about how much we eat. In
the book, I have two different portion sizes for each
recipe. The way that I like to eat when I go to a restaurant
is order two appetizers because the portions are small.
Otherwise order a main course and ask them to bring out
half. The other half, ask them to package it, and then
take it home and eat it the next day.
I
lived in Paris for many years studying cooking. You know
how much Parisians give you to eat, it's very small! So
they can drink wine, eat bread eat cheese, but they don't
eat a lot of it and they move a lot. So it's about rethinking
the way you enjoy food.
Vidya Rao TODAY
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