Joanne Lusted - Dish Do-Over

To my mom and dad, Susan and Roland Lusted, and to my late grandparents,
Chris and Mary Birch, and Charles and Dorothy Lusted

T his book started as a dare from my foodie friends: Create a do-over version of not just any pizza but a bacon double-cheeseburger pizza. Two fast-food favourites together, one massive amount of fat, sodium and calories. But does it have to be? Do you have to give it up or give up the flavour? Not on my watch. Friends exclaim that my low-fat bacon double-cheeseburger pizza tastes like junk food but is better than the original!

My mother is a fantastic cook. She always made sure we had a home-cooked meal on the table. She made everything from scratch, including my favourite, macaroni and cheese. I didnt have Kraft Dinner till I was six. My grandmother and I always baked together, me standing on my little stool so I could reach the counter. And I remember watching, through the oven door, the cookies rise. We were a family of cooks that enjoyed good food.

So it wasnt too much of a surprise when I decided to go to chef school. Probably not a surprise either that you can gain weight when youre a chef: heavy cream, butter, pan-fried and breaded meats, fatty braised meats, butter sauces, decadent desserts, homemade bread and pastries, cheese, vegetables blanketed in butter and lots of refined starches like rice, pasta and white flour. After packing on the pounds and not feeling good, I knew it was time for a change. I started to look for healthier ways to eat my favourite foods. And like many people, I found I was eating a lot of non-fat, fat-free or low-calorie food that was often heavily processed. I also got frustrated by so-called makeover recipes that used ingredients that werent healthier, portion sizes that were reduced to hit a mythical calorie count or deceits like wrapping taco filling in lettuce and calling it a taco or soggy oven fries that didnt taste at all like their deep-fried brethren.

I wanted to eat the classics the favourites I grew up on but without the fat, crazy sodium or calories, and without the garbage. I wanted real food that was still healthy and still tasted good. As it turned out, I wasnt alone. In 2012, Dish Do-Over launched on the television show Steven and Chris, and the response was overwhelming. Viewers told us their kids favourites, their guilty pleasures and the restaurant favourites that they wanted to make healthier and at home. Requests poured in for chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese, beef stroganoff, double chocolate cake, eggs Benedict, butter chicken, pad Thai, hamburgers and more.

Dish Do-Over features viewer favourites, plus many of my own family recipes reinvented. You wont find trickery here, just simple and smart swaps that anyone can do. As youll see, the trick to making french fries in the oven is to soak the potatoes in hot water before baking them, to help draw out the starch. Dry them well and bake them at a high temperature, and theyll be crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside.

The bacon double-cheeseburger pizza has more tricks, but theyre fast and easy. Simply cooking the bacon in the oven instead of frying it saves fat and calories without cutting back on the amount of bacon on your pizza. Adding ground mushrooms to lean ground beef replaces the fat in full-fat ground beef (and no one notices the mushrooms, guaranteed). And the best thing of all? When you lose the fat, you actually are left with more flavour. Healthier food can taste better, and you can enjoy your favourites more often. You can transfer smart substitutions to other recipes: use the mushroom swap for anything with ground beef, such as lasagna, Bolognese sauce and tacos.

I believe that no one should ever feel guilty about eating and that you shouldnt have to make the choice between eating tasty food and enjoying good health. It also doesnt have to be difficult or intimidating to cook delicious food. Sacrificing flavour and your favourite foods is a surefire way to sabotage your mental state and healthy lifestyle goals believe me, Ive been there! Eating is just as much about the experience and the memory as it is about nutrition, perhaps more so. The key is balance. Being able to enjoy your favourite comfort foods prepared with wholesome ingredients is the perfect way to have your bacon double-cheeseburger pizza and eat it too.

I m going to let you in on one of the biggest secrets of my professional cooking career: healthy cooking is most definitely, 100% assuredly, not complicated!

You dont have to be a trained chef to make lick-the-plate-clean dinners and delectable desserts, and you certainly dont need a nutrition degree to craft healthy, clean meals that nourish your body. It all comes down to ingredients and techniques, and once I help you get those down pat, youll be fully equipped to start dishing out delicious, nutritious meals in a snap.

First things first: lets talk ingredients. The fresher your ingredients are, the better your food is going to look, smell and taste. And as a plus for all you busy cooks out there, the better your ingredients look, smell and taste, the less work you actually have to do in the kitchen. Thats because food thats naturally fresh and full of nutrients is so delicious on its own, you hardly have to do anything to it to bring out the succulent flavour. The quality of your ingredients is particularly important when cooking healthy meals, since youre not masking the natural flavours with excess oil, salt or sugar. Even the saddest, driest little potato will undoubtedly taste incredible when deep-fried in fat and smothered in salt, but try turning that sorry spud into a clean, nutritious snack with a tablespoon of oil and pinch of salt and youll get a different story. Theres a reason that fresh summer corn on the cob needs only a few minutes in hot water to satisfy your taste buds the sweet, creamy flavour is coming straight from nature, rather than from half a pound of butter and salt.

This brings me to my second rule for cooking delicious healthy meals: choose the right techniques. To let the natural flavour of your food shine, you need to know how to treat each ingredient in your kitchen. Dont worry: this is where I come in! In this chapter I show you the easiest, healthiest and simplest techniques for cooking the perfect hard-boiled egg and the best crispy bacon, among other things. I also give you recipes for the basics, such as homemade ketchup and whole-wheat pizza dough, to mention just two. And once youve got the basics covered, youll be well on your way to transforming the calorie-heavy comfort foods youre used to reserving for special occasions into healthy flavourful meals you can enjoy every night of the week think creamy pastas and pub-night classics!