Healthy Ideas For Valentine's Food By Letty Velasco

In the past, whenever it's Valentine's Day, everybody seems to have a sweet tooth. Chocolates coming from lovers are a common thing, and all people enjoy eating them. Nowadays, people are more health conscious and keep their bodies in check during the holidays. That's why if you can't help indulging on sweets this Valentine's Day, then make room for some healthy Valentine's food to offset the gained weight.

It's really not that hard to include some healthy add-ons to the Valentine's meal you have prepared for your loved ones. If you follow some of these tips, I bet they really wouldn't mind the change at all. Whether it's just between you and your sweetie, with the family, or a Valentine's party, you can employ some innovative cooking sense to make a leaner meal.

Starting off, while the Valentine's food is baking in the oven, you can present some healthy snacks that everyone can enjoy eating. Most of the time, these snacks are cookies or candies, but for a change, how about serving a tray full of veggies and fruit? The vegetables can be topped with your favorite cream cheese for good flavor, or some Ranch dressing. Fruits can be accompanied also by flavored fruit dips or yogurt flavors like strawberry and peach, which works quite the same.

If you're serving chicken as a Valentine's food appetizer, instead of the usual chicken wings, you can opt in with some breaded chicken chucks. It's basically the same chicken, but the difference is the calories saved when you're using boneless and skinless chicken breasts rolled in batter. To increase your metabolism even more, how about serving the chicken chunks with some hot sauce? The heat will definitely up your appetite as well as increase your metabolic rate, essential in keeping slim.

For salads, there's a good alternative for croutons and that's to use cubed pieces of wheat bread for more fiber. Wash them with a little butter before baking them in the oven. You'll be amazed at how wheat bread can still add a little crunch to the salad even though with less fat than your regular croutons. And for more advanced tactics, try adding a sprinkle of shelled sunflower seeds into the mix. That would definitely make the salad crunch even more.

Vegetable haters are the worst, but you can trick them into eating some healthy Valentine's food by hiding the vegetables in tasty soups. Valentine's Day calls for a simple serving of vegetable, chicken noodle or tomato soup. Just remember though that you should pattern the soup type to the meal you'll be serving. Anyways, the point is that other than being a healthy vegetable hider, soups will fill you up quickly without much eating on your part.

The Valentine's food main course is the hardest part because it's really difficult to eat healthy when there's a holiday festivity going on. This doesn't exclude Valentine's Day because it's real hard to monitor everything when you're too busy enjoying yourself. However, if you stick with lean cuts of meat from beef, pork or chicken, I guess you'll do very fine. As an alternative, you can also use seafood in preparing the main meal of the day, depending on what you think would be most enjoyable to eat.

Healthy Valentine's food means healthy ingredients and that mostly mean low-fat alternatives. If your recipe calls for heavy cream, sacrifice a bit of taste by going for some light cream. Try avoiding using much salt on the recipes and just add a little bit of seasoning to highlight the flavor of the meal.

Food for Valentine's Day can be very healthy too. All it takes is a little know-how of alternatives and of course, a bit of knowledge in preparing them. Besides, if you love someone, you would want to make sure he or she lives long enough for you to celebrate more Valentine's Days together. And that reason certainly calls for good health food to eat even in this sweet holiday.

February 14 is definitely a very perfect day where you can cook some Valentine's food [http://www.foodmenublog.com] for your special someone.

Visit the Food Menu Blog for more tips on how to prepare Valentine's food [http://www.foodmenublog.com] and other cooking ideas that you will certainly love to share with your family and friends.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Letty_Velasco

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