Recipes?

Were you wanting specifically Nica recipes, or just any recipes? For general recipes, I like RecipeZaar.com. You can search by just about anything: special diet, ingredient, occasion, etc. RecipeSource is another option, although not as full-featured. And there are tons of other sites if you look around a bit.

I tend to be amazed with the grease and salt level in food here. There are a few "reasonable" recipes in "Living Like a Nica" but I think that was mostly a result of me saying 100 times to Ana that I wanted them. On the other end, we have a maid that floats eggs in oil to cook them and that seems typical.

That said, I want to add a recipe section either here or in NicaPlaza.com. The either comes from the fact that this is a Drupal site and NicaPlaza is a Joomla site so available plug-ins are different. I need to do an upgrade on this site in the next few weeks. Once that is done, I will look into a recipe module.

My "cooking healthy" experience comes mostly from either steaming or baking where a Nicaraguan would fry or put in some dairy-based sauce. One easy starting point is to "think Chinese". That mostly means get a wok and stir-fry assorted veggies (with some low-fat meat if you are into eating animals).

You can also steam fish and veggies. If you want to eat red meat, treat it as a condiment. That is, make a steamed or stir-fried veggie dish and just toss in a bit of meat for protein.

When making gallo pinto and such, I do it in a teflon pan. I can't convince our maid that you don't need a pile of oil but if I do it myself it comes out pretty fat-free.

Another consideration is what kind of fat you use. Unsaturated or mono-saturated fat is just so much better for you. We use olive oil in anything that doesn't need serious "frying temperatures". Also, traditional things such as tajadas where you cook plantains in oil can be "moderated" by cooking them on either an lightly oiled griddle or on a lightly oiled pan in the oven.

On the low-salt front, if you look at how typical food is prepared, the only seasoning used is salt. I expect a lot of that is because it is cheap. The one other seasoning commonly used is achote. Add basil, oregano and a few other spices and you can get some flavor without adding a lot of salt. For me, that has been a bit harder conversion but it is possible.

I have been an "almost" vegetarian for 30 years. I continue seeing myself applying the knowledge I gained in that time to "converting" people here to a low-fat diet.