Side

This is a healthy version of one of the greatest inventions of the 1980s: the hollowed-out deep-fried potato skins filled with sour cream, bacon, and cheese that first appeared on the menu at T.G.I. Friday’s in New York City. There are a few differences, though. Here, the potato skin is baked until crisp, not fried, and the fillings are all reduced-fat products. The result is a pretty spectacular loaded potato skin at one-third of the calories and less than one-fourth of the fat of the original.

French fries are maddeningly delicious, but consider that a large order of McDonald’s French fries contains about 500 calories and 25 grams of fat before you dip them into ketchup or mayo. I think it’s time for French fry rehab, don’t you?

I learned that sweet potatoes are the single healthiest vegetable. They’re loaded with carotenoids, vitamin C, potassium, and fiber. You can dress them up a bunch of different ways, but this simple puree is ideal.

Few dishes are as soul-satisfying and luxurious as a buttery-rich potato puree or mashed potatoes. I love mashed potatoes, but I know that they’re not particularly good for me. Cauliflower puree makes a truly superb substitute.

There are two basic types of potato salad: mayonnaise-based and sugar-and-vinegar-based. I have always preferred the latter because of the sweet-and-sour element—plus it has bacon in it. This alluring sweet-and-sour salad replaces not-so-nice white potatoes with sweet potatoes (much nicer for you), and the texture of the salad has been bulked up with cauliflower.

A deli side-dish favorite, macaroni salad is a gimme on every table in America come summertime. Everyone has a favorite recipe—some contain ham, some peppers, some bacon, and some peas. But all contain high-fat mayonnaise and white pasta, a fundamentally bad combo. White pasta is replaced here with whole-wheat shells, and the high-fat mayo with low-fat mayo. I added a few bits and pieces, like smoked paprika, to give it some personality.

Coleslaw goes with so many things. You’ll rarely see a cookout without it. The crunchy shredded raw cabbage and the sweet-and-sour flavor make it a wonderfully piquant counterpoint to the grilled meats and BBQ sauce-slathered main dishes that make up America’s favorite backyard menus.

This was a tough one. Everyone loves cheesy garlic bread, but between the white bread, the butter, and the cheese, it’s a tough sell to the health-conscious. The task was to figure out how to get whole-wheat bread to respond like white bread. Toasting the bread first, then dipping it in chicken broth before topping it with a generous amount of low-fat cheese, and finally broiling it did the trick.

Though they are both outrageously rich pasta sauces, carbonara and Alfredo are distinctly different. The base for Alfredo is cream and Parmigiano-Reggiano. The base for carbonara includes onions, bacon or pancetta (originally it was guanciale—cured pigs’ cheeks), egg yolks, and Parmigiano-Reggiano or Pecorino Romano. At almost 1,000 calories per serving, this dish was ripe for a makeover.

Here’s a great steakhouse side dish that can do more harm than the red meat itself. Standard preparations make a bad boy out of an otherwise extraordinarily healthy vegetable. The problem with spinach is that it’s very lean and often bitter—which is why we sauté it in butter or douse it with cream. All-natural Greek yogurt has been employed here to help clean up its act.

I once ate true Fettuccine Alfredo at Ristorante D’Alfredo in Rome, where a giant picture of its namesake owner hangs on the wall. The big flavors of the dish were brought to bear by combining outsized amounts of butter and Parmigiano-Reggiano. It was that simple: butter and cheese. Not so simple, though, if you’re watching your waistline. This version eliminates the cream that many American versions call for but retains a little bit of the butter for flavor. The velvety-smooth texture is re-created with yogurt and thickened chicken broth. It may not be as authentic as the original, invented by Alfredo di Lelio, but it’s a very tasty version we can all live with (for a very long time).

A healthy amount of celery gives this traditionally rich seafood salad a good bit of crunch. The lightened-up lemony mayonnaise dressing would be delicious with any cold, steamed, or poached seafood, including crab, scallops, and lobster.

The Italian name for this salad is insalata caprese, and it’s a shining example of the brilliance of Italian cuisine: a few fresh, simple ingredients at the peak of their season combined to produce exceptionally complex flavors. It hails from Capri, a small island off the coast of Naples in the region of Campagna, where my family comes from. Buy only the best mozzarella, tomatoes, basil, and olive oil you can find to make this salad. It may be naturally fresh and healthful, but I have kept fat and calories to a minimum by keeping the olive oil to a minimum—only 1 tablespoon for 4 servings.

A great green salad has always been a staple on my restaurant menus and on my table at home. The combination of Dijon mustard, good-quality vinegar, and olive oil gives tender green leaves their raison d’être. There is no olive oil in this dressing and it still tastes great. I kept the Dijon mustard in the mix because it’s very low in fat—and because few ingredients can pack a punch like Dijon mustard. Yogurt, lemon juice, and aromatics like tarragon and fennel round out the dressing. You’ll never again eat a green dressed with artificial-tasting, gloppy, low-fat dressing.

Who doesn’t love a big thick chunk of iceberg lettuce with bacon and blue cheese dressing alongside a juicy cowboy-cut ribeye? It’s one of my favorite steakhouse meals. Problem is, at 700-plus calories and more than 80 grams of fat—for the salad alone!—it’s a very bad bargain. Thankfully, the availability of reduced-fat blue cheese means you don’t have to choose between the steak and the salad.

The highest form of “cream of” soup starts out with cooked, pureed vegetables and pure, fresh cream. The second-best incarnation of that same soup winds up being pastier, with cornstarch as a thickener and the fresh cream replaced with cheaper fats, like vegetable oils. There’s one more way to make cream soup, though—a way in which you get the freshest, purest, least diluted taste of the vegetables. There’s no cream in this recipe—and no cornstarch, either. You still get a great creamy texture by using a lot of mushrooms and chicken broth. The key is to not let the mushroom liquor (the juice expressed by the mushrooms as they cook) evaporate, and to use a good blender to create a luxurious puree.

This is such a great salad—especially in the fall, when beets are in season. The sweet, earthy flavor of the beets provides a nice foil for the tangy blue cheese and peppery arugula. By lightly crushing the walnuts, you need less of this healthy but high-fat nut in your salad. Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big difference.

I must admit that I didn’t realize at first that tortilla soup was an American favorite, but it slowly dawned on me. One of my favorite hotels serves it, there is a movie called Tortilla Soup, and when I asked my Twitter peeps about soups, it came up over and over. Its origins are Mexican, but it has become Americanized over the years. In Mexico City, this soup is made simply with roasted tomatoes, chiles, chicken broth, and corn tortillas. This version is true to the original, with a few additions.

Everyone loves a good croquette. It almost doesn’t matter what’s in them—as long as they’re filled with something juicy and fried, we like ’em. I think high-quality canned fish such as sardines, tuna, and salmon is underappreciated, so I designed this croquette recipe with canned salmon in mind. To keep it tasting light and fresh, it’s mixed with fresh salmon and one of the best jarred foods out there: fried peppers.

A hollowed-out mushroom cap makes an ideal little edible bowl, perfect for filling with cream cheese and bacon, creamed spinach and ham, Italian sausage and cheese, or crabmeat. These—made with fresh crab, a little bit of low-fat mayo, and real bacon—are a real caloric bargain. A single serving (4 large mushrooms) nets you only 4 grams of fat and just under 120 calories.