Top 10 recipes under 500 calories
by Charlotte Morgan | 04 January 2013 | 
2 comments
Tweet
`Tis the season to eat well. All ten of these recipes are under 500 kcal per serving. we worked out the calorie count of those recipes which don't specifically state it.
Nadia Sawalha’s fruity porridge is the perfect start to a healthy day. Apparently her husband loves a bowl before running his marathons (!), so it obviously keeps you going. Nadia uses almond milk for extra flavour and to save on calories, then serves topped with pear and honey. 343 calories per bowl.
A chicken soup recipe made simply from chicken breast meat, baby spinach, pickled ginger, spring onions, garlic, lemon juice, stock, Thai chilli, fish sauce, a little vinegar, soy sauce, basil and bean sprouts… phew! It’s health in a bowl. Serve in big bowls, sprinkled with lightly crushed peanuts.
Roast monkfish with olives and capers is an ideal light and airy main. Recipe author Sally Bee loves monkfish for its firm texture and refreshing taste, and here she serves it with a thin sauce made from yoghurt, olives, capers and parsley. Serve the fish sprinkled with chilli flakes, and the dressing on the side.
Our cauliflower and celeriac soup recipe comes straight from The Detox Kitchen, and marries a cauliflower, celeriac, onion, garlic and celery soup with little rice fish cakes made from brown rice, lemon zest, parsley, thyme and Pollock. Recipe author Lily Simpson likes to serve it with edible flowers.
Baby sweetcorn, Tenderstem, courgettes, water chestnuts, fresh root ginger, cashew nuts, coriander... Mark Sargeant's super stir-fry is health in a frying pan. It’s easy to make stir-fry tasty without the meat, especially when you have an abundance of fresh and healthy ingredients.
Levi Roots’ steamed snapper with Tenderstem is another fishy dishy which is designed to keep down the calories. Predominantly seen as the coolest Sunday meal in Jamaica served with rice and peas, it’s also loved as beach food with festivals. Here Levi swops ocra for Tenderstem to make it healthier.
It doesn’t get much healthier than Arthur Potts Dawson’s raw salad with baby beetroot and quinoa. It’s a 'low carbon' raw salad, mixing together everything from young fennel to broad beans, red endive, and fresh herbs. Plus it’s made with ingredients which are mostly easy to grow at home.
Another genius recipe from Nadia Sawalha, this time for apple pancakes. She says: “My girls just love helping me to make these little babies, not only because they get to make a mess in the kitchen with mum, but also because they know how utterly delicious they are!” 282 calories per pancake.
Gizzi Erskine gets round the problem of fatty cakes by making her blueberry cupcakes from an ‘angel cake’ recipe (lots of egg whites are involved), which contains absolutely zero fat. Plus she packs blueberries into her little morsels to make them all the more healthy. They still taste divine, though.
Harry Eastwood works magic with her Madeleines recipe, managing to make them only 87 calories per cake. 87! She successfully retains the buttery richness of a classic Madeleine, perhaps by her use of ground almonds for moistness. Plus Harry only uses 50g of melted butter.
You might also like
The top five craziest diets of 2012
Can fast food ever be healthy?
Are cereal bars as healthy as they look?
Comments
by jenncatt4 | on 07 January 2013
This article is a little bit odd... the calorie count per portion isn't even given for most of the recipes (even when you click through to the recipe itself) which seems a bit pointless after all your hard work calculating it!
The apple pancakes particularly caught my eye - I'm sure they're delicious but but they had better be for 287 calories for one pancake. Compared to a normal 4 inch plain pancake (no sugar in batter) at 87 calories on average (with a 6 inch pancake at 176 calories) to which you'd add a sweet topping usually... it's a little hard to tell what size these ones are intended to be but they don't look very big on the plate? I suppose adding in the almond milk and apple are supposed to do away with having a calorific topping, but you'd have more portion control if you added the topping on afterwards rather than including the fruit in the batter, surely?
Added to that, do you know any adults who eat just one pancake for a whole breakfast (as the recipe suggests)? They're usually served in stacks of at least 3 for a meal, which racks up.... 861 calories?! I mean, they sound lovely but it seems strange including them in an article which vaguely suggests they might be slightly lower calorie.
And as for the madeleines... well, google tells me ground almonds are 73% fat so sure, that's where they get the moistness. Except the moistness is actually just non-dairy fat? That last sentence might need correcting...
by zuriga | on 09 January 2013
I definitely agree with other posters that including pancakes that are 287 calories apiece is hardly good advice for those on a diet!
The best way to lose weight is to use up more calories in a day than one consumes. That's what endocrinologists have said for years, and it's the Gospel.
Join the conversation
Please sign in or register to post a comment.