Root Vegetable

In Mexico, tacos are small, fresh, and simply prepared. I once had a taco al pastor there that was mind-bendingly good, and it had all of three ingredients! Somehow, when the taco got to the United States, it morphed into double-crust, Taco Bell Beef Supreme Chalupa with sour-cream-out-of-a-caulking-gun madness. Here I do my best to honor the Americanized taco everyone seems to love, while bringing some traditional flavors into the picture.

I adore risotto. It is as much fun to make and serve as it is to eat. I have spent most of my career learning how to perfect it—and much of my life eating it. There are few foods that make people moan as much as a beautifully prepared risotto does. (Remember Seinfeld?) Two things make it so delicious: the starch that is released from the rice during the slow and careful cooking process, and the butter and cheese we add to it. Unfortunately, for a few pleasurable moments on the lips, it’s a terror for the hips, thanks to the fat and carb content. This rice-less risotto uses something called TVP, or textured vegetable protein. It’s a high-fiber, high-protein soy product. It’s great both raw and cooked, and it has far fewer carbs than white rice.

When I was young, I worked at a resort in the Poconos on the weekends. The way they made Shrimp Scampi was to simply let peeled shrimp sit in very large vat of warm garlic butter until an order came up. After many years of high-end cooking, I realized that wasn’t such a bad method after all—unless you were interested in living past the age of fifty. In this version, quick-broiled shrimp and broccoli, in a butter-free lemony, garlicky sauce spiked with fresh oregano, is every bit as good.

Bouillabaisse is a rich, traditional seafood stew from the south of France. It always contains garlic, saffron, and, of course, seafood. It’s almost always served with a garlic-and-mayonnaise concoction called rouille spread on grilled bread. In order to save time, this version calls for prepared clam juice, mussels, and boneless fish fillets (in the traditional version, usually several types of small flavorful fish are sautéed in olive oil and simmered for some time). The clam juice and mussels are very flavorful. In order to save on fat and calories, there’s no added olive oil—and I omitted the rouille and grilled bread altogether. This version is quite delicious as is and goes together quickly, so it’s fine for a weeknight meal.

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.

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.

If ever there was a dynamic duo of destructive caloric forces, cheese and potatoes is it. But they taste sooo good together, we dive in anyway. This potato-free cheese and “potato” soup reunites the duo but tames them to a mere shadow of their former fatness.

French onion soup began to show up on restaurant menus in the 1960s, when America’s interest in French food was piqued by Julia Child. Onions have tremendous nutritional value and have been shown to aid in preventing and treating both cardiovascular disease and certain types of cancer. Though a bowl of French onion soup is full of great things, it also has a fair amount of fat. This recipe calls for reduced-fat Swiss and little to no fat in the general preparation, which trimmed fat and calories by about one-third and one half, respectively.

The unhealthy parts of deviled eggs are the yolks and the devilish amounts of fat—usually in the form of mayonnaise—that most recipes call for mixing into the yolks. These deviled eggs are yolkless. The traditional seasoned mashed yolks have been replaced with seasoned mashed sweet potatoes mixed with mustard. They look just like the real thing. No one will miss the yolks—or the fat and cholesterol, either.

Because quiche is a custard, by definition it requires that a protein (egg) and fat (cream) mixture set up during baking but remain soft and silky when served at room temperature. Here, the cream has been eliminated completely, making a portion that is just over 200 calories. The flavor comes from caramelized onions, a little bit of bacon, and a small dose of an assertive cheese, such as Gruyère.

I’m a huge fan of raw tuna. The trick is to get high-quality tuna—called “sushi grade.” If you don’t want to eat raw tuna, you can sear it whole in a hot pan until it’s cooked to your liking, then slice and serve it with the sauce and the mushroom salad. Textured vegetable protein can be found in the health-food aisle of most major supermarkets.

Cheese fondue is a puddle of warm melted cheese flavored with wine, and I adore it. When it’s done right, the cheese coats a piece of fruit or bread with a perfectly satin layer of fatty unctuousness that transforms both parties into something miraculous. Getting that singular texture without all of the fat is a matter of making a thickened wine-shallot reduction and using high-quality low-fat cheddar. I threw in a little bit of bacon because everything’s better with it. If you leave it out, though, this reformed fondue contains one tenth the fat of the original.

Bucatini looks like fat spaghetti that’s hollow in the middle, like drinking straws made of pasta.

We eat a lot of swordfish when we are in Sicily, where my mom is from. She always orders a salad of oranges and fennel or oranges and onions to accompany it. When I cook swordfish anything at home, I always have oranges in the salad, for Mama.

This dish combines fresh and pickled veggies. It tastes awesome hot or cold.