Fit Fare

Sometimes cooking and eating in a healthy way can be exhausting. There’s the counting of calories, carbs, and fat grams, the search for organic and locally-grown produce, the avoidance of trans-fats, the limiting of red meats, the inclusion of superfoods, and more. Once you’ve assembled all your high-quality ingredients, the last thing you need is more headache during the preparation and cooking phases.

Some kitchen tools are gimmicky rip-offs; in an effort to round out a wedding registry with reasonably-priced items, I certainly ended up with a lot of them. However, I also ended up with a lot of really cool things, many of which make it easier and more fun to cook in a healthy way. In this installment, I will pick out some of the tools I’ve encountered that have been most valuable in my healthy cooking experiments. They can all be found at any cooking tools website or cooking store, and they should all go for $25 or less. The photos shown are for general reference only; FitFare does not endorse any particular brand, retail website, or store.

1. Oil misters

Oil misters allow you to spritz foods with a very fine coat of oil so you can use an absolute minimum, and without the chemical additives and propellants found in commercial non-stick cooking sprays. This is particularly useful for preparing vegetables for grilling, or for spritzing on panini before pressing them.

2. Bamboo steamers

Bamboo steamers offer a quick, easy, and healthy way to prepare vegetables. They require no additional fat, and they do not reduce the nutrients in vegetables as boiling may.

3. Grater/microplane

Everything tastes better when it’s freshly grated, from ginger to nutmeg to chocolate to cheese. It means you get more mileage out of the flavoring ingredients, so you can use less of the less healthy ones. Also, it’s much more tempting to throw in a handful of pre-grated cheese; if you have to use your muscles to get it shredded, you’ll probably use less.

4. Spice grinder

On a related note, spices are something that can really liven up lower-fat food. That’s why it’s a great investment to grind whole spices. The intensity of flavor is much higher than with pre-ground spices, and the shelf life is longer as well.

5. Food scale

Portion control is a huge challenge for many people, and a food scale gives the surest way to gauge how much you’re really eating. It’s also valuable for baking, because weight is a more accurate measure than volume for ingredients like flour, which can have different volume due to environmental factors.

6. Fat separator

Soups are one of the healthiest foods you can make: they’re easy to load up with vegetables, they’re hearty and soothing, and if you make them at home, you can completely control the contents. A fat separator is a tool that makes it even easier to cut the fat out of your stock, without the inconvenience of having to chill it to remove solidified fat.

These gadgets aren’t absolutely essential. You can always cook healthfully no matter what your setup, as long as you pay attention to what’s going into your food and don’t lose track of the nutritional content of condiments, cooking oils, and other extras. These tools offer an affordable way to save yourself some stress when trying to cut the bad things out of your diet and maximize the good things.