From childhood, we are all firmly convinced that a side dish is something satisfying, high in starch. In schools, kindergartens, cutlets or meatballs traditionally serve children with potatoes or rice. For a growing organism - this is a completely normal combination, but what about a person who leads a sedentary lifestyle or is overweight? Here you have to refuse mashed potatoes, replacing it with low-calorie side dishes.
Utility leader
Nutritionists, no doubt, put vegetable side dishes in the first place. And if you already feel sick from stewed broccoli with asparagus, they can be replaced with more delicious grilled vegetables. The ideal low-calorie garnish for fish is salad. Such an addition will not only help to lose weight, but also give a charge of vitamins, slowly digestible carbohydrates, the necessary trace elements and fiber, which fills the stomach and provides a feeling of fullness.
The ideal recipe for a low-calorie side dish is a salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and herbs. All this is seasoned with a spoon of olive oil and served on the table.
Zucchini, pumpkin, beets, carrots are also considered the lowest-calorie side dishes. You can diversify the taste of these products if you add green peas, beans or mushrooms to the dish. But sauces and greasy dressings will have to be abandoned.
Second place among low-calorie side dishes
This can already include dishes containing starch. Buckwheat, pearl barley, wild rice, and durum wheat pasta are suitable. All this can be consumed even during weight loss, but only if the following rule is observed: such side dishes should also be combined with vegetables. But frying, fatty sauces and butter will have to be abandoned. They only ruin the usefulness of the dish.
The rules of side dishes for weight loss
Low-calorie side dishes suggest a minimal fat content. But the portion size is also of considerable importance. Garnish should not exceed the size of the main dish, treat it as a supplement that adorns the taste and saturates with vitamins. So what is a low-calorie side dish?
What will have to refuse?
Potatoes and pasta will have to be left in the past. Of course, if you use pasta from durum wheat, and just cook potatoes, you can slightly reduce the calorie content of these dishes, but these figures will still remain high in relation to vegetables and cereals.
An ideal option would be cabbage, asparagus, beans, eggplant, zucchini. All this can be stewed, baked, made stew and so on.
Braised cabbage
An excellent side dish will be white cabbage, which is perfectly stewed in its own juice, without adding additional ingredients.
To prepare a tasty and healthy dish, chop it, salt and mix. After a couple of minutes, she will start the juice, and you can already begin to simmer it over low heat. For taste, you can add carrots or tomatoes to the cabbage. You can stew it with meat. In this case, start with it, and then, when it is already almost ready, add the cabbage. The benefit of the dish increases if you steam it.
Marinated eggplant
If you go to barbecue, you do not need to swallow saliva, despite the fact that everyone is eating fatty meat. Eggplants, which are ideally cooked at the stake, may turn out to be equally tasty.
And to pickle them, first chop or grate carrots, peppers, cabbage on the most ordinary grater. Salt and remember all the ingredients. Now you can start eggplant. They, along with tomatoes, need to be cut in half, add garlic and lay out all the vegetables in layers, crushing oppression. You can try the marinade in 5-7 days.
If you don’t really want to bother with cooking, you can simply boil the asparagus and prepare a healthy mustard sauce for it.
What can be done with broccoli, brussels sprouts or cauliflower
These vegetables are best cooked in a double boiler. They are combined with Provencal herbs and leeks. Each type of cabbage can be prepared as an independent dish, or you can combine and make assorted dishes.
What will such a low-calorie side dish look like ? This is a stew of Brussels sprouts, with broccoli, carrots and green peas. The dish is combined with chicken cutlets , meatballs or meatballs. Steamed vegetables will be juicier if you eat them with various sauces. Forget about mayonnaise, it is better to make them yourself based on sour cream.
Baked pepper with tomatoes
This dish can even surprise guests and serve it to the festive table. For cooking, you will need about 40 pieces of cherry tomatoes, 3 sweet peppers, a bunch of basil, salt and pepper - to taste. Such a dish takes about 40 minutes, so you have to stock up on time. So, let's begin:
- Wash and clean the peppers and cut them exactly in half. Your task is to clean them so as not to break, the halves should be completely intact, without damage.
- Take a baking sheet and grease it with a drop of oil so that the peppers do not stick, and lay them out, pre-salt.
- Wash the cherry and peel the tomatoes, dropping them in boiling water for a couple of seconds. After that, the skin will peel off itself.
- Now the cherry can be stacked in peppers, the main thing is that they lie tightly against each other and the parts are completely filled.
- Pepper and salt, add basil or any other spices.
- Wrap the baking sheet with foil and put in the oven for half an hour at a temperature of 180 degrees.
- Then remove the foil and put in the oven for another 5-10 minutes. Peppers should become rosy.
The dish is served as a side dish and will decorate any table. And his calorie content is only 23 kcal per 100 g.
Porridge - all over the head
We already know that cereal porridge is also an excellent low-calorie side dish. For fans of proper nutrition, buckwheat and brown rice are the first places. The advantage of these cereals is that they perfectly saturate, dull the feeling of hunger and contain a minimum amount of fat, along with useful trace elements and vitamins.
As for buckwheat, it is necessary to boil it only in water, without adding oil, otherwise the whole diet will end, before it even starts. Of the cooking methods, proper nutrition only approves of stewing, baking, boiling and steaming. Indeed, to fight extra pounds of low-calorie side dishes is possible only if they are properly cooked.