The 150 Healthiest 15-Minute Recipes on Earth

INTRODUCTION

How to Create the Healthiest, Quickest, and Most Delicious Meals on Earth

If you’re reading this book, there are two things I know about you:

One, you’re interested in healthy food for you and your family.

Two, you’re in a time crunch.

Usually, healthy and fast don’t go together. Healthy fast food is almost an oxymoron, and most people have to choose one or the other. And when you’ve got a family to take care of, guess which one wins most often?

Years of private practice with nutrition clients (and even more years speaking to audiences around the country, writing books, and running a website that gets a ton of mail) have taught me that people are genuinely perplexed when it comes to food. They truly want to make smart and healthy choices, but those choices are usually very labor intensive (and often, though not always, expensive to boot).

Jeannette Bessinger has had the same experience, and she’s even more in the trenches than I am. She works with busy families, providing nutrition education, and helping them improve both their eating habits and everyday food preparation. Many of these families are also on a budget, and all of them are time-crunched, stressed out, and overcommitted. They don’t have time to investigate every food, read up on every health benefit, dissect every label, evaluate different claims, and then cook every meal from scratch. So Chef Jeannette is all-too-aware of the day-to-day challenges faced by the average person wanting to feed his or her family the best food possible in the least amount of time.

Hence, this book.

Let me say right off the bat that you’re not crazy—it’s sometimes very difficult to make healthy food quickly. You didn’t imagine that, it’s a fact of life, and we need to acknowledge that from the beginning.

But it’s not impossible.

Far from it.

So we approached this cookbook as a huge challenge. How do we put together meals that are rich in nutrients (like vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals from plants, omega-3 fats, and so on), contain a good mix of protein, healthy fat, and good carbohydrates, don’t break the caloric bank, and can still be assembled from start to scratch in a reasonable amount of time?

We think we solved the problem.

Is every single recipe perfect? No. Occasionally there’s a shortcut or two (like using a prepared store-bought sauce or dressing). Not every single ingredient is organic (doesn’t really have to be, actually). And once in a while the recipes will spill over 15 minutes a bit, but this is, after all, real life!

So let me tell you some of the things we looked at when we created these recipes. It may help you to understand why it’s actually possible to eat healthy food that can be prepared in no time. You just have to know what you’re looking for.

Here’s what we were looking for:

1. Nutrient Density

When I evaluate a food, I’m looking at the costs versus the benefits. Chocolate cake has a very high cost: lots of calories, lots of sugar, and almost nothing that’s nutritionally good for you. Now granted, it does have the benefit of being delicious, but that’s what evaluation is about: weighing the benefits against the cost.

When you think about it, evaluating food isn’t much different than evaluating anything else you shop for. If I go into the store and see a nice shirt, I might look at the price and say, Hmm, the shirt is okay, but I’ll only wear it twice a year and it costs $300. The benefit of looking nice twice a year is not enough to compensate for the outrageous cost, especially when I can find an equally nice shirt for a fraction of the price.

To put this way of thinking into the context of food, I might think to myself, Chocolate cake tastes really good (benefit) but really screws up my blood sugar, gives me no nutrients to speak of, and is very high in calories (cost). Now if there were no other way to get that delicious taste, I might splurge and go for the cake. But the fact is that with some creative recipe development (the kind in which Chef Jeannette excels) I can get fabulous taste at a fraction of the cost. Not only that, but I can get nutrients that support my health, protect my waistline, and give me the building blocks for everything my body needs.

So when we nutritionists speak of nutrient density we’re talking about the balance between nutrients and calories.

Here’s an example. Spinach is a really nutrient-dense food. One cup of raw spinach has 30 mg of calcium, 24 mg of magnesium, 167 mg of potassium, 8.4 mg of vitamin C, 1,688 mcg of beta-carotene, 2,813 IUs of vitamin A, and a whopping 3,659 mcg of lutein and zeaxanthin (two superstar nutrients for eye health).

Want to know how many calories that cup of spinach has?

Seven.

See where I’m going with this? When you can eat a few cups of a food for fewer than 50 calories and get a ton of minerals, vitamins, and phytochemicals, you’re eating a nutrient-dense food. There are a lot of nutrients densely packed into a small caloric package. Compare that to a tiny serving of commercially prepared chocolate cake that has about 54 IUs of vitamin A and not much more—not a single milligram of C, D, E, K, or any B vitamin (except for a tiny amount of folate). It’s got a ton of sugar, 35 grams of processed carbs, and comes at a caloric cost of about 235 calories, and that’s for a serving that wouldn’t satisfy anyone but a squirrel.

So maybe spinach and chocolate cake represent two extremes. But the best-kept secret in the world is that when it comes to healthy food, you can actually have your cake and eat it too. Chef Jeannette has worked her kitchen magic to concoct recipes that feature nutrient-dense food at a reasonable caloric cost and that taste delicious too.

2. Glycemic Load

Okay, here’s another technical-sounding concept that’s easy to understand once you cut away all the scientific jargon—glycemic load. Here’s what it means:

When you eat food, your blood sugar goes up. That’s normal and natural and expected. But you don’t want it to go too high. When blood sugar goes up, the body responds by secreting the hormone insulin, the job of which is to escort some of that extra sugar into the cells where it can be burned for energy. But when blood sugar rises too high (and stays up there), you need a lot of insulin to get it back down. Insulin, also known as the fat storage hormone, is a perfectly fine and important hormone, but when you have too much of it floating around, it can contribute to all sorts of health problems such as obesity and diabetes.

When blood sugar gets too high, it creates a separate set of problems not unrelated to the ones that come from high levels of insulin. The insulin eventually brings your blood sugar down, but sometimes it goes down too low, resulting in cravings, mood swings, and overeating. So keeping blood sugar in a nice, healthy range, which also keeps insulin in a nice, healthy range, is a major goal of healthy eating.

The glycemic index is a measure that researchers use to evaluate the effect of a given amount of food on blood sugar. (The glycemic load is an even more accurate measure of the same thing.) When foods have a high glycemic impact, they tend to create blood sugar problems. (Just for reference, foods with the highest glycemic impact include pure sugar, white bread, cornflakes, and most processed carbohydrates.) Clearly, we want to choose foods that are reasonably low glycemic, have minimal effect on our blood sugar and keep cravings, hunger, and mood swings at bay.

That’s why Chef Jeannette and I always talk about foods that are low glycemic. Translated, that means they’re low in sugar or processed carbs, and won’t contribute to the myriad health problems associated with too much sugar in the diet. Foods that are high in fiber (beans, for example), high in healthy fats like omega-3 (salmon), and higher in protein (grass-fed beef, chicken, and fish) all fit the bill. And almost every vegetable on the planet, and most fruits, are pretty low glycemic as well, not to mention nutrient dense!

3. Fiber

Speaking of fiber, it’s one of the most important constituents of your diet, and most Americans simply don’t get enough of it.

Fiber slows down digestion in the stomach and small intestine, which helps stabilize blood sugar levels. It increases our feeling of fullness, making it less likely we’ll overeat. It reduces cholesterol. It may help prevent colon cancer, and it definitely helps prevent constipation and hemorrhoids. It’s good for digestive disorders. High-fiber diets are associated with reduced rates of heart and kidney disease as well as lower rates of diabetes and obesity.

So Chef Jeannette and I pay attention to fiber. And we try to make sure it’s in every recipe whenever possible. It’s definitely one of the components of a healthy diet. Most responsible health organizations recommend that we get between 25 and 38 grams of fiber a day, but the average American only gets between 4 and 8 grams. Interestingly, most high-fiber foods are also nutrient dense and low glycemic!

Are you beginning to see a pattern here?

4. Free-Range Meats and Wild-Caught Fish

We make a pretty big deal about grass-fed meat and wild fish, and with good reason. Let’s start with meat. Some studies have shown that high levels of meat consumption are associated with higher rates of cancer and heart disease, leading many people to simply avoid meat altogether. But the truth about meat eating is a bit more complicated than you might think.

Most of the meat we get in the supermarket comes from what are called factory farms. If you’re an animal lover you don’t want to visit a factory farm. (In fact, it’s next to impossible. Factory farms are notoriously secret about their meat-processing practices and almost never allow visitors to observe—with good reason.) The cows are kept in tiny, confined spaces and fed a diet of grain. This is a problem. Cows don’t digest grain very well; the stomach of a ruminant is not suited to grain, and it causes terrible acidity. Not only that, grain diets are very inflammatory, and the meat of factory-farmed beef is high in proinflammatory omega-6 fats. And if the grain-based diet weren’t enough to make the cows sick (it usually is), the crowded conditions in which they live ensures that most of them won’t be the healthiest specimens. As a result, factory farms routinely shoot their animals full of antibiotics, which winds up in their meat, which winds up on your table.

That’s not all they’re shot full of. Factory-farmed meat routinely contains hormones (such as bovine growth hormone) and steroids used to fatten the cows up and hasten the time to slaughter. These are in addition to whatever pesticides and chemicals they’re exposed to in their cheap grain diet. The result is a meat product that is anything but healthy.

Contrast that to a grass-fed cow. Cows were meant to live on pasture. Grass is their natural diet. When they are grass fed, their meat is higher in the amazingly healthy omega-3 fats (the same fat found in cold-water fish such as salmon). Their meat also contains a cancer- and obesity-fighting fat called CLA that is conspicuously absent in the fat of factory-farmed beef. And grass-fed cows are almost always raised organically.

Studies that show ill effects from meat eating look at populations that consume large amounts of processed meats. That includes deli meats, which, in addition to all the problems stated above, also contain nitrates and high levels of sodium.

Interestingly, just as this book was going to press, a new study came out that looked at meat eating and heart disease. In this study, however, researchers didn’t just lump all meat eaters together. They compared people who ate nonprocessed meat, such as burgers and steaks, with people who ate high amounts of processed deli meats. The results were interesting. While processed meat eaters did indeed have significantly higher risk for heart disease, the people eating nonprocessed meat did not. I suspect that if researchers actually compared those eating grass-fed meat (and wild game) to those eating processed meat, the results would be even more dramatic.

So meat has gotten a bad name, but perhaps unfairly. Real, grass-fed meat with no antibiotics, steroids, or hormones is a very different food than store-bought, factory-farmed meat. We realize it’s not always possible to get grass-fed, but we feel strongly that whenever possible you should try to do so. It really makes a difference. When we do use deli meats in these recipes (only once or twice, actually), we always suggest nitrate-free and low-sodium varieties—this eliminates two of the most problematic compounds in processed meats and significantly reduces the dangers associated with eating it.

Similarly, farmed fish is fed an unnatural diet of corn and grain, which leads to problems similar to those encountered when cows are fed an all-grain diet. Wild fish such as salmon naturally dine on krill, mackerel, and crustaceans. Wild fish has lower levels of inflammatory omega-6s and higher levels of health-giving omega-3s—it’s also high in antioxidants (such as astaxanthin), which are provided from their natural diet.

Although there is always concern about mercury in ocean fish, the truth is that farmed fish have an even bigger problem—PCBs. PCBs are polychlorinated biphenyls, a really nasty toxin that’s been spilled into the environment since the early twentieth century and persists today, even though PCBs are now outlawed. The toxin accumulates in the fat of animals and fish, and today, according to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, farm-raised salmon is the most PCB-contaminated protein source in the American diet.

So we recommend wild salmon whenever possible. Farmed salmon isn’t going to kill you and is a compromise between eating wild salmon and not eating salmon at all, but when you can get it, wild fish is the way to go—at least where salmon is concerned!

5. Organic Versus Nonorganic

I’m always amused by the way the media spins studies on organic food. They love to trumpet headlines about studies that show no nutritional advantage to organic fruits and vegetables when, in fact, that’s only part of the story. It’s true that studies have been mixed about whether organic food has more nutrients than nonorganic (sometimes yes, sometimes no; it never has less). But the fact is we eat organic food not just because it may have a little more vitamin C or folate, but because of what it doesn’t have—chemicals.

We believe that it makes sense to try to reduce our daily exposure to the more than 80,000 unregulated chemicals that exist in the environment (many of which come to us via the food supply). We also recognize that organic food in general is harder to find and somewhat more expensive than nonorganic. As private citizens, Chef Jeannette and I both choose our battles on the organic front. Some foods (strawberries, for example), are more contaminated and sprayed than others so when buying those particular foods, we choose (and recommend) organic. Other foods (pineapples) are pretty clean, so for those it doesn’t matter as much. (For a complete and current list of the dirtiest and cleanest foods, go to www.food-news.org.)

A WORD ABOUT SHORTCUTS

First of all, let’s be clear about something: Compromise isn’t a dirty word. We’re living in the real world, and, as mentioned earlier, it’s not always going to be possible or practical to choose perfect, fresh, organic, local ingredients and cook them from scratch. To accomplish our bigger goal of providing you with healthy meals in 15 minutes, we made a few small compromises. We occasionally used processed products to stay under 15 minutes, but we feel that on balance, the health benefits of the recipes in which this was done still far outweigh the minor negatives associated with a small amount of processed food.

In general, when using processed or prepared foods (sauces, wraps, and the like), it’s best to go for the highest-quality versions (fresh, clean ingredients, whole grain, etc.) and nix things that have too many chemicals, too much refined sugar or flour, or multiple artificial ingredients whose names you can’t pronounce. We tried to be conscious of sodium content as well, and fiercely conscious of trans fats (hydrogenated oils), which we simply did not use no matter what.

What we did do was front-load the recipes with whole foods, which

come from what I have referred to as the Jonny Bowden Four Food

Groups—food you fish for, hunt, gather, or pluck.

As long as these foods make up the bulk of your diet, you will be way ahead of the game. Those foods account for the majority of the ingredients in the recipes that follow.

Finally we’d like to suggest that your whole diet shouldn’t be composed of these quick and easy meals. If you can, try to make some time for slow food—food that may not come together in 15 minutes, but whose taste, texture, flavor, complexity, and nutritional benefits are worth the extra time needed to prepare it. We offer nutrient or flavor bonus tips in several of the recipes themselves for when you have an extra 5, 10, or 30 minutes.

If your diet consists of a good balance of slow food and the truly healthy fast food featured in this cookbook, you should be in very good shape indeed.

We hope reading these recipes (and the introductions) will help you make a shift in your relationship to food. Food, after all, is fuel for your body and brain, but it is more than that. It is celebration, sharing, and giving. It is meditative, mindful, and sensual. It is a source of joy and community. It is both nutritious and recreational.

It is essential.

Why not make the most of it?

Enjoy the journey.

—Jonny Bowden

Woodland Hills, CA, 2010

KEY TIPS ON HOW TO MAKE SPEEDY, TASTY WHOLE FOODS MEALS AT HOME

The average amount of time an American family spent cooking meals in the 1980s was about two hours a day. Today those two cooking hours have dwindled down to an average of 20 minutes—for all three meals! Clearly many of us have been leaning on prepared, takeout, and restaurant food to get ourselves fed. But, as Dr. Jonny so eloquently tells us, the quality of that high-calorie/low-nutrient-density food is poor and the health cost of eating so much of it has been dear, as evidenced by the epidemic of obesity we’re facing (and all the other issues that have come along for the ride, such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease).

So if fast food isn’t worth the health toll, and we no longer have two hours a day at our disposal for cooking, we need to get smarter about the raw ingredients we buy, and the way we use our time in the kitchen. Following are tips for getting healthy, tasty meals on the table fast. I’ve recommended a few key pieces of equipment to help cut your prep time, shopping tips, core pantry staples for the speedy whole foods kitchen, general time-saving tips for food preparation, and simple things to you can do to ensure delicious and varied flavors in your meals.

ABOUT THE 150 QUICKEST AND HEALTHIEST RECIPES

The recipes are divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 is the heart of the book, with about 100 recipes (mainly entrées with a few breakfast dishes) that will take you about 15 minutes from set up (see Organize Your Kitchen on page 22) to prepare and cook, with suggested speedy sides to complete your meal. Among the selections are about 25 recipes that require little to no actual cooking. Many of them are more like assembly meals that you can get from pantry to placemat in 15 minutes or less. Chapter 2 offers about 25 delicious entrées that require only 15 minutes or less of preparation, but need a little more time for cooking (never more than 45 minutes). Chapter 3 contains 25 tasty and innovative balanced snack ideas, most of which can be made in a flash, and many of which can serve as mini-meals in a pinch.

Dr. Jonny introduces all the recipes and highlights the special health qualities of particular ingredients or nutrients in his Nutritional Notes throughout the book. The recipes in the first two chapters suggest side dishes to complete the meal, superspeed tips that will trim even more time off the prep, ideas for enriching your dish if you have 5, 10, or 30 extra minutes of time, and variation tips for ingredient substitutions to make the dishes more versatile.

The Planned Leftover tag indicates that a recipe includes planned leftovers. Planned leftover meals allow you to prepare two meals in the same amount of time as one, so you can eat fresh that night and freeze another meal to eat at any time over the next two months. Follow our directions for flawless freezing, then thaw the dish overnight in the refrigerator before the evening you would like to eat it. The next night it’s ready to simply heat and eat! Include a PL meal in your repertoire once a week and you will soon have a stock of high-quality, frozen prepared meals on hand for those evenings when you’re too tired to lift a finger for food prep, but still need to feed the family. One more thing: If a non-PL dish freezes well, and most of them do, you can transform it into PL by simply doubling the amount of the original recipe and freezing one of the meals. (See the note on batching later this introduction.)

THE STARS

Though we love all the recipes in the book, we wanted to note those that were outstandingly healthy and delicious—the best of the best. It was a challenge deciding which ones to give a star to, and we’re sure you could argue that some deservedly good ones didn’t get stars. Remember, everything in this book is a star in its respective category—the ones we chose soar above the rest in terms of the nutrition they provide your body and the outstanding flavor they deliver to your taste buds. Enjoy!

THE EQUIPMENT TODAY’S SPEEDY HOME COOK NEEDS

These are the pieces of cooking equipment that I return to again and again when I need to get a dish together quickly. Investing in good kitchen tools that allow you to prepare fresh food fast will save you scads of money over time in less expensive home-cooked meals versus pricier packaged or restaurant food.

Food processor (with attachments for slicing and grating). The food processor is a simply indispensable tool for high-speed grating, slicing, and chopping. It is all you need to make sauces, dressings, raw-food bars, soups, and instant puddings (see chapter 3).

High-powered blender. A powerful blender can grind nuts into milk or butter, chop fruit and ice and blend it into smoothies, and even make a quick soup from raw veggies, all in a few seconds to a couple of minutes. Dr. Jonny and I love our Vita-Mix blenders.

Immersion blender. The immersion blender is a portable wand with a blender and mixer attachment. Pureeing a soup in the blender or food processor requires cooling time and usually takes multiple messy batches to get the job done. With an immersion blender you can drop it in your pot of soup (or eggs, batter, or dressing ingredients) and get the dish to the consistency you desire in seconds, with a super quick cleanup.

Mandoline. The mandoline allows you to quickly, thinly, and evenly slice or julienne firm fruits and vegetables (such as apples, carrots, beets, turnips, celery root, etc.) more safely than using a kitchen knife, and with less cleanup than a food processor.

Double mesh sieve and colander. Double mesh sieves and colanders allow for quick rinsing and draining of almost any ingredient that gets wet, including tiny grains, such as quinoa or amaranth. They are also terrific for use with delicate pastas, like rice noodles, and the best thing out there for draining and rising canned beans in no time flat. Look for stainless-steel varieties to prevent rusting.

Multiple nesting mixing bowls, measuring cups, and spoons. One of the skills of a speedy whole foods cook is preparing multiple dishes at once. To do this efficiently, have several different bowls you can use simultaneously and more than one set of measuring spoons and cups, so you don’t need to wash between every use. These are inexpensive, so it won’t set you back much to purchase additional sets if you already have some you like. My favorite bowls are my cheapest steel ones because they are light and shallow, easy to use and manipulate, and super fast to clean.

Tempered glassware with rubber lids. Dr. Jonny and I both advocate cooking and storing foods in glass over plastic. Glass is a better environmental choice than plastic, it’s more sanitary, does not transfer flavors or colors among different dishes, and does not leach anything scary into your food when heated. Not all plastics contain BPA and other unpleasantries, but why take the risk when glass is so great in so many other ways? A tempered glass product (we like Pyrex) will not shatter in the freezer or oven, so it can travel from hot to cold without needing a container transfer, saving you time and effort. Being able to snap a lid over leftovers to refrigerate them or to batch extras for freezing is a great, time-saving convenience.

Sharp chef’s and paring knives and a sharpener. Investing in one high-quality chef’s knife and one high-quality paring knife (good steel, full tang, sharp edge) will save a great deal of slicing and dicing time over the years. Most slips and struggles with cutting occur because of working with a dull blade. Buy an electric sharpener or a sharpening stone, or take your knives to a sharpening service, which is usually inexpensive. By the way, that rod in a knife block doesn’t actually sharpen, it’s just for smoothing out any burrs on an already sharp edge.

SPEEDY SHOPPING TIPS AND PANTRY STAPLES

One of the secret keys to being able to get meals on the table quickly is keeping a well-stocked larder. If you have a good collection of staple ingredients on hand at all times, you will always be able to pull a quick meal out of your hat. Try these tips:

• Make a list. It’s much more efficient to spend 10 minutes making a good list of what you need to restock your pantry and to make the dishes for that week, than to get to the grocery store and try to figure it out as you wander the aisles. Take a quick look in your fridge and pantry