If you’re like me, one of your favorite meals is brunch. But if you’re also like me, you’ve started to notice that there aren’t very many healthy options to be had at brunch. Enter Debra Klein, an AADP certified Health Coach who leads healthy eating workshops out of her own kitchen in Swampscott. Each workshop has a different theme, from adding more greens to your diet to how to incorporate the season’s bounty into your meals.
This past week I attended a workshop on, you guessed it, brunch and how you can make dishes that are still delicious, but that also pack the added punch of being good for you. So often, when you are hosting a brunch at your own home or attending one at someone else’s, the habit is to reach for the most buttery and sugar-filled recipe you can think of, mostly, as one of the women at the workshop pointed out, because they are the easiest and least time consuming. But Debra Klein would like to put an end to that and over the course of our two-hour workshop she showed us six options to start us on our way.
The first recipe was for a crabless crab cake whose base is artichoke hearts instead of crabmeat and which are jam packed with vegetables. Instead of using flour to bind the vegetable mixture together, she used oats, a simple and tasty way to cut down on carbs. There was also a grapefruit, arugula and fennel salad dressed with juice from the grapefruit, homemade beet crackers and Gravlax (house- cured raw salmon that needs three days to “cook”) as well as a nectarine and blackberry crisp, again with oats instead of flour, and last but certainly not least a crustless frittata filled with tomatoes, asparagus and scallions and baked to fluffy perfection.
While Debra is the only one actually doing the cooking during the workshops, she breaks down her techniques so that her audience can learn how to slice through the membrane of a grapefruit so the sections come out cleanly, for instance, or how to scoop an avocado out of its skin in one piece with a spoon. It’s like attending the live taping of a cooking show.
Each dish, while being good for you and tasting great, was also very visually attractive. As Klein says, “I think that people really eat first with their eyes. When they see something pretty, they’ve already decided it tastes good.”
She also advises that whenever you take something out of a recipe, like flour or sugar or cornstarch, you have to add something to it so that it still tastes good. For instance, subbing arrowroot for cornstarch, ground almonds or another nut for flour, pure maple syrup for sugar and aromatics such as garlic or onions in the place of excessive salt. All things that add nutritional benefits, but also add flavor as well. Variety is the spice of life and also the key to getting as many healthy things into your body as possible, so don’t just stick to one type of nut flour, but try to use as many different substitutes in your recipes as possible.
In her post workshop email, Klein reminded us to, “Never forget that YOU are in control over what goes into your body…and ultimately how you feel. Decide to own your own well-being!”
Debra holds one workshop a month in her house, which run for two hours from 7-9 p.m. and her recipes and tips can be found on her website. Participants eat all of the food made in the workshop, so no one leaves hungry!
617-797-9534, dkhealthcoach@gmail.com, debraklein.com