Ratatouille is a stewed vegetable dish that originates in the Mediterranean coastal town of Nice in the Provençal region of France, very close to Italy. It features ingredients common to both Italy and France, like stewed tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash, peppers, garlic and onions. I have made it enough that I am sure most of you are familiar with it. My version is meat-free, has a very small amount of olive oil and is relatively low in sodium. For the 100% vegans out there, I am using the Better Than Bouillon chicken and ham bases in this recipe. You can buy the Better Than Bouillon Soup Ham base I use right down at Gene’s grocery store! Look for the “Chef Steve’s Grab Good” label in the aisle! The chicken breast we add to it has 160 calories, 3.5 grams of fat (1 gram saturated), 85 mg of cholesterol and 530 mg of sodium. This meal easily fits into almost any diet on the healthy diet spectrum! Leave off the meat and it even fits into the plant-based whole foods diet. Most importantly, it tastes great! I use 2% milk instead of cream in the soup. It is thickened with an oil-based roux. Even so, it is a healthier version of a cream soup than you will find in other restaurants, but there is no getting around the fact that it has cheese in it. You can fit this into a moderate diet like the DASH diet, but you will have to be careful with your sodium and fat for the other two meals today. The chicken and ratatouille are gluten-free.

Many dishes you order in a Chinese restaurant are fried in a deep-fat fryer, making them exceptionally high in fat and saturated fat. That is the case with sweet and sour chicken, General Tso’s chicken and orange chicken. I use a breaded, baked chicken breast “nugget” that still retains the basic elements of fried chicken. It has a breading that gets somewhat crispy, like fried chicken, and makes a very suitable base for a healthier version of orange chicken. A portion of this chicken has just 3 grams of fat (1.5 grams saturated), 50 mg of cholesterol and 680 mg of sodium. The sodium is a bit high, but with some effort, it will fit into a 2,000 mg sodium diet like the DASH diet. The egg rolls have 7 grams of fat (2 grams saturated), 20 mg of cholesterol and 490 mg of sodium per serving of two. With those numbers, you have to consider them a treat item. You can see that if you have both the egg roll and the chicken, it will be half of the sodium allowance for a two-gram-a-day lower sodium diet. I make the fried rice as low in fat and sodium as I can, but you probably need to consider it another treat if you are watching your fat and sodium intake. There’s no health reason not to enjoy the California roll. The surimi, or imitation crab, contains a fair amount of sodium, but I use only about half a portion per sushi roll. One portion of a California roll is approximately one-third of a sushi roll. If you can not tolerate the small amount of gluten in soy sauce, the soup, broccoli, and California rolls are the only 100% gluten-free items today.

We have whole wheat, spinach, tomato-basil tortillas, garlic herb and jalapeño cheese tortillas. For fixings, we have turkey, ham, beef, a variety of cheeses, as well as lettuce, tomatoes, spinach, arugula, sprouts, peppers, olives, pickles and too many other fixings and dressings to mention. Make this meal what you want it to be. Lunch meats and cheese are always a little high in sodium, but we don’t use much. Be careful with dressings if you want a low-calorie wrap with less fat and sodium. Remember we have honey and spicy brown mustard, which are tasty options with zero fat and not enough sodium to mention. On average, the baked chips we offer have 50% of the fat that regular chips do. Some of them are also very low in sodium. Check the nutrition facts label on the bags. All of the Lays products and the Doritos are under 200 mg of sodium per bag! The Chili is a traditional bean and meat chili. The wrap, as a salad, without the tortilla and chili are both gluten-free.