Cooking with Fewer Calories: Puréed Vegetables

While looking for recipes to incorporate more vegetables, I came across an article suggesting to cook with puréed vegetables. Puréed vegetables are natural appetite suppressants and can help you eat fewer calories when added to a main dish.

Researchers from Penn State gave 20 men and 21 women casseroles made with varying amounts of purée. This bulked up the dish, leaving fewer calories per serving. (You can see two of the recipes developed by the researchers here.)

The men and women ate the casseroles at separate sittings with the same amount of food each time. They consumed 200 to 350 fewer calories with the casseroles made with puréed vegetables and had no complaints of taste.

You may ask… How do you puree vegetables? It seems pretty easy.
Just follow the steps below:

1.       Prepare the vegetables by cleaning them and peeling them if need be.

2.       Chop the vegetables into fine pieces. Make them as fine as possible.

3.       Place the prepared and chopped vegetables into a vegetable steamer and cover them with water. Be sure that they are completely covered with the water. Add approximately 1/2 cup of water for every 2 cups of vegetables.

4.       Steam the vegetables.

5.       Put the steamed vegetables and about 1/3 of the water from the pot into a food processor or blender. Hit puree or blend until they are soft and there are no chunks left in the mixture.

I always think of baby food when talking about purée, but now I may have to try cooking with it. Do you know of another healthy substitute for cooking?  I’d love to hear your ideas!

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