3 Delicious Heart Healthy Recipes – #OurHearts

Welcome to the Our Hearts Cooking Demonstration. I'm Dr. Holly Nicastro, a nutrition scientist with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, or NHLBI. And joining me today is Carlene Thomas, a registered dietitian nutritionist, a food photographer, and blogger. February is American Heart Month. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States. But the good news is, it's largely preventable thanks to lifestyle choices, like exercise, healthy eating, not smoking, and managing stress, just to name a few. And research shows that social support makes it easier for us to be heart healthy. Our hearts are healthier together. We can find social support at work, in our communities, and even online. This week, we're focusing on Our Hearts Online. So thank you all for tuning in, and please let us know in the comments where you're joining us from. But speaking of online, websites are a great resource for free information and recipes on heart-healthy recipes. So Carlene shares heart-healthy recipes on her blog, Oh, Carlene. I'm so glad to be here with you guys. And as we talked about, heart disease is so preventable through what we eat, and so through things like fruit and vegetables and whole grains, and a lot of the things that we're gonna be cooking with you guys today, you can make some extremely great heart-healthy choices. So when I'm looking for inspiration on when I'm building my blog recipes or sharing on Instagram Live, I head online with all of you guys to see inspiration. And so through resources like NHLBI or what you guys send me in Instagram direct messages, I find some great inspiration for cooking healthy. Great. Now NHLBI recommends the DASH eating plan. DASH stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. It emphasizes fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. It includes fish, poultry, beans, nuts, and healthy vegetable oils. It limits foods that are high in saturated fats. That would be fatty meats, full-fat dairy, or tropical oils. And it limits sweets and sugar-sweetened beverages. For a lot more information on the DASH diet, you can check out the NHLBI website, and we'll put that link in the comments. So Carlene, what are we cooking today? So we're making three things with you guys today, but we're gonna start off with dish number one, which we have here. This is our chicken picadillo, which we're calling a chickadillo recipe, and it starts with all one-pot things. It's chicken and rice staples, which a lot of people have on hand. We wanted to pick something that was easy, one-pot, and just staples. They're easy to dress up multiple different ways. So for the recipe number one, in this one-pan dish, we have a little bit of olive oil, some onion, two kinds of peppers for color, although you could easily add in a yellow pepper if you wanted to do stoplight colors, as well as some chicken already going here. Okay, so now we're making the big changes. We started with the chicken and rice, which we'll add later, but Holly's gonna add in some of our ingredients here. We've got golden raisins. We have some ground cumin and bay leaves. Make sure to remove the bay leaves later. Some lemon juice, low-sodium chicken stock, no-salt-added tomato sauce, and a little bit of water. Great, so this recipe substitutes chicken for the beef that you'll normally find in picadillo recipes, so that helps keep it lower in saturated fat, which is good, because saturated fat can raise levels of unhealthy blood cholesterol. And we're substituting some of that saturated fat from the beef with heart-healthy olive oil. And this chicken dish is also a great way to add vegetables, which are a good source of vitamins and minerals like potassium, calcium, magnesium. So this, through the magic of Facebook Live, we're gonna cover and bring out the final dish, but what happens here is you cover it and let it simmer for 20 minutes. Really, what you're just going for is for all the flavors to combine and for that chicken to get really nice and tender. So Holly's gonna go ahead and start chopping our cilantro while I switch out to a few other things. Now, with the cilantro that Holly's chopping, fresh herbs are a great way to add a lot of flavor for those who are on a sodium-conscious diet or for those who are looking to be a little bit more calorie-conscious. And in this pot, while Holly's chopping that, we're getting started on recipe number two, which just goes to show how much you can take those same staples, the chicken and the rice, and change it up. Okay, so while that's heating, we're also gonna get started with our beans. Great. So beans are a great source of fiber, great source of the minerals we were mentioning earlier, and I found that they're also kid-friendly. I know if I make something with beans, my kids will eat it no matter what it is. Okay, so to those black beans, which we rinsed and drained, and that's that great way to reduce the sodium, a simple rinse and drain is a great way to reduce it by up to 30%, just a simple change. Let me get your cilantro. There we go. Perfect. And this is just our quick side salad that we're throwing together for a little bit more color and texture. So with our final dish, Holly's gonna help me garnish this while I plate up our beans and mango salad. So here are the toppings that Holly's working with. We've got some green olives and a little bit of keeper. Okay, so this chicken picadillo, like we said, if you're just joining us, it's a healthy one-pot dish full of vegetables, low in sodium, and very delicious. You're not missing out on any of the flavor here. So a little bowl of that. Great. Okay, so are we ready to move on to dish number two? I think so. What's number two? Okay, so here's the great thing about dish number two. You saw how easy it was to throw together dish number one with chicken and rice. So we're taking it a little bit more veggie-heavy and some different kinds of starter things. So in, again, our one-pot meal, we're going to use that leftover chicken and rice. And leftovers are a great way to reduce stress because the chicken and the rice is already done. You know, you're reducing food waste, you're saving some time so you can do some more heart-healthy activities. So in this pot, we've got a little bit of garlic and ginger, scallions, water chestnuts, and that chicken I went ahead and started with. So Holly, if you wanna go ahead and add our two extra add-ins, we've got our stir-fried veggies. And you can use frozen. Don't feel like you have to use fresh. Frozen is a great thing to have in your kitchen, in your pantry, in your freezer, because it doesn't go bad. It's there when you need it. And also that brown rice. Great, so brown rice instead of white rice means you're getting a lot more fiber. And a key component of the DASH eating plan is that it's low in sodium. So this recipe helps to achieve that by using light or low-sodium soy sauce instead of the full-sodium soy sauce. And what's great about DASH as well, you can change it up to fit with your dietary restrictions. So if you wanted to make this dish vegetarian, you easily could. You could just omit the chicken, or you could substitute it with your favorite meat substitute, or even beans. That sounds so good. And so with this sauce that we're putting in, like Holly said, we've got a little bit of that light soy sauce, and we also have some sesame oil. Sesame oil, if you've ever smelled it, super fragrant. It's a great way to add a ton of flavor while being really conscious of sodium and calories. And cooking this dish, it's really a great opportunity to invite a family member to come join you in the kitchen. So please let us know in the comments who's your favorite person to cook with. I know I love when my husband and my kids join me. Yes, my husband is also a great cook. I always like him in the kitchen with me. So with our wiki rice, which is what we're calling dish number two, it is really a good look at leftovers. The chicken, the brown rice, the stock veggies you have in your freezer or fresh. And we're gonna garnish it with a little bit of that green onion that we started with and a little bit of sesame seeds. Right, now adding these toppings, it's a great way to personalize this. I know at home, my five-year-old son, he loves to tear up and add basil to his own dishes to make it his own. So with this dish, like you said, the basil, you could easily add a little Thai basil if you wanted to. Or you could add some other fresh produce on top. But really the personalization of having toppings like this is it makes it fun for everyone. Everybody gets to be really involved in the kitchen. Everybody gets to take their own take on it. And like you said, your kid and your husband have their personalized things. My husband likes spicy. No thanks on the spicy for me. But you could also add a spicy topping to this if you wanted to. Right, so this was dish number two, our wiki rice. Look how fast that was. High in fiber, high in vitamins and minerals, low in sodium, heart healthy. Definitely, and a great weeknight recipe. So also if you're just tuning in, we wanna know in the comments what your favorite weeknight dish is because I would love to know for when I get home tonight. So what about dessert? We never wanna miss out on things like dessert. Now, when you saw in dish number one, we used that mango in a side salad. But here's your opportunity to take advantage of being a little budget conscious. So when you see fruit that is a great deal at your farmer's market or in your grocery store, you can go ahead and buy it, cut it up, freeze it flat on a tray, and then bag it so those little pieces don't stick together. So in our mango smoothie today, we have a little bit of low-fat milk, some banana, mango, and also a little bit of ice. But the nice thing about this is it's really easy to change because you can always add something like raspberry to it or strawberry or even, going back to those fresher herbs, some mint. Great, and we'll be putting the links to all of these recipes in the comments below. But if you are a dessert person, fruit is an excellent way to satisfy the sweet tooth at the end of the meal. So consider substituting some of your more traditional desserts for fruit salad or fruit smoothies just like this. So this is just a great example, again, of three really easy things you can do that are health conscious. We know those lifestyle changes, making decisions with your diet, it's an easy way to reduce your risk for developing heart disease. So we've got the whole grains, the lean protein, the fruits, the vegetables, and all of those can help combine, along with being with your favorite people and the social support you can find online, like with NHLBI or Instagram or wherever it is, to do some positive changes. Great, well, thank you all for joining us today. I know our hearts are already feeling healthier thanks to these recipes and from the social support of Cooking Together and having you all join us. You can find social support anywhere, at work, at home, even online. Throughout the month of February, let us know what you're doing to stay heart healthy. Post on social media and use the hashtag OurHearts. For more information on American Heart Month, heart disease, or Our Hearts, you can check out the NHLBI website, link will be below in the comments, for a wealth of information. You can also follow The Heart Truth and NHLBI on Facebook and Twitter. Thank you again for joining us today. We hope you learned something new. Thank you to Carlene. Have a great heart healthy day, everybody. Bye.