Healthy recipes for meat dishes aren’t difficult to find, but you can also cut out saturated fats, excess starch and sugar from your existing favorites with a bit of ingenuity and advance planning. What is your favorite meat? You can easily lower your fat intake simply by selecting leaner cuts and trimming any excess fat prior to cooking.

How you prepare your meat is just as important to low fat recipes as trimming away the extra fatty portions. If you're used to preparing chicken dishes on the stove top using cooking oil, try a vegetable-based alternative such as olive oil. Some people cook red meat with no oils at all, and depending on how you cook this is an effective way to reduce saturated fat from cooking oil in general. The key to cooking meat in a frying pan with no oil is to let the fats in the meat lubricate the pan.

Some people trim the fat off a cut of beef, rub the fat along the pan briefly to give it a thin coat, and cook the beef at the usual temperature. You may have equal results by cooking the meat with nothing added, but this can require a skilled touch. It is best to turn the meat more frequently than you normally would to prevent overcooking.

You can also bake or broil beef, chicken and seafood instead of pan-frying it. Try marinating lean chicken breasts in a low-fat mixture of citrus, reduced-salt soy sauce and herbs, then baking in the oven until they are juicy but fully cooked.

Some cuts of beef may come out of the oven a bit chewy, but you can tenderize an inexpensive cut of beef using a balsamic vinegar marinade. This is best when served with steak sauce or other condiments; those who like the taste of rare or medium beef should avoid this marinade as it does color the flavor. Diners who want tenderness in a well-done piece of meat can use this preparation instead of sodium-heavy meat tenderizer powder.

You can also create low fat recipes for meals by combining beef and seafood. Cut your beef portions down by adding salmon or tuna; you’ll get two great flavors on one plate. You also get the benefit of omega oils from the fish with fewer grams of saturated fat from beef.

Next: Low Carb Baked Goods

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