I love experimenting with healthy foods, but finding healthy—and delicious—recipes aren’t always easy to come by. Take, for example, the Eggplant Bruschetta that I attempted to make the other night for dinner. It was basically a recipe for baked eggplant, and then mixed in a bowl with the usual toppings for bruschetta (tomatoes and onions etc).

Maybe I’m just not a huge fan of eggplant. Or maybe bruschetta should be primarily used as a topping on bread (although it also tastes great mixed in with a bit of tuna and then used as a sauce for spaghetti—mmm). Whatever the case, the onion overpowered the rest of the dish and the eggplant itself was simply bland and boring. The mother dear ate some out of politeness and I tried it too, but most of it went to waste. Thus the problem with experimenting with healthy foods!

Experimenting with healthy foods & recipes

I don’t see the eggplant bruschetta experiment as a failure. Every recipe that goes wrong or doesn’t quite work out is a learning experience, and there is always some kind of benefit to be gained. Besides, how are you ever going to determine the good healthy recipes from the bad if you don’t give them a try?

Searching for healthier recipes and then putting them to practice can be great fun. Sometimes they won’t work out, but other times, you’ll hit the jackpot. In one cookbook, I managed to find an apple-banana bread recipe and altered it slightly to make it even healthier (I switched homemade applesauce for the oil, exchanged half of the white flour for whole wheat flour, and used less sugar than the recipe called for—the applesauce is sweet enough to replace quite a bit of the granulated sugar). When I make that recipe, the banana bread gets eaten within a couple days; everyone who has tried it absolutely adores it. That is one case in which experimenting with healthy foods was a definite win!

Some healthier versions of food are a matter of acquiring a taste for them. I have found, however, that whole wheat spaghetti tastes pretty much identical to regular white spaghetti, and mixing frozen berries into a plain, fat-free yogurt tastes much better (and far more real!) than the sugary, calorie-laden fruity yogurts you find lining the grocery store shelves.

It’s easy enough to incorporate healthier variations into your lifestyle when experimenting with healthy foods; replacing half of the white flour for whole wheat flour doesn’t noticeably change the taste or texture in baking a lot of the time (although it does give cookies a more nutty, crumbly aspect… and sometimes that can be desirable).

Healthy foods can be delicious, too

My point is that although a lot of people shy away from foods marketed as healthy (because healthy is automatically associated with tastelessness), a lot of those healthy foods are actually really delicious. All-natural peanut butter tastes just as good as the hydrogenated stuff that the majority of people buy, and using lower-sodium products often makes the food taste better. Too much salt will otherwise overpower the other flavors.

So go to the grocery store with an open mind and experiment! Be adventurous in experimenting with healthy foods and try out some whole wheat, all-natural foods for a change. Get on the Internet and look for some healthy recipes (you can find hundreds of them through Google). And if there’s some kind of vegetable that you detest, then don’t bother working with it right away—find another one that you do enjoy and work with that (clearly, I should be experimenting with cauliflower or mushrooms instead of eggplant!).

I’d still recommend trying the ones that you don’t like every few months or so, because our tastes do change and expand. It wasn’t until these past few months that I started eating salmon, and now it is a favorite of mine. I’m still working on spinach, but I’ve come to quite enjoy raw spinach, whereas you’d never catch me eating it a year ago!

Be prepared to have a couple let-downs when trying out healthy food, but remember that with each recipe that doesn’t work out, you can figure out a way to make the next one that much better. Besides, there’s tons of non-healthy recipes that turn out to be pretty awful too. And in the process of experimenting with healthy foods and making some new healthy recipes, you’ll discover some real treasures for yourself that you’ll want to make over and over again.

What are some of your favorite healthy foods? What healthy foods have you recently eaten but didn’t used to enjoy? What recipes do you love these days? Share in the comments section below!

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