RECIPE MAKEOVERS

Healthy Chicken Piccata and More Favorite Italian Recipes

healthy chicken piccata

Featured Recipe: Chicken Piccata with Pasta & Mushrooms

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So good, you’d never guess we cut 22 grams of fat!

By Jessie Price, Food Editor, EatingWell

Cheesy lasagna, buttery chicken piccata, fried eggplant parm, those are all Italian, right? So they qualify as Mediterranean and thus healthy. Unfortunately many of those Italian classics have been Americanized in a not-so-healthy way. Fortunately it’s easy to reinterpret such classics into dishes that can clearly be called healthy.

Our recipe for Chicken Piccata with Pasta & Mushrooms is a perfect example. Typically Chicken Piccata starts with a thin piece of seared chicken breast. No problem there. The issue comes with the sauce, which in most cases is based primarily on butter. We use chicken broth, white wine, capers and lemon juice as the base of the sauce and add just 2 teaspoons of butter as opposed to the 6 tablespoons you’ll find in many recipes, cutting the fat by 22 grams. We also added mushrooms to the sauce and opted for whole-wheat pasta—this dish now delivers a respectable 16% of your daily fiber needs.

We made over some of our other Italian favorites, including Neapolitan Meatballs (we added bulgur to stand in for some of the meat and keep them lean). Our Corn & Broccoli Calzones have less fat and calories than typical calzones, plus plenty of added vegetables. We also made a delicious Skillet Tofu Parmigiana, that many tasters declared would get their tofu-phobic families to eat the soy-based product. And then there’s lasagna… this Mushroom, Sausage & Spinach Lasagna is one of our favorites.