Chinese Food: "Have Your Sauce and Eat it Too!"

Making Chinese food available for takeout was such an amazing idea- kudos to whoever started that ages ago. Who doesn't like Chinese food? But you're probably thinking it is barely ever low calorie unless you get plain dishes with no sauce- and when you order in chinese food who wants that? Ok, that was a bit harsh, since I've actually done that myself many times. But I admit, as sodium and fat-laden as they probably are, I am a sucker for the sauces they use- be it either a brown sauce or an egg sauce or a spicy one. To me, chinese food just isn't chinese food without them. Yes, I've done the whole "sauce on the side thing" but, it definitely doesn't taste the same. So I thought, and I thought, and then I figured out how to "have my sauce and eat it too" (haha): add plain steamed vegetables to your dish! The benefits of this are: it ups the percentage of food to sauce, allows me to eat more for fewer calories, its not boring because you mix the flavor laden bites with the plain ones (or manage to get both in one mouthful!) This works either when you are sitting down at a restaurant or when you get takeout.

And then the next great realization I had was that this was getting expensive! The price of two dishes for one. Since I normally just get takeout, why couldn't I just add my OWN steamed veggies? That way I could choose which vegetables I use and it's FREE! It saves you about 6 dollars and you probably choose healthier vegetables than they do. I like using frozen broccoli, spinach, and edamame. (You can obviously steam fresh vegetables too- I just always have tons of frozen vegetables in my house) I make it in a big bowl and then I take a portion of the dish that I ordered and mix it in. And if neccesary I pour on it a little bit of the extra sauce that's on the bottom. I just combine different individually bagged frozen vegetables, but if you're looking for more of an Asian-inspired blend, Costco sells a huge mix that has broccoli, edamame, snap peas, carrots, water chestnuts, mushrooms, red peppers, and baby corn.

The benefits of this substitution are as follows (sort of a recap):

• you get tons of vegetables, probably more than they would have given you in the dish
• you get to eat a lot more for not that many added calories
• a lot less sodium and fat than had you eaten the same volume of just the dish itself
• it still feels like you are eating real Chinese food- not like a 'diet plate' of plain food
• it's free
• it's fast- you can heat the vegetables in your microwave in the 10 minutes it takes them to make your food

I actually just ate Chinese food using this method, and mmm it was good and I don't feel like I ate hundreds of extra calories!