Question: What are some unique, healthy and easy to make “comfort food” type dishes?
Preferably somethings that can be made with organic ingredients?

Answer:

Answer by musicimprovedme
Most soups are considered comfort foods and they can be very healthy. Brown your meat, then add veg of choice, stock, and if you like you can add barley, pasta, or rice. Use organics, fresh, homemade components as you see fit, kind of depends how you shop and how involved you are in the kitchen. A lot of soups you can take shortcuts that save lots of time and don’t affect the nutrition or cost…frozen veg for example. Just remember, if you add only healthy ingredients, you get only healthy food.

Crockpot beans are about the healthiest, cheapest, easiest thing you can possibly do. Serve over brown rice or with some whole grain chewy bread, with a green salad and light dressing. You can also use these beans to make a ground turkey chili, or you can add them to a minestrone soup, or you can puree some with a little of their own juice to make a bean dip for chips or Mexican food.

You can also do stuff like beef stew or pot roast…very easy in the crockpot, very healthy, just watch the added fat and salt and gloppy gravies and such. Rely on your fresh herbs and if you need a sauce use the au jus, or reduce it with some wine.

Pasta is a worldwide comfort food…toss with veg in an olive oil or light salad dressing or a fresh marinara with a bit of parm. Likewise pizza can be very healthy and kids love it…it all depends what you put on it.

Potatoes are popular everywhere too…cheap and plentiful, versatile and humble. We now know that potatoes are about the equivalent of same amount of white sugar…but you can improve on them…when you make mashed potatoes for example, you can blend in some cauliflower to reduce the carbs a bit and add some of the nutrition from the cabbage/broccoli family. You can also switch your white potatoes for sweet potatoes when you make fries or oven wedges and you can switch from mayo based potato salad to olive oil and herbed potato salad.

Fruit tarts are a relatively healthy dessert, they have some nutrition from the fruit, and they are honest real food, straightforward and uncomplicated…This is also a chance to use a lot of organic ingredients. And they are super easy to put together, can be free form.

You can make things like chicken pot pie a little healthier…better ingredients, a little less fat, crust on top only, thicken the gravy with brown rice or something instead of meaningless flour or cornstarch.

Also do note that sometimes you can mess with comfort food too much, and something gets lost in the translation. How do you fix mac and cheese? You DON’T! What you do is serve it every once in a while, in a reasonable portion, with a heaping green salad on the side.