THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 3, 1996 TAG: 9604020043
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F4 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Morsels
SOURCE: Ruth Fantasia
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
``I LOVE THE nutritional analyses on the recipes,'' a reader told me recently. ``I just skim through and look at the percent of calories from fat. Any recipes over 30 percent I don't bother to cut out. It saves me tons of time.''
While I'm glad we're saving you time, STOP IT.
You're skipping many good recipes. Just because a recipe has more than 30 percent calories from fat doesn't mean you would consume a day's allowance of fat grams in that one dish.
Vegetables dishes and salads with light dressings, for example, sometimes contain about 70 percent of calories from fat - the calorie count of vegetables is low but count of the dressing is high.
A more realistic way of looking at the recipe is to see how many grams of fat are in a serving and compare that number to the recommended allowance of fat in your diet.
Sound complicated? It's not really.
Take a look at the analysis on this recipe for Artichokes With Lemon Butter Sauce. Notice there are 80 calories per serving and 6 grams fat. If you multiply the number of fat grams (6) by the number of calories in each gram of fat (9) you find 54 of those 80 calories are from fat. That's a whopping 67 1/2 percent. However, if you are following a 2,000-calorie-per-day diet, your recommended allowance of fat is about 75 grams each day. Those 6 fat grams in the Lemon Butter Sauce are only 8 percent of your recommended daily allowance.
A good egg
Nancy Richards West, an artist from Chincoteague, was chosen by the Virginia Egg Council to paint the commonwealth's official Easter egg. The egg will be displayed at the White House during this year's festivities.
The Virginia egg is decorated with three snowy egrets stalking through a salt marsh.
A taste of Greece
Greek specialties will be available from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Hellenic Woman's Club Bake Sale. The sale will be at the Hellenic Community Center, Granby and Fife streets, Norfolk. Call 420-2990. by CNB