Seriously?

We've been really busy these past few days. We made a one day trip to Wisconsin for a graduation. I took The Girl to a birthday party that was over an hour away. The Chef and I went to a White Sox game last night. Yesterday The Chef took The Boy for his shots and I took The Girl to the movies. This was the first time I have not been there when either of my children got their shots.

But anyway, the other day I was watching the Food Network. I used to watch it all the time, but over the years it has gotten so far from what it originally was that it barely appeals to me. I do not want to watch any show with Wars in the title, cupcakes or not. I don't want to watch Robert Irvine try to feed 400 people with a burlap bag and a spatula. I don't want to watch Guy Fierri try to fool me into thinking he knows what he's doing. I do not want to watch Sandra Lee make her horrendous Kwanzaa cake. I want to watch talented people make recipes, not drive around overeating or searching for the next big idea.

I was getting the kids packed up for our day trip on Sunday and flipped Food Network on, figuring it was good background entertainment. A show called Hungry Girl came on. It's supposedly about eating healthy without sacrificing. The host was going to show us how to make picnic food figure friendly. She started to make her recipe for potato salad. With cauliflower. Yes, you read that right. This woman is making potato salad without potatoes. This bugs me for two reasons:

1) The potatoes are not the high-fat part of potato salad to begin with.
2) It's not potato salad if you use cauliflower, it's cauliflower salad.

Couldn't she just make potato salad with low-fat mayo and low-fat sour cream and call it a day? Nope. Lets use cauliflower and add a little non-dairy creamer too. I'm all for making things healthier. But doesn't the fact that non-dairy creamer has absolutely no nutritional value defeat the purpose? Sure it's lower in calories than real cream, but it's nothing but a bunch of chemicals mixed together with some milk proteins (The fact that there are milk proteins in non-dairy creamer is another topic for another day). At least cream brings some calcium and actual nutrients to the table.

Then she adds a packet of ranch dressing mix. This is probably because the recipe as it sits appears rather bland. And, as Hungry Girl says, there's no fat in the packet. So rather than open the spice cabinet door and season the salad with recognizable items, we're supposed to dump a packet of mix that has 37 ingredients (yes I counted) simply because there's no fat? Spices don't have any fat anyway.

So it's okay now to say you're being healthy if you're substituting chemical and preservative laden ingredients in place of actual food because the actual food is higher in calories?


As I started to write this post, I went over to the site and looked at the recipe and reviews. About half  of the reviewers commented that it was tasty, but it did not taste like potato salad. Did they honestly think it would? When was the last time you ate cauliflower? I don't recall ever taking a bite and thinking "Gee this tastes like a potato." The others swore you couldn't tell the difference. Sorry guys, I'm not buying it.