Make good use of kitchen gadgets and you’ll save time, energy, avoid messy clean-ups and enjoy healthier meal preparation with ease.

Blender:
• Make homemade pestos in your blender; make them lighter by replacing most of the oil with good-quality, reduced-sodium broth
• Puree fruits and vegetables to make smoothies and shakes
• Use your blender to make creamy pureed soups
• Puree fresh and frozen berries to make fruit coulis (a fat-free sauce made from just fruit to pour on low-fat frozen yogurt and angel food cake)

Coffee Grinder:
• For a fresh spice flavor (versus pre-ground, bottled spices), toast whole seeds of cardamom, cumin and fennel and then process until finely ground

Food Processor and Mini Prep Machines:
• Quickly chop herbs to add flavor and zing to practically ANYTHING (add fresh herbs just before serving)
• Use shredder attachment to shred carrots and zucchini for quick breads and muffins

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Are You Making These Healthy Cooking Blunders?

Healthy cooking isn’t rocket science, but there are mistakes many folks make that keep their foods from being as nutritious as they could be.  Last month, we polled nutrition experts about the foods they avoid; this month we polled more top nutritionists and registered dietitians to find out the most common healthy cooking faux pas.

See All 11 Healthy Cooking Mistakes »

We covered everything from apples to zucchini this year, with a lot of healthy eating ideas in between. We’re counting down our 15 most popular posts this year.

See what everyone was reading »

We shared our Top 5 Kitchen Tools before, but there are many more helpful ones out there. Here are a few more that I use daily, especially during the summer months.

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