The Moroccan Diet- 3/19/09

All of us have heard of the South Beach diet, the Scarsdale diet, and the Atkins diet but have you heard of the Moroccan diet? Nope. Well, after making tonight's meal, I think the idea has promise. I made a Moroccan themed meal to go with the recipe for Oasis Carrot Salad found on page 17 in this month's Gourmet. I've been adding components to this blog this week and wanted to add an approximate number of calories per serving for the recipes I'm making. Some cooking magazines are designed to help the reader eat healthier. Gourmet addresses the need for healthy, low-calorie meals but it is not the main focus of the magazine. I have never seen nutritional information after a recipe in Gourmet. I am very fortunate in that I don't have to calorie count in an effort to lose weight. I'm active and have good internal portion control so I don't worry about what I eat. This is not true of many Americans and I think it would be interesting to see how Gourmet's recipes stack up in the health department.
As I said, tonight I made only one recipe from this month's Gourmet, the Oasis Carrot Salad, a Moroccan flavored salad. Using a calorie counting website, Fitday.com if you're curious, I added up the total calories in tonight's recipe and divided by the number of recommended servings. The carrot salad was a mere 116 calories per serving. I used the same site to factor the nutritional information for the Moroccan Beef Stew I made to go with it that was on Epicurious.com. This hearty main dish was just over 500 calories per serving, still quite conservative for a main dish. I did serve the stew over couscous, at 150 calories per serving. That's just over 700 calories for a full meal. I see a real future for the Moroccan diet.
As for flavor, the Oasis Carrot Salad is best classified as interesting. I found the vinegar a little strong. The small description before the recipe said that this would be good with any meal. I might disagree. I felt the Moroccan stew matched it well but some other milder dishes would be overpowered by the strong vinegar of the dish.

Oasis Carrot Salad- C
Total cost- $2.00
Calories per serving- 116

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