easy healthy cooking

Use healthy fats and robust flavors to create tasty, healthy meals.

Homemade salsa and chips are a tasty, healthy alternate snack.

You might consider restaurants to be a danger zone when it comes to healthy eating. While that can sometimes be the case, some chefs know how to deliver maximum flavor and use a maximum of healthy ingredients. You can do the same thing when cooking at home: Try these tips for easy healthy cooking from chef Roberto Santibanez, who plans Mexican meals with farm-fresh ingredients for The Taco Truck (www.thetacotruck.com), a restaurant and mobile food service coming soon to Hoboken, NJ.

# 1: Know your fats. "Cook with pure vegetable oils, real butter and/or lard, all of which have proven to be better for you than those processed with vegetable shortening and hydrolyzed fats. Also, use them with moderation!" says Santibanez. "Use no more than a teaspoon to sauté a chicken breast, for example, is my recommendation."

# 2: Choose real corn tortillas, the way Santibanez does, made with no fat. "They are much healthier than plain flour tortillas," he says. More ways to use tortillas for easy healthy cooking: Heat with cheese to make quesadillas, or cut them up and bake or fry them into chips. Try garnishing soups and salads with your homemade chips. Or do as they do in Mexico: "Tortillas are eaten in the same way bread is in other parts of the world, so we eat tortillas with everything—not just as a wrap," says Santibanez.