Destinations Diva

Each year during the Lenten season, after Mardi Gras and before Easter, Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays.  If you live in Louisiana, we don't suffer at all because it's also crawfish season and we have so many other wonderful choices of Louisiana seafood.  However, sometimes I like to go back to the basics.  Lent mean--it's time for tuna!  My Cajun mom alway made tuna the same way, with boiled eggs  (always use one boiled egg per can of tuna), celery and pickle to distract from the fishy tuna flavor and mayonnaise for creaminess.  We always serve it with saltine crackers but I enjoy plating atop a green salad with fresh (and not refrigerated) tomato wedges.  My mom always made Good Seasons Italian Dressing using the dry mix but she had a trick.  She always filled the cruet above the V line to the W line with vinegar.  Then she added a little water and the normal amount of oil.  This kind of dressing goes perfectly with ...

One of my favorite lunches out has always been the "all you can eat" soup, salad and breadsticks at Olive Garden.  As long as I got a second helping of salad, I would delude myself into thinking that I was eating healthy.  In actuality, Zuppa Toscana or their Tuscan Soup is full of heavy ingredients including bacon, heavy cream, white potatoes, parmesan cheese and pork Italian sausage.  The one healthy part of this soup was the fresh kale and that's the good news.  The freshness of the kale was one of my favorite parts of the soup!  It adds texture to the heavy soup. So how would one lighten up this soup?  One word--cauliflower!  By substituting cauliflower for most of the potatoes in the soup, the health benefits are greatly increased (I still add one small russet potato for the starchy quality).   The next substitution is using fat free evaporated  milk instead of the heavy cream.  Since the traditional soup is a thin ...