Our Seafood Feast

Today's diet tip:  Substitute salad dressing with a splash of fresh lemon juice for a fresh, sparkling flavour without the calories.  This will cut 45 calories or more!

We eat a lot of fish at home, at least once a week but often two or three times a week.  Our fish of choice is locally caught yellow lake perch, pickerel and bass but we also eat a lot of cod and wild salmon.  When we bought our vacation home in sunny Florida in 2010, I fully expected to be eating a lot more seafood when there!  That certainly has not been the case especially when eating out.  We have discovered several excellent BBQ joints so ribs are the order of the day.   Our favourite seafood restaurants in Florida is Harry's Seafood Bar and Grille and Red Lobster.  We discovered during our recent stay that Long John Silvers isn't too bad (I pick the coating off). 

Fish and seafood is a dieter's delight because it is so low in calories.  You can have a nice filling piece of fish without breaking your calorie budget as long as it isn't coated and deep fried.  I like coated and deep fried fish though but never eat the coating.  About the only fish I will eat coated is yellow lake perch but that is just a very light coating to begin with.  I also don't like shrimp or any other seafood coated and deep fried. 

We were at our vacation home for most of October, home for almost three weeks then back to our vacation home for five weeks.  I decided to make a seafood feast during the first part of our stay.  The night before we had been to Red Lobster with friends for their crab leg feast so I brought home the crab legs I couldn't eat to make a crab meat salad.  Imitation crab meat salad is good but imitation crab itself has a higher carbohydrate content as well as food colouring.  Real crab meat is the healthier, lower calorie choice!

Our seafood feast consisted of bacon wrapped scallops (169 cal/3 scallops), steamed littleneck clams (168 cal/4oz), baked mahi mahi (93 cal/3 oz), crab meat salad (140 cal/half cup) and steamed asparagus (26 cal/8 spears).  This dinner as shown would have been 596 calories at the full amounts but we had less asparagus and clams.  We also had a small garden salad (not shown) at 20 calories sprinkled with fresh lemon juice instead of dressing which made up for the calories cut by smaller servings.  It would have been lower omitting the bacon by about 100 calories.  At any rate, a healthy meal under 600 calories is always a good thing whether or not you are counting calories!