When it comes to making your favorite meals healthier, one of the first places to look is at all the oils and butters that are added to the dish. It may not seem like a big amount, but adding the 1-2 tablespoons of oil called for at the start of most recipes, really does add up to the amount of fat in the finished dish. It’s also an easy place to start limiting fat added to a dish, so you can cook what you love, only healthier.

If you’re using a recipe that tells you to add oil or butter to your cooking surface before you cook your meat or vegetables, you can reduce the amount they state in the recipe to only what you will need to keep the food from sticking to the nonstick surface. In the case of your George Foreman grill—even with a bake or griddle plate—you can actually eliminate it all together with almost any food.

This is part of the innovation of our George Tough™ nonstick coating that almost any food can be cooked without the oil or butter usually required to prevent the food from sticking to the hot cooking surface. This way, you can simply place your meat, chicken or even fish and vegetables on the grill plates without oil or butter without having to worrying about tearing the food as you try to remove it once it’s cooked.

Of course, not every cooking surface is a George Tough™ nonstick cooking surface, but even when you’re cooking in a sauté or fry pan, you can apply the same logic—most recipes call for way more oil than you need for the food you’re cooking. Often, 1-2 tablespoons of oil or butter can be reduced to as little as 1-2 teaspoons and you’ll still get great results. If you want to start limiting the oil that you’re adding at the beginning of cooking, try adding 1-2 teaspoons at first; if you need more to prevent sticking, add just a little at a time. 

Healthy Menu Planning: Using a weekly menu plan to help balance your diet

When it comes to your diet, it’s definitely possible to have too much of a good thing. Whether you’re talking about your favorite NY strip steak or an Omega-3 rich piece of fish, eating the same thing day-in and day-out is a fast way to an unbalanced diet. One of the simplest ways to ensure you’re getting the most out of what you’re eating is to use a weekly menu plan to ensure you’re getting a diverse mix of foods day-to-day. 

The first great thing about creating a weekly menu plan is that it lets you plan out when you’re going to be good and when you’re going to indulge so you can create balance. If you know that you have a dinner party on Friday night, you can plan to eat a little healthier on Wednesday and Thursday night to balance it out. Or if you know you’re having a really healthy menu for the week, you can even plan to indulge for a meal or two over the weekend.

This idea of staggering your healthy and not-so-healthy meals works especially well with kids, since you can appease them into eating that healthy chicken and veggie dinner tonight since they know they’re getting burgers or hot dogs tomorrow. It’s also a good way of getting in new menu ideas and dishes, letting you experiment in the kitchen without driving your family crazy with a whole week of weird foods they’re not used to eating.

The other great thing about a weekly menu plan is it lets you more easily balance requirements for vitamins and minerals in your diet. By incorporating more foods into your weekly mix, you’re getting more of the vitamins and minerals you need to stay healthy naturally. This way, you can get the benefits of a variety of proteins and different kinds produce through your food, leading to a healthier lifestyle, overall. In addition, the more balanced your menu, the less vitamins and supplements you may have to take to get your daily requirements. All the good is coming from the good mix of foods you have in your menu.

By creating this weekly menu plan, you’re simply making it easier to eat healthier. You have a plan, so you know you’re not eating red meat 5 days back-to-back or a full week of fish that may have high mercury levels. A weekly menu plan also gives you a bit of freedom from indulgence, since you know your diet is balanced overall. This way, you can keep your comfort food and your balanced diet, too!

Dry rub pork topped with a colorful fruit salsa

Tips & Tricks: Using Dry Rubs on Your George Foreman Grill

Yes, you can use dry rubs to season food on your George Foreman grill! Although we’ve mentioned it in a few posts, we’ve had a few questions recently on whether dry rubs actually work on an indoor electric grill. While you might think that you can’t use them, because the dry ingredients would burn that close to the heat source, in truth, dry rubs come out looking great and tasting phenomenal from your George Forman grill.

Whether you want to make your favorite dry rub from scratch or simply purchase a premade rub to give you food that extra punch of flavor, both will work on your grill. Dry rubs are a great way to spice up a boring or bland meal. Premade rubs also particularly good on those busy weeknights when you’re trying to please your family’s palates with very limited time to cook.

While in the past, it might have been more difficult to find something premade without going to a specialty store, McCormick®* and a few other brands have just come out with new lines of premade rubs, so you don’t even have to mix. Just go to your local grocery store and find a rub or spice mix in the same aisle with the spices and herbs.

Unlike with marinades, dry rubs don’t need a lot of time for your food to soak in the flavors – in fact, you want to put the rub on your food just before you start to grill it for best results. This makes them perfect for quick meals on nights where you haven’t planned what you want to do.

When you’re doing the rub, don’t overcoat the food, because this can lead to the “charring” effect of the ingredients burning on the outside of your food instead of crusting nicely and cooking in. Basically, you just sprinkle the rub evenly over the entire surface of the food – including the edges – then press or “massage” in. The more the rub is pressed into the food, the more the flavors will penetrate the food. If you think you have too much of the rub in one area, you can shake or tap off the piece of food directly before you place it on the grill.

A few months ago, we did a Feature Focus post on the benefits of our George Tough™ nonstick coating that comes standard on any George Foreman cooking surface. A few comments we received came from people having issues with their surface, so we wanted to do another post specifically directed at maintaining your nonstick surface properly.

In this post, we review all of the tips and tricks that will help extend the life of your product by maintaining the nonstick surface. Everything from placing and serving on the plates, to how best to wash is covered, so you can get all the information in one place. If you’re still having issues maintaining your finish, we recommend calling our Customer Care line at 1-800-231-9786.

The first and absolutely most important point in maintaining the finish on a George Tough™ nonstick cooking surface is to completely avoid metal utensils of any kind for placing, moving or serving food. Even if you don’t visibly mark the plate when a metal utensil touches it, the surface may be weakened; then, each time you wash the plates, the weak point will get larger and your cooking surface will start to be affected.

While it’s sometimes tempting to just stab your steak with a fork and pull it off the grill, particularly if you’re in a rush, this can affect the life of your grill in the long term. Even if you’re rushing, always make sure to use non-metal utensils to avoid marking the surface in any way.

Using the spatula provided with your grill will help extend the life of your grill (and make serving easier!)

Our best recommendation is always to use the accessories provided with your grill. Not only is the custom spatula safe to use with nonstick surface, it actually makes it easier to remove the food since it fits along the ribs on the plate. If you’ve lost your spatula, it can be replaced by calling 1-800-738-0245; just use the part number listed at the front of your Use & Care manual.

If you don’t have the spatula or prefer to use utensils of your own, just make sure they’re made of the right material. Any heatproof plastic, nylon, silicone or wooden utensils are acceptable. Silicone utensils are the most highly recommended because of the generally superior quality to resist heat and discoloration.

The second part of maintaining your nonstick cooking surface comes in cleaning. Never use harsh cleansers, abrasive scrubbers or brillos, or any metal scrubbing pad. Since the George Tough™ nonstick coating is designed to provide easy cleaning, you shouldn’t need these anyway, even when removing tough stuck-on food. In most cases, you can just clean your grill plates with a damp, soapy sponge and then dry with a soft cloth. If you need more scrubbing, a few simple wipes with a plastic, silicone or other nonmetal scrubbing pad should do the trick. For the soap, always choose standard dish soap, and not one that includes abrasive scrubbing crystals.

If your grill has removable plates, these can absolutely be washed properly in the dishwasher without damaging the nonstick surface. You may notice white spots on the surface when you pull them out of the dishwasher, but these are harmless (water dried on surface). The white dried water spots can be easily erased simply by rinsing the plate and drying it thoroughly immediately.

Have you ever gotten a really good cut of steak, cooked it to what you thought would be perfect and then been less than thrilled with the juiciness of the meat on your finished plate?

The problem could be that you’re not letting your steak rest prior to cutting and placing on your dinner plate. Although it seems like a small detail – and an extremely easy one to miss when you’re hungry and ready to start dinner – it can mean the difference between an average meal and an exceptional one.

In truth, this is one of those trade secret tricks that set steakhouse meals apart from their in-home counterparts. However, if you learn the trick, you can have steakhouse quality meals right at home without the steakhouse prices. Your family, your guests and your own palate will thank you!

Resting isn’t even something tricky – all you have to do is allow your steak to sit in a warm place for 5-10 minutes prior to any cutting. Cutting the meat even includes any small cuts or minute incisions you want to make to make sure the meat is done the way you want. Don’t cut it at all – just be patient and let it rest so the juices can work their way back into the fibers before you cut. Otherwise, cutting too early means all those natural, delicious juices of your meat end up on the cutting board, rather than where they belong.

So what is resting, really? Basically, it’s giving the juices of your meat the opportunity to work back into the fibers before the meat is cut. In the raw meat, moisture is stored in the fibers, but as the temperature rises during cooking, this moisture is let out. It’s held in the steak temporarily by the seared exterior, but when you cut into it, those juices are let out completely. Resting allows the juices to be incorporated back into the fibers of the steak as the temperature naturally decreases once the meat is removed from the grill. It doesn’t take much to make a phenomenal impact on your finished meat.