WE LIKE THE VOLUME TURNED ALL THE WAY UP!

Adding volume to your meals to help fill you up while saving calories is back in the news. This is a trick I employ quite a lot when I'm working my plan, so I thought I'd focus today on a couple of my favorites.

My lunches are mostly eaten at home alone so I frequently rely on leftovers from a dinner meal that I have frozen in single serving sizes. I also keep a few of my favorite frozen dinners available so I get something prepared quickly and with minimum fuss.

But if you're like me, sometimes the portions are a little small and I just want to eat more than that. I could add a salad but I try not to wear myself out on salads by eating them at every meal. So I add volume to the meal by adding some extra vegetables to it.

Yesterday I had the Roasted Butternut Squash Ravioli dinner I love in the microwave when I decided I wanted a little more so I quickly tossed a combination of shredded cabbage, onion, minced garlic, and green pepper around in a non-stick pan sprayed with Pam. By the time the dinner was warm, I had the vegetables crisp tender and lay them down on the plate and poured the dinner on top. It was great and filled me up without adding more points.

For dinner, I wanted to use a strip of smoked sausage I had frozen, but a two ounce serving of that is already 8 points, so I decided to accompany it with something that was not going to add a lot of extra points. Following the advice of eating a vegetable to start the meal, I made us each a salad with lots of raw vegetables and a little vinegar and oil dressing.

And to add volume to the main part of the meal, I made my recipe for "When You Want To Eat a Lot Green Beans". The combination ot the smoked sausage and the green beans was really good and I wound up satisfied with the small portion of smoked sausage I had measured out for myself.

I also make an oriental vegetable mix that is zero points and is a great base for adding shrimp or chicken and forming a low point entree. It is also really good in a wrap or used to extend a frozen dinner as I did with the ravioli yesterday.

One of my favorite ways to add volume to milk is to measure out the one cup serving and blend it with an equal amount of ice, an artificial sweetener, a drop of vanilla, and a teaspoon and a half of unsweetened cocoa powder. The ice and the introduction of air during the blending process expand the volume of the milk to at least double what it was to begin with and the shake really fills me up!

Anytime you can add a little more volume to a meal with tricks like these, you are increasing the chance that you will be full when you leave the table and that's a good thing when you're trying to keep the calories low.