Healthy Low-Calorie Recipes

This mile-high vegetable and hummus sandwich makes the perfect heart-healthy vegetarian lunch to go. Mix it up with different flavors of hummus and different types of vegetables depending on your mood.

This one-pan pasta that combines lean chicken breast and sautéed spinach for a one-bowl meal is garlicky, lemony and best served with a little Parm on top. I call it "Mom's Skillet Pasta" and she called it "Devon's Favorite Pasta." Either way it's a quick and easy weeknight dinner we created together and scribbled on a little recipe card more than a decade ago, and it remains in my weekly dinner rotation to this day. It's a simple dinner the whole family will love.

This one-pan chicken-and-broccoli recipe comes out of the oven all browned, cheesy and bubbling like a casserole, but is really prepared more like a skillet meal on the stovetop. Serve with a crunchy green salad.

It's worth using that special bottle of olive oil and seeking out Parmigiano-Reggiano, which is bolder than basic Parm, for this simple salad. Use a mandoline to shave the veggies if you have one.

Muffins meet oatmeal in these moist and tasty grab-and-go oatmeal cups. Feel free to swap out the pecans for any other nut--walnuts would be great--or omit them altogether. Make a batch on the weekend and keep them in your fridge or freezer for quick and easy breakfasts all week. Reheat in the microwave for about 40 seconds.

Though a chicken cutlet may be a chicken breast cut in half, this recipe shows how to make chicken cutlets with double the deliciousness. A jar of sun-dried tomatoes does double duty for this healthy dinner recipe. The flavorful oil they're packed in is used to sauté the chicken, and the tomatoes go into the cream sauce.

Casseroles make perfect meal-prep dinners--this enchilada version is so easy to prep ahead. The whole casserole can be built and left to hang out in the refrigerator for up to three days. Then all you have to do is bake it off on a busy night and you have a healthy dinner on the table in a jiff. The quick homemade enchilada sauce in this recipe is great when you don't have any of the canned sauce on hand--just season crushed tomatoes with spices and salt for an instant enchilada sauce.

Thanks to jarred marinara sauce and oven-ready lasagna noodles, this labor-of-love kind of meal can be ready in about an hour.

In this easy and healthy dinner recipe, sweet and savory baked honey-garlic chicken thighs come with a side of veggies that cook on the same sheet pan as the chicken. The honey-soy-garlic marinade for the chicken does double duty as an irresistible sauce to drizzle over everything. Lining your baking sheet with foil will protect your pan from the sticky honey-soy-garlic sauce, so cleanup will be a breeze too. If you can't find small carrots, cut medium carrots in half lengthwise.

This meatless main-dish salad combines creamy, satisfying white beans and avocado. Try mixing it up with different seasonal vegetables.

This nutrient-packed grain bowl recipe comes together in 15 minutes with the help of a few convenience-food shortcuts like prewashed baby kale, microwavable quinoa and precooked beets. Pack these ahead to keep on hand for easy meal-prep lunches or dinners on busy nights.

This easy-to-make chocolate cake is dark, moist, rich--and only dirties one bowl! Not quite as easy as boxed cake mixes, but those often contain trans fats. Our simple “from scratch” recipe gives you a home-baked cake with healthful canola oil and whole-wheat flour.