Heart-Healthy Recipes

Whole-grain pasta is one of the easiest ways to sneak whole grains into your diet. This lasagna, made with noodles broken into 1-inch pieces, features a healthy pesto made with walnuts and basil.

Cyril Renaud, who grew up in Brittany, had brown rice for the first time when his Irish-American wife, Brigette, introduced him to it. Now he loves this heart-healthy, nutty-flavored grain, especially because its chewy texture holds up beautifully in salads, like this slightly spicy one full of vegetables and herbs.

Chef Kevin Graham rolls up trout fillets and poaches them in a delicate white-wine broth flavored with juniper berries and enriched with a little butter. Like salmon, mackerel and sardines, trout is an oil-rich, heart-healthy fish. It's also an excellent source of iron, selenium and vitamin B12.

In Seville, chickpeas and spinach (garbanzos con espinacas) is a popular dish served in both fine restaurants and tapas bars. It's simple but incredibly tasty, with plenty of flavor from tomato, raisins and saffron.

Jose Garces prepares this dish with hake, a relatively hard-to-find cousin of cod. He also uses fresh juice from shucked clams to make the delicious broth.

This barbecue sauce, made with ketchup, cider vinegar, Worcestershire and canned chipotles in adobo, comes together quickly in a blender. The chipotles give the sauce an appealing smokiness.

A small piece of bittersweet chocolate is the perfect indulgence. Not only is dark chocolate full of antioxidants, it is mood enhancing in its own right. This recipe, from F&W's Grace Parisi, gets an extra boost from walnuts (an excellent source of omega-3 fatty acids) and dried cherries (high in fiber and minerals).

Grilling broccoli gives it a wonderful sweet-smoky flavor. This simple dish is elevated by drizzling the broccoli with an easy, earthy dressing of anchovies, lemon juice and rosemary.

This dish offers a fitness-minded mix of lean chicken and calcium-packed watercress. Canadian bacon, with just a fraction of the calories and fat of bacon, gives the salad a slightly sweet and salty flavor.

If you can find them, use blood oranges instead of lighter-colored navels because darker pigments deliver more antioxidants.

This moist, nutty bread is a terrific way to use up late-summer zucchini. The walnuts in the bread are super-heart-healthy, and the yogurt adds moisture without any fat.

In Vietnam, palate-cleansing ginger is typically served with rich foods like duck. Here, a pungent ginger dipping sauce is paired with salmon, which is loaded with omega-3 fatty acids.

This combination of zingy herbs, cool noodles, grilled shrimp and spicy dressing makes a fabulous, easy dish. Plus, it can largely be made ahead of time, then put together just before serving. Squid or chicken are delicious substitutes for the shrimp.

These chocolate cookies by François Payard are divinely gooey.