99% of my dinners' vegetables are pre-heating the oven to 350-400, putting aluminum foil on a cookie sheet, and coating Vegetable X in salt, oil, and pepper, and cooking for 15-20 minutes. It's basically 0 cleanup and you're eating whole, unprocessed vegetables. Our bodies are built for that sort of diet.

Brussels sprouts and cauliflower, to name just two, are outstanding when cooked this way.

If you want to bring your brussels sprouts to the next level, add bacon and maple syrup.

I'm amused that we're talking about recipes on HN but then after all recipes are algorithms.

Or saute them with a bit of butter, garlic, and balsamic.

or a little maple syrup plus goat cheese bits!

Along this same line, something I've been extremely surprised by every time I visit someone in the hospital is how unhealthy hospital dining options are.

What's even more depressing is that hospital meals are designed for healthy people. Most people recovering from a gastrointestinal disease or chemotherapy find most food unpalatable, and hospital food seems like straight up garbage to them. For example, there are few to no "light" tasting options. Everything is seasoned restaurant-style (pedal to the metal in the flavor department). Hospital food ought to have a bland option.

Hospitals are such stressful places to be in that they seem mandated to provide "comfort food" all around.

In my observation, most people don't want healthy food. They want to think they are eating healthy but when it comes down to it, they want the fat, sugar and salt that goes into restaurant food. They want to think they're healthy drinking their fruit smoothie but god forbid you leave out some of the sugar. They want to think they're healthy eating a salad but make sure it's got some fried chicken and plenty of salad dressing on it. It's healthy because it's salad, right?

I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule but restaurants typically have to cater to the lowest common denominator.

For about a year, Noodles & Company had an option to replace the noodles with spinach and double the veggies of any dish. It made a few of their menu items decently healthy. I was sad when it was discontinued shortly after I discovered it.

Yes; restaurants, especially nice restaurants, are in the business of selling food which people eat primarily for pleasure, not for nutrition. It's an indulgence, not sustenance.

Even those restaurants who want to appeal to a 'healthy eating' audience find that their less healthy items sell better; considering the difficulty of succeeding or even surviving in the restaurant business, they start to emphasize those items and eventually become a source of relatively unhealthy meals. It's the same phenomenon that caused all of the niche cable networks to fill their schedules with general-interest reality shows unrelated to their original programming over the last couple of decades.

tl;dr: Restaurants sell unhealthy food because people want to buy unhealthy food.

The misconception is tasty food and healthy food are orthogonal qualities; that's thankfully far from the case! For example, you could a make a restaurant quality chicken breast entree with a white wine reduction and heavy cream sauce, seasoned with Herbs de Provence. If you're a follower of Keto, you'd notice these ingredients are all low carbohydrate, and offer protein and fats. Pair with seasoned veggies and you've got yourself an entree, it's delicious, and it's far from consuming the "empty" calories of typical fast food.

Substitute thighs for the breast and you might have something. As has been noted, chicken breast is the skim milk of the meat world.

There's nothing wrong with chicken breast, especially if the skin is left on and crisped. It just lends itself to different applications than thigh.

Especially if you're using heavy cream, which is 36% fat. The sauce compensates for the breast's lack of fat (when compared to thighs). I like both, but as you say, they have different applications. For breast, just use extra olive oil/butter/heavy cream to balance the dish.

Thighs are less time and temperature sensitive. They're a bit more hardy if you're new to cooking. Chicken breast is easy to overcook because less fat makes it less forgiving.

Chicken breast is garbage. The magic is in the leg meat.

Healthy meals do not have to be flavorless. Of course if they are trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator then the menu will maybe start to look like McDonald’s, but even somewhere like chipotle you can buy a salad without the extra cheese and chips.