Green things CAN taste yummy!
It has been brought to my attention, after traveling through Utah, Colorado, and Kansas, that although many people have the intention to be healthier and eat more fruits and vegetables, they just don’t know what to do with them!
“I would eat more vegetables if they actually tasted good,” has become a commonly heard phrase.
It seems we were all taught to cook macaroni, spaghetti, and other noodles, a rite of passage in independent eating (whether you’re 8 or newly in college). Also, most humans over the age of 6 can quite adequately create a sandwich of sorts, whether by stacking on cheese slices or smearing the bread with PB&J. And perhaps I’m lending out more credit than is due, but I postulate that the greater majority of humans can cook an egg in a pan or microwave a potato.
But when and where do we learn to cook vegetables, pick a salad from the garden, or create a new meal full of healthy ingredients? Perhaps many of you learned to cook from your parents, an old roomie, or the famous jailchef Martha Stewart. But unless your experience with recipes and chef mentors are dramatically different from those that I have met recently, you learned to cook starches and meats with butter and cheese and the occasional overcooked side of asparagus.
So, in lieu of that innate sense of vegetable cheffery that few of us inherited, the purpose of this blog is to provide you with a few easy pointers on how to increase your vegetable intake WITH FLAVOR!
All vegetables are not created equal. You will, no doubt, have some you like more than others. But that’s ok, these aren’t you’re children and showing preferential treatment towards certain colorful foods won’t hurt anybody’s feeling, promise! It’s okay to eat more broccoli than cabbage, more sweet potatoes than mushrooms, yet there is a unique and fantastic flavor to each vegetable and eating varying types of yummy things from the earth is a healthy approach. Variety IS the spice of life, as you may recall, and it counts towards eating habits too!
Any dish that calls for one vegetable can easily be improved by adding 2…or 3 or 4 or 5 instead! It’s not that you need to start cooking completely different meals in order to get more green goodies, most meals can simply be augmented with these tasty morsels. Try adding broccoli and carrots to your can of soup, red cabbage and green peppers to your premade salad with its wee baggy of croutons and almond slices, cabbage and kale to your casserole (or anything else you bake in the oven…even pizza!). Even if you’re making a potroast or baking chicken a la Papa Smurf, simply throw in some sliced sweet potatoes and you’re good to go! More vegetables mean more vitamins, minerals, health, and flavor! Plus, dishes always look prettier with colorful veggies adorning them… lining them with those little pop up fancy drink umbrellas wouldn’t hurt either
Vegetables can be cooked alone, steamed, sautéed, grilled, whatever! And they can easily be spiced up without adding any calories or harmful ingredients. The top 5 spices I keep on hand at all times include (but are certainly not limited to): salt, pepper/cayenne, cumin, garlic, and basil. With these spices, no dish will proceed blandly to the table! Try sprinkling these atop steamed veggies or mixing them right into the pan while stir-frying. Iron chef, here you come!
I think that many people believe vegetables taste bad because they cook them till they are limp and the color of death. Death has no flavor… hell might, but not death. The secret to steaming or any other type of cooking involving veggies is to throw them into the pan/pot in their own due time. For example, carrots cook more slowly than kale, so toss them in early and wait till later with the kale so it still has its fresh flavor and has not wilted beyond complete recognition. Below is a list of common veggies, they are in descending order for cooking times (approximately), that is the ones at the top of the list need to go in first.
Sweet potatoes/potatoes
Beets
Carrots
Onions
Broccoli
Green beans
Asparagus
Bell peppers (cook the red ones longer…no, not really
Zucchini and other squash
Peas
Corn
Mushrooms
Cabbage
Spinach, kale, collard greens, mustard greens
*Tomatoes – tricky tricky, it depends whether you’re cooking them down to make a sauce, like them more squishy and stewed-like, or want them all fresh and juicy.
One fantastically amazing tasty healthy snack that I have recently run into is kale chips! So easy, so fast, so delicious! Check out EcoJaunt’s video Kale Krunch for the step by step recipe from Laura in Hamilton, MT and prepare to by yummified.
Also, grocery stores and ethnic specialty shops are making it easy to add a little flavor to the pan. Sauces and marinades can easily be added to veggie sautés to give it some kick and pizzazz! For example, try a curry sauce or teriyaki atop your onion, broccoli, carrots, and mushrooms, oh delicious! Or even drizzle a touch of BBQ sauce (yeah, I know, full of high fructose corn syrup and sugar, yet tasty) over your skewers of veggies for the grill. Hot diggety, I’m getting hungry!
And when there’s just no room on the proverbial supper table for another dish, have fresh raw veggies as an appetizer. This way, no one’s just too stuffed to eat his or her vegetables. And, you can serve them up with hummus (a great dip made from garbanzo beans with good vitamins and protein), a salad dressing of sorts, or a chutney of choice!
Another way to add more vegetables to your diet is to invoke the old dinner salad rule. That is to say, dinner always FOLLOWS salad. And we’re not talking iceberg lettuce with a few lonely carrot circles (you know with the jaggedy edges all cute and stuff). We’re talking red lettuce and romaine (small amounts) mixed with cucumber and red bell pepper and celery and carrots and beets and snap peas and…. you get the point. When it comes down to it, just lettuce (especially iceberg) doesn’t do a lot for you in the category of nutrition, so fill your salad with other goodies that do.
My particular eating pattern includes a salad for lunch, filled with whatever scrumptious veggies I could scrounge from my fridge (ahem, currently a small cooler). This way I know that come dinner time I’ve already had at least SOME green goodies and if my evening sustenance turns out to be mac and cheese or bread and balsamic vinegar with a glass of red wine and a side of giggling girlfriends…well, then at least I’ve dosed my body with vitamins and minerals once or twice that day and there will be no nutrient melt down to be wary of.
Instead of super sizing your less than happy meal, SUPER SALAD it for dinner! This is a great easy way to feed yourself or a hungry hoard that takes little time and is tasty as all get out. Simply chop up heaps of different veggies, open cans of black, kidney, or garbanzo beans and canned corn (real stuff is extra credit) and mix and match as you please. You can also cook up a touch of tofu or meat as a topping. And I’ve forgotten cheese! Don’t forget the cheese (even if it’s the shitty parmesan cheese in the green can that one would have difficulty differentiating from Comet cleaner).
And once you’re sick of all these ideas, experiment! Buy new and different veggies, ask the vendors at farmers’ markets what they do with foods you’ve never used or even knew existed. This is how I learned what to do with kohlrabi (which it turns out is kinda like broccoli stalks in my opinion) and is a great way to learn about new and LOCAL foods (this is yet another blog that I will jump to soon enough).
So get to cheffing and healthifying all those things that go into your body! Remember, just because it comes from the dirt, doesn’t mean it has to taste like dirt.
If you’re having problems coming up with a recipe for certain vegetables or need help strategizing a way to sneak veggies into your life, email me and we’ll spice it up right!
ContactUs@EcoJaunt.org
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