YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Two Kale Salads

This past Monday we had bookclub at my house, and it was really nice. We read Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, and ate a whole bunch of delicious things, including a fantastic sweet potato soup (from Amy Chaplin’s Whole Food Cooking Every Day), rainbow carrots and baba ganoush from the West Side market, and Lynne’s fantastic kale salad, which she throws together with tahini dressing and a homemade mix of spiced almonds, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds. One of these days I’ll have to get the recipe, but I can already see her laughing and tossing back her head as she says, oh I don’t know, I just toss it all together! So, at least for now, your guess is as good as mine.
Then there’s this other kale salad, whose source I honestly cannot remember. It is very easy, and quite delicious. The dressing is unusual in that it contains the juice of a whole tomato. And lately there is plenty of kale to go around, so here is something you can do with it:
1. Chop up 1 pound of well-washed and drained kale into small pieces with a knife or a pair of scissors. Place in a medium-large serving bowl. Mix with your hands for a minute or two until the kale leaves begin to soften and turn darker green.
2. Add one-quarter cup raisins, 1/4 cup diced carrots, and 1/4 cup diced red onion to the bowl.
3. Into a high-speed blender, add the juice of 1 lime, 1/4 cup tahini, 1 large tomato, and a few leaves of fresh mint. Blend until liquid, and then pour over the kale mixture. Prior to serving, you can sprinkle a few pumpkin seeds on top, if you’d like.

Enjoy this salad for lunch, or take it to bookclub. It is really yummy.


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Bob’s Red Mill Quinoa Salad

You may or may not have heard, but last month, on February 10th, Bob Moore, a founder of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods, passed away at the age of 94. And I felt the need to write a post about this man who made such a remarkable difference in our food supply. Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Mushroom Potato Stew (gf, vegan)

A dear friend of mine, a great cook, recommended this recipe to me a couple of weeks ago. She made it, her daughter made it, and now I’ve made it. A triple play! It was not originally gluten free, but I made it gluten-free by substituting tamari and oat flour for the soy sauce and wheat flour in the prior version. Easy peasy. 

Try serving this with a plate of sliced oranges, maybe sprinkled with a few berries. Nothing specific, just use whatever you can find in the fridge.  Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Good Brownies

We are going to a neighborhood holiday cookie party this afternoon, and so I decided to share an idea for something sweet and delicious.

A lot of people think that the only sweet food I eat is fruit. While it is true that I almost never eat items containing ingredients that I would categorize as “food-like,” such as high-fructose corn syrup, white flour, or maltodextrin, I definitely enjoy my share of desserts. For example, I have made peanut butter cups from quality dark chocolate and organic peanut butter (one ingredient — peanuts) that are sublime. And this past week I stopped in at Fantasy Candies to buy some holiday gifts, and I picked up some pecan chocolate bark for myself. That was also pretty yummy.

So yes, I, too, love recipes like these. The ingredients are all real food, all nutritious, and the results turn out way more delicious than any product wrapped in cellophane. Besides that, you can feel really good about feeding this to people you love. Continue reading


First Trimester Ideas for My New Friend at Verizon

This week at the Verizon store I got a new phone and made a new friend. She was endlessly patient and kind through four interminable visits over the course of two weeks, and I appreciated her even more once I learned that she was also in the process of struggling through her first trimester.  When she told me that she’d been having a hard time figuring out what to eat that she could keep down, I promised to write a post about nourishing foods that would — hopefully — include something easy to digest. So here we go. Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Red Soup for the Holidays

In the days when my house was full of school-age children, I used to make crockpots full of soup every weekend, and hope that it would last into the beginning of the following week to provide warm lunches or dinners until it was gone. I don’t make weekly crockpots anymore, but I still love using my crockpot to make soup in the fall, around the holidays, and in the early spring, before the weather begins to warm up.

This time of year, with the nights cooling and plenty of holidays on the calendar, it’s always a great feeling to fill the crockpot and see what develops. And it doesn’t have to be chicken thighs. You can also fill your crockpot with beans! An overnight crockpot fills the house with a sublime perfume, the stomach with a delicious and satisfying meal, and the hearts of those you feed with all kinds of warm and cozy feelings. Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Green Herb Sauce

At this time of year, fresh herbs are growing everywhere, and large bags of zucchini, tomatoes, and other fresh vegetables continue to appear in the coffee room at work or maybe on your front steps, seemingly from out of nowhere. So even if you don’t keep a garden of your own, this is a great time of year to whip up a batch of an herb sauce that will channel the magical properties of those gorgeous vegetables. Not to mention that it will increase the likelihood that you and your lucky friends and family will eat more of the nourishing and colorful phytonutrients hiding inside all those beautiful vegetables, especially the phytonutrients in the herbs and other deeply colored green leafy veggies.  Continue reading


Colorful Meals (with a few recipes)

In the past few days we’ve had vegetable-bean soup made with Moro beans from Rancho Gordo, fresh tomatoes on toast made from Simple Kneads’s sourdough bread, tossed green salads with peppers and radishes, pickled red onions, fresh guacamole, orange-grapefruit salad sprinkled with pistachios, green grapes, cherry tomatoes, and fresh blueberries. And there is almost always homemade bread made from my husband’s hands with King Arthur’s whole wheat flour. 

Our meals do not exactly have a theme, but they always have a lot going for them. It’s all about vegetables, and fruits, and color. On a regular basis we make our way through red, green (light, medium, and dark), white, yellow, brown, orange, purple and blue produce. That’s a lot of colors. And, as my mom taught me, the more colors at a meal, the better. Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Pickled Cabbage Salad (Curtido)

When I was a little girl, I used to “help” my Grandma Rosie pickle cucumbers, green tomatoes, and even garlic, which sometimes developed an interesting blue color as it fermented in the pickling juice. We loved her homemade pickles, and we still do. This post is also a shoutout to longstanding and devoted YHIOYP reader Joe G, who absolutely loves Grandma Rosie’s pickles and has made them on many occasions since I first wrote about them.

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YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Baked Oatmeal

Baked oatmeal is a great way to start the day. It’s sort of like bread pudding, but with lots more texture, flavor and, yes, nutrition. Not only can this recipe can be prepared in a single bowl, but it’s guaranteed to keep you cozy and satisfied all morning. One great thing about it is that you can make it on the weekend, and then heat up a slice (or scoop) every day to get you through your mornings all week long. It’s also a very flexible recipe, so you could vary the ingredients slightly every time, and never make it exactly the same way twice! Continue reading