Category Archives: Recipes

YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Cauliflower/Potato Latkes

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Try these latkes sometime this week when you’re ready for a change.

2 cups raw cauliflower cut into tiny bits
½ teaspoon each of turmeric and cumin
1 teaspoon garam masala
If you don’t have garam masala, double the turmeric and cumin, and add 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon.
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 teaspoons salt
2 large grated potatoes
1 medium grated onion
1 large egg

Mix together all the ingredients, and then drop heaping tablespoons full of the batter into hot olive oil.  Flip when the edges are brown, and remove to a paper-towel-covered plate when crispy on both sides.  Keep the plate of latkes in the oven on warm until ready to serve, which you should do as soon as humanly possible.  Happy Chanukah!  

 

 

 

 

YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Fermenting Cabbage x 2

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A couple of months ago I pulled the last 2 cabbages, sliced them very, very thinly, and mashed them, along with 2 tablespoons of salt, in a large wide bowl with the back of my fist until the cabbage was soft and its water was leaching out into the bowl.  Once it was very soft and watery, I jammed it into a glass jar as firmly as is humanly possible, and made sure that all the cabbage was immersed in the watery broth that came up all the way to the top of the jar.  I picked away any stray cabbage strands, closed the jar firmly, and rinsed away the excess water that had dripped over the sides.  Then I placed the jar in the dark cabinet.  A few weeks later there was sauerkraut; and there was satisfaction.  We ate the jar’s entire contents that evening.


Then I found this wonderful recipe.  It’s called kimchi, and it’s from Korea.  You might call it sauerkraut with a smile.  I noticed how similar it was to my simple sauerkraut recipe, and that’s when I decided to plant more cabbage in next year’s garden.  Here is Korean kimchi: 

1 large Chinese cabbage (like bok choy or napa)
2 cups carrot, grated
1 tsp honey
1/2 cup green onion
1 tbsp fresh ginger, grated
4 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp chili flakes
2 tsp salt
Cut up cabbage (remove core, outer leaves, thick stems) and mash in salt + a bit of water (1/4 c) in a large bowl.  Let sit for 2-4 hours to soften.  Add all the other ingredients, and mash together with back of fist until juices are released.  Fill up a glass jar with the mixture, leaving 1/2-1 inch at the top.  The liquid MUST cover the ingredients completely.  If you cannot get the cabbage to stay down, fill a baggie with approx 1/2 cup of salted water (1/2 tsp. in 1/2 cup), remove all the air, knot it closed, and place inside the jar on top of the vegetables prior to screwing on the lid.  Put the jar in a dark cabinet for 2 days, and then celebrate with your homemade kimchi.  

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If you’ve never been on “Your Health is on Your Plate” before, and you’re not sure where to start, visit Lets Start at the Very Beginning to get a jumpstart on preventing diabetes and obesity in yourself and the ones you love!!

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Then, scroll down and check out “A Milestone Celebration — Your Favorite Posts” to find a list of great blog entries!

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YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Wednesday Night Vegetable Soup

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Here’s a great example of what real food is all about.  Your great-grandparents ate this, it doesn’t have a bar code, it will go bad if you don’t cook and eat it, and each ingredient doesn’t have its own ingredient list.  

All you have to do is to toss some scallions, sweet potatoes, carrots, bok choy, beets, tomatoes, yellow squash, broccoli, potatoes, onions, garlic, salt, black pepper, and a few shakes of turmeric into a pot with some water and turn on the stove.

You can’t go wrong! Don’t worry about skipping an ingredient, or substituting something else for what you see here.  Wednesday night soup is so good! 

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If you’ve never been on “Your Health is on Your Plate” before, and you’re not sure where to start, visit Lets Start at the Very Beginning to get a jumpstart on preventing diabetes and obesity in yourself and the ones you love!!

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Then, scroll down and check out “A Milestone Celebration — Your Favorite Posts” to find a list of great blog entries!

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YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Butternut Coconut Soup

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What’s for Thanksgiving dinner today? Here’s a delicious and different squash soup.

Ingredients:
1 medium-large butternut (or other) squash
2 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger (or 1 teaspoon powdered ginger)
1 ½ teaspoons curry powder
½ teaspoon cumin
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
3 cups water or vegetable stock
1 cup coconut milk (canned)
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice (approx 1 lime)
salt and pepper
Preheat oven to 400°F and place butternut squash halves (soft flesh side down) on a foil-covered cookie sheet.  Roast for approx. 1 hour until squash is soft enough to pierce easily with a fork.  Let squash cool for a bit.

Heat oil at the bottom of a large soup pot.  Add garlic, ginger root, curry, cumin and cayenne, and stir 3-5 minutes until fragrant.  Immediately pour in coconut milk, lime juice, and water or stock, and turn the heat down to medium.

Now remove and discard the seeds from squash.  Scoop out the flesh, and add it to the soup pot.  Blend the ingredients of the pot using an immersion blender.  (Alternatively, you can transfer the solid ingredients to a food processor or standard blender, and then add them back to the soup pot.)

Heat through, and serve with a sprinkle of parsley or cilantro.  Serves 4 generously.

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If you’ve never been on “Your Health is on Your Plate” before, and you’re not sure where to start, visit Let’s Start at the Very Beginning to get a jumpstart on preventing diabetes and obesity in yourself and the ones you love!!

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Or check out Your Favorite Posts for a list of great blog entries!

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YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: PEANUT BUTTER MOUSSE

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This recipe comes from a friend whose young son cannot get enough of this great dessert!  If you still haven’t figured out what to make for Thanksgiving…

12 oz. light firm silken tofu
1/4 c. honey
1 c. smooth peanut butter
1 tablespoon vanilla
1/2 tsp. sea salt

Blend the tofu in a food processor 1-2 minutes until very smooth.  Add the honey and blend again.  Finally, add the peanut butter, vanilla, and salt and blend thoroughly until very smooth and light.  Refrigerate 1-2 hours until firm, and enjoy.  If it’s going to find its way to your Thanksgiving table, consider using it to fill a pie shell, especially one made with ground almonds.  

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If you’ve never been on “Your Health is on Your Plate” before, and you’re not sure where to start, visit Let’s Start at the Very Beginning to get a jumpstart on preventing diabetes and obesity in yourself and the ones you love!!

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Or check out Your Favorite Posts for a list of great blog entries!

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YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: TOFU SALAD WITH TURMERIC

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Turmeric is a great spice, beautifully deep gold in color, and with a great dusky, smoky flavor.  Tofu takes on the flavors of anything you mix it with.  Thank you to Andrew Weil MD for this recipe.


1 pound tofu, firm

1 teaspoon turmeric

1 tablespoon mustard

1 tablespoon pickle relish

3 tablespoons celery, chopped

3 tablespoons onion, chopped

1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped

1/4 teaspoon paprika

salt to taste

Instructions:

Drain tofu well and mash.  Add vegetables and spices, mash more, and mix thoroughly. Serve on a bed of lettuce with something brightly colored, like carrot sticks, or red peppers.  You can add hot sauce, too, if you’re so inclined.  Of course, some people put hot sauce on just about everything.  I know someone like that.

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If you’ve never been on “Your Health is on Your Plate” before, and you’re not sure where to start, visit Let’s Start at the Very Beginning to get a jumpstart on preventing diabetes and obesity in yourself and the ones you love!!

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Or check out Your Favorite Posts for a list of great blog entries!

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YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: POACHED EGGS ON A BED OF SWEET POTATOES

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Many thanks to Nancy and Bob Charles from High Meadow B&B in Wallingford, Connecticut, for this wonderful recipe!

First, cut a couple of sweet potatoes into thick slices and toss them with some salt and olive oil. Lay the slices on a cookie sheet and bake at 400 until soft.  Then slide them, one layer thick, into a wide pottery serving dish and set aside.
Now poach a few eggs.  Bob has one of those fancy poacher inserts that fits into a pot of boiling water.  I just crack the eggs into salted, boiling water and hope for the best.  As soon as the whites are cooked, with yolks just beginning to set and a bit on the runny side, scoop out the eggs onto the sweet potatoes and serve.  So good!
If you decide to serve this dish to guests, as Nancy and Bob did, you can serve the eggs and sweet potatoes with fresh papaya, homemade strawberry and ginger jam, and home- baked bread.  Yum!!!

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If you’ve never been on “Your Health is on Your Plate” before, and you’re not sure where to start, visit Let’s Start at the Very Beginning to get a jumpstart on preventing diabetes and obesity in yourself and the ones you love!!

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YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Fall Soup

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I got this recipe just today from a woman I work with.  I arrived home to find my daughter frying onions.  What’s for dinner? I asked.  I don’t know, she replied, this is as far as I’ve gotten.

So here is what we made:

Step 1:  Fry 2 medium diced onions in olive oil in a soup pot
Step 2:  Peel 3 beets, 3 carrots, 2 sweet potatoes and 1 turnip
Step 3:  Cut the vegetables into several large chunks each, and add to the soup pot
Step 4:  Cover the vegetables with water, and boil 15 min until softened
Step 5:  Scoop out the vegetables into a food processor or Vitamix, and swirl until smooth.
Step 6:  Return the puree to the pot of liquid, add a teaspoon each of thyme, salt, and pepper.
The soup was heavenly.  The color was divine and the flavor was a celebration of autumn, earthy and sweet at the same time.  I put a whole bunch of spices on the table for people to choose from, and they were terrific in all different combinations: turmeric, cumin, and hot paprika.  Rosemary would be good, too.
Hearty appetite!
 

YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Talia’s Crispy Apple Cereal

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You know how some of the best inventions happen by accident?  So this past Sunday I decided to slice up about a dozen of the abundance of apples in my refrigerator and dehydrate them.  I don’t have a real dehydrator, so I used the next best thing — the oven.  Around noon, I sliced each apple into 5 or 6 circles, spread them on cookie sheets, sprinkled them with cinnamon, and turned the oven to 200 F.  Then I left on an assortment of errands.  I planned to return around 4 pm, at which time I would begin to check on the apples periodically.  

But it didn’t turn out that way, exactly.  I’ll spare you the details, only to say that the apples were quite crisp at 8 pm.  I thought I was going to have to feed them to the chickens, but was surprised to discover that they were really good!  I began scooping them off the cookie sheets and putting them into a jar on the counter.  
Right then, my daughter walked through the kitchen and helped herself to a few.  Hey, these would be great in milk, she said.  So she crumbled a few into a cup and poured some milk over them.  Almond milk, in her case, but any milk would work.  They kept their crisp and made a great (grainless) “cereal.”  And we still have bunches more.  

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If you’ve never been on “Your Health is on Your Plate” before, and you’re not sure where to start, visit the post called Let’s Start at the Very Beginning to get a jumpstart on preventing diabetes and obesity in yourself and the ones you love!!

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YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: HOT GREEN TOMATO PICKLES

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If you saw the photo of my haul of green tomatoes and the rest of “the best harvest of my life” last week, then you know what I’ve been doing.  I made my way through a whole bunch of recipes I’d never made before, including green tomato chutney, hot sauce, sauerkraut, pickled watermelon rind, and the aforementioned hot (as in hot pepper) green tomato pickles.  The house smells a little vinegar-y, but the pickles came out great!  They’re nothing like my Grandma Rosie’s green tomatoes, which were deliciously sour, garlicky, and completely different.  I’ve also given away a few jars, which has been an extra bonus.  



I did not actually put up the tomato pickles for long-term storage.  I just filled up glass jars and stuck them in the refrigerator.  Learning proper methods for canning is on the list of things I intend to get to in the next year or two.  I’m not really concerned about their shelf life in the refrigerator.  First, there’s so much vinegar in them that nothing could live.  Secondly, they’ll be gone long before there could even be a problem.  They go with everything, and were particularly good with scrambled eggs and applesauce for lunch the other day.  



Here’s the recipe:

8 cups quartered green tomatoes

2 cups chopped onion

3/4 cup chopped hot peppers

1 cup brown sugar

3 tablespoons salt

2 cups white vinegar

1 teaspoon celery seed



Place all the ingredients in a large pot.  Cook on high heat until mixture begins to boil, and remove from heat immediately.  Pour into clean jars and refrigerate.



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