YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Three Delicious Salad Dressings

Have you ever noticed how so many different cuisines include a dish that pairs some type of greens with some type of fat? Whether it’s lettuce and olive oil, cabbage and mayonnaise (cole slaw), sauteed greens + pignola nuts, spinach with bacon dressing, or deep-sea fatty fish and seaweed (sushi), parsley salad with tahini dressing, you are apt to find green leaves combined with fats over and over again. Continue reading





YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Rice & Collards Soup

Last year I was asked to give a talk on vitamins and minerals. For lack of a more inspired approach, I decided to go in alphabetical order, plodding through all these micronutrients like an elementary school teacher. As part of the talk I shared ideas for good sources of the various vitamins and minerals. To my delight and surprise, I discovered that greens were a source of almost every vitamin I mentioned! Who knew? Greens even have tons of orange and yellow nutrients, like beta-carotene. The dark green pigment hides the lighter ones, but they’re still there. Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Lentils & Collards Soup

I’ve posted this recipe on these pages once before, but I thought it was worth repeating. I love how the aromatic cumin and cinnamon and lemon flavors in this soup are so different from the spice combinations I usually use.

The box of vegetables I picked up a couple of days ago contained two huge bunches of collard greens, and I could see that they were just aching to be made into this warm, aromatic soup. It took a day or two, but I finally gathered up all my ingredients, and started chopping. Well almost all. Because most unexpectedly, after I’d rinsed and chopped all the greens, I discovered, for the first time in probably decades, that we were completely out of onions. So I did the only thing I could think of, which was to increase the garlic to 10 cloves. Or maybe 15. There were a lot. Continue reading