Archive for the ‘Recipes’ Category

Recipes That Sing a Plant-Based Song

Monday, April 1st, 2013
The Jazzy Vegetarian makes preparing a plant-based meal fun and easy

The Jazzy Vegetarian makes preparing a plant-based meal fun and easy

The Jazzy Vegetarian Brings Health With Music and Food

Laura Theodore started asking for acting and singing lessons at age 3, when she made herself the star of home movies that were supposed to have her baby sister as the focus. Laura got her first acting job when she was 11, and had performed in 40 plays and 5 television shows by age 16. Her acting was interrupted by idyllic summers on an island in Lake Erie between the US and Canada, where she learned to love nature and fresh-grown fruits and vegetables.

Laura, now popularly known as the Jazzy Vegetarian, shared with me her story of how she’s developed her cookbooks, PBS television series, and weekly radio show to get everyone to try their hand at healthy, compassionate cooking. Her journey started with frequent childhood stomach aches that became intolerable by the time she started her professional career in New York. “I grew up eating a typical American diet with lots of meat. During rehearsals as a kid, we would be given fast food dinners. I got terrible stomach pains after, but never (more…)

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Vegan For the Holidays Is Your Must-Have Cookbook for Festive Winter Celebrations

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

Vegan for the Holidays will definitely upgrade your holiday table and give your guests a memorable meal

Zel Allen Offers Whole Foods, Plant-Based Recipes To Delight Your Guests

Expectations are high for holiday meals. From Thanksgiving through Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Years – and all the parties and house guests in between – vegans may wonder how to satisfy friends, family, and co-workers while staying animal-free at the table. Health conscious eaters may be resigned to fatty, salty foods that lead to weight gain, heartburn, and a rush of guilt on New Year’s Day.

Enter Zel Allen with her original, satisfying, healthy recipes in Vegan For the Holidays. Zel, a cofounder of the popular site Vegetarians in Paradise, includes whole food, plant-based holiday recipes that will (more…)

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How To Make Fruit Salad Everyone Will Love

Saturday, July 7th, 2012

An inventive presentation can make your delicious fruit even more tempting

Easy Elegance for Picnics and Get-Togethers

If you are figuring out a fast, easy dish for any gathering, from a summer picnic to an elegant dinner party, fruit salad is your solution. Colorful fruit salad is gorgeous and tempting, bringing an orchard to your kitchen.

You don’t even need a recipe for fruit salad. You can make it on a moment’s notice, assuming you keep lots of fruit in your house. Hopefully you do this anyway, since fruit is a pillar of a healthy, whole foods, plant-based diet.

Fruit salad is the ultimate in uncooking. You can even let young children help assemble it. In fact, letting kids have fun in making meals with healthy foods is one of the best ways to get them launched on lifelong wise eating choices.

Here are some hints to making your fruit salad memorable and irresistible.

Enjoy your fruit salad outdoors on a picnic blanket in a green space, at the beach, or in a sunny nook in your house. Appreciate all that nature put into the fruit – the soil, sun, pollinators. Smile at nature’s greatest bounty.

Include a range of colors for visual appeal. The fruit salad will also be more interesting (more…)

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Whole Food, Plant-Based Recipes for Everyday Feasts

Saturday, March 24th, 2012

Me and David at the table just before dinner. David cooked such an excellent feast that I'm still thinking about it. Yet the recipes he used are designed for easy home cooking by anyone who want to eat healthy with a minimum of time in the kitchen.

David Gabbe Makes the Veg World More Delicious

Do you ever look around your kitchen and feel uninspired? You want a simple, tasty meal but can’t quite get it together to cook something.

David Gabbe, a Portland-based vegan cookbook author, cooking instructor, and speaker, can help you out. I was fortunate, on a recent trip to Oregon, to savor an excellent dinner at David’s house with him and his wife, daughter, and son-in-law.

My spirited, friendly hosts offered such a variety of enticing food that it was hard to know what to eat first. I ended up with a plate crammed with a whole grain medley, tofu cubes, Mexican-themed casserole, corn bread, baked yams, and kale salad. Home made chocolate truffles (more…)

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How To Make Delicious Green Sandwiches

Saturday, March 17th, 2012

Whole grain bread, two kinds of kale, and romaine lettuce are the appetizing basis for my next green sandwich

These Toppling Creations Can Be Your Go-To Lunch

Green smoothies are everywhere. Thousands of recipes offer intriguing ways to blend leafy greens, such as kale, chard, and spinach, with fruits, plant milks, chocolate, ice, and more for a thick, cold, satisfying drink. Often filling enough to be a meal on their own, green smoothies can be a delicious part of a whole foods, plant-based diet.

Green smoothies often aim to be slightly sweet. People who are not much into (more…)

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Not-Recipes for Not-Meals

Sunday, November 7th, 2010

Spur-Of-The-Moment Cooking Can Be Healthy and Fun

You can make delicious soup with a prepared base plus your own fresh vegetables and spices

Cooking from scratch with fresh ingredients is the gold standard for healthy plant-based eating. Tips to make cooking more enjoyable simplify this process. But some nights even the most undemanding recipes are out-of-reach. You are running late at work and get home tired and distracted. Traffic was a hassle. Maybe you have less than an hour to make dinner, eat, clean up, and run out for another commitment. Even on weekends, you can be squeezed for time as you bounce from one commitment to the next.

Don’t despair. Even in these stressful situations, you can have healthy, satisfying food. You do not need to (more…)

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Summer Comfort Food that Keeps You Full

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

Steaming Potatoes Means a Cool Kitchen and High Energy

Red potatoes, purple, or Yukon Gold are all excellent for steaming. Cut into bite size pieces first.

Potatoes are one of nature’s most satiating foods. This means they get you full and keep you feeling full and satisfied longer than most other things you could eat. These nutritious spuds have gotten a bad name because they are usually made into chips or fried (read unhealthy and weight-promoting oil) or baked and smothered with a dairy topping. So it’s no wonder that potatoes have gotten a bad – but undeserved – reputation.

Baking and roasting are my favorite ways to make potatoes. In the heat of San Diego summer, though, the oven is best turned off. So I experimented with steaming potatoes and am cheering at the results.

First, I scrubbed and cut up about 10 medium sized Yukon Gold potatoes into (more…)

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Green Recipes for Health and Weight Loss Success

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Convenient Ideas for Endless Great Eating With Whole Foods

Whole foods are so tasty that, if you are not into cooking, you can still have excellent not-meals with little kitchen time. For example, after work, one of my favorite quick dinners is green lentils with vegetables on a whole grain tortilla.

The lentils cook from their dry form in about 40 minutes. I mix them with freshly steamed or leftover brown rice or some frozen organic corn. Then spoon onto the whole grain tortilla with some chopped leafy greens, salsa, and/or spices. Steamed fresh vegetables round out a super simple but yummy and filling start to an energetic evening.

Sometimes, though, I want a more elaborate taste experience. Just as important, I find chopping and mixing colorful whole foods to

Working with beautiful whole foods is fun and relaxing

Working with beautiful whole foods is fun and relaxing

be relaxing and fun. If you never liked cooking before, you may change your mind when you go the whole foods route.

Want cooking ideas? An unbeatable site for thousands of whole foods recipes is fatfreevegan.com. This super blog is friendly, fun, and overflowing with enough recipes to keep you happily hanging around your kitchen for years.

This site features food photos that will make you hungry if you aren’t already. The advanced search function helps you find a recipe to use up ingredients that are filling your garden or refrigerator. The home page has an extensive, convenient list of five star recipes.

Cooking ideas are conveniently grouped into categories either by ingredients (such as beans (more…)

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A Whole Foods New Year’s Tradition that Tastes Great

Friday, January 1st, 2010

Black-eyed Peas and Greens Are Fun and Healthy

The Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas and greens on New Year’s Day is now widespread. Prosperity and luck throughout the year are the promised benefits. The peas (actually a kind of bean) symbolize coins, while the greens stand for dollars.

Eating this combo at New Year’s started about the time the Civil War was ending. Union soldiers spared the humble black-eyed peas as they confiscated or destroyed other crops in the South.

Black-eyed peas are the stars on New Year's

Black-eyed peas are the stars on New Year's

Had the troops understood the outstanding health benefits of black-eyed peas they might have targeted this food as well. This legume shares the same health benefits as other beans, filling you up and satisfying your appetite. The beans are a nutritional powerhouse, rich in minerals, complex carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins, protein, and phytochemicals.

Just as important, black-eyed peas and greens are easy to cook and there are so many fun variations on the basic dish. Here is the recipe I made for 2010.

Any Day of the Year Black-Eyes Peas and Greens

The ingredients are: (more…)

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Not-too-sweet Cranberry Sauce: Here’s the Secret Ingredient

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Home Made Cranberry Sauce that Will Wow Your Guests

If you grew up eating canned, jellied cranberry sauce, as I did, you have hopefully already discovered how amazing the home made version of this perpetual favorite can be. No holiday gathering would be complete without the deep red and tart richness of this treat.

This cranberry sauce was so good that my friends started eating it before I could get my camera out

This cranberry sauce was so good that my friends started eating it before I could get my camera out

Luckily, fresh cranberries are in season. Leave the cans in the store and bring home the ingredients for your own taste treat. While you can discover hundreds of recipes on the Internet, I have put together the following simple recipe that cooks in ten minutes. Even people who usually don’t like cranberry sauce will eat a plate of this.

Recipe for not-too-sweet cranberry sauce:

Ingredients

4 cups of cranberries (this is the amount in a 12 ounce package)

¾ cup water

½ cup sugar (see below) (more…)

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