How to

Living in a different country can be a challenge as far as having everything we are used to–especially kitchen equipment. We could just buy what we want, but it’s better to go without a few things and find ways to improvise.

I regret letting a year go by without trying to accept that and live without an oven, when we spent our year in Taiwan in 2013-14. Most Asian kitchen don’t have ovens, so I went the whole year avoiding cooking anything involving an oven.

This year in Spain, it’s disappointing that our house doesn’t have an oven again. However, I tried harder and figured out how to keep having our favorite healthy snacks like kale chips in the kitchen. It was a big success, and I gained confidence experimenting with new techniques.

I’m obsessed with making dried apples (apple chips) and I have turned so many adults and kids onto them too. I have given away jars and jars to friends as birthday and Christmas gifts, or for my daughter’s school parties, etc. It’s so rewarding to see kids pick the dried apples over other sweet treats!…

and enjoy them!

When I lived in Thailand, making my own sushi seemed impossible. I never thought I could make it at home–especially the vegetarian type. There are so many Japanese restaurants to choose from, and most of them serve sushi in amazingly tasty, Thai styles, which are convenient and fun to eat.

Talking about tasty Thai style, I’m still craving Tom-Yum Pizza! (based on the famous Thai soup). If you like Tom-Yum soup, I’m sure you’d love Tom-yum pizza, and it’s a standard fixing in Thailand. Thai people create all kinds of famous foods in Thai versions to please our taste buds. Sushi is the same, like pizza, there is plenty of great and often unique sushi available there.

Now, sushi is what I make at home almost every week, in fact, sometimes twice. It’s the favorite school lunch for my active daughter, as she can open her lunch box and munch it while busily talking with friends–an empty lunch box is guaranteed!

When we make it to eat at home, we don’t roll it, but eat it as wraps the way my Japanese friends showed me in Tokyo a long time ago. We call these Nori Wraps. I love eating sushi this way so much and have been making it for almost 20 years now. However, I do substitute a few things to suit my own style, and it’s pretty easy to make actually.

Let’s step into my kitchen for a little bit, so I can explain some main ingredients before we get the sushi-making started:…

My crispy Kale Chips creation started when I planted too much kale 10 years ago. Kale is the easiest vegetable to plant, and you are guaranteed to have leafy green kale all year round, including winter–really! Since I had too much, I wanted to find new ways to eat it, and came across the crispy kale idea. I used my oven to bake it and failed by burning it so many times before I finally got the right temperature and technique to make perfect kale chips.

I’m proud to say, I have turned quite a few grown-ups and kids who don’t like green vegetables onto eating Kale Chips, and some have even asked me to show them how its made.

Crispy kale chips have been a lifesaver for when I don’t have much time to cook, or when my daughter needs some healthy snacks right after school. With kale chips in the pantry, she can prepare a few things and grab a jar of kale too. It’s also a great way to have green vegetables for the road, and on camping trips.

In the past, I could rely on having an oven, or sometimes a dehydrator, to do this, and it was a bit inconvenient when we lived in places without an oven. However, this time in a house without an oven, I figured out how to make the same kale chips. It’s actually easier and faster than using the oven, and that is another thing you gain when you live with less: creativity!…

I still remember the first time I tried to make soup by following a recipe. I ended up putting my project away and cooked a different dish entirely because I didn’t have either stock or broth on hand. I was so afraid to cook anything if I didn’t have all the ingredients mentioned in the recipes, and most soup recipes required either stock or broth, so my soup dishes were on hold for a while.

To be honest, I was a little confused about stock and broth. I didn’t know the difference between them, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. My desire to make beautiful soup like I saw in cookbooks kept coming back to me, so I decided to really look into the stock and broth terminology.

Here is what I found out:

To make vegetable stock, prepare the main ingredients, which are vegetables. Slow cook them in water until everything is cooked thoroughly, then remove the vegetables. The liquid that is left after removing the vegetables is called “stock.” The stock is plain, but highly nutritious.

Broth is cooked the same, but we don’t remove the vegetables when it’s done. We do add some seasoning such as salt and pepper or other spices. The seasoned, cooked vegetables with the liquid is called “broth.” We can drink the liquid, and also eat the vegetables at the same time. Broth is also very nutritious.

When I finally understood the difference between stock and broth, I started to make my own. I like making broth as I feel a little bit silly throwing away the cooked vegetables afterwards. Although, I do separate and save some liquid once in awhile if I plan to make some dishes that require stock….

My First Steps in Blogging

Ever since I dreamed of blogging my passion, oh how I wanted to have my blog look like one of those beautiful professional ones I see all over. Clicking and exploring the blog pages is so easy and fun as everything that appears to my eyes looks stunning and flawless, but I had no idea there is so much work to be done before a blog can be on the web for people to enjoy–until I began trying to get mine started.

My desire to blog started back in 2003 when my doctor told me that I had over a 90% chance to have a baby after 4 pregnancy losses. I was over the moon, and wanted to blog and share every step of my daughter’s life-journal with my families and friends across the world. Unfortunately, I had to put everything on hold for a long time when my pregnancy got more complicated and my daughter was born 2 months early. Long story short, the difficult beginning gave way to much better years, but they’ve been busy years that have gone by fast….

tie the napkin with the rubber band, insert the stick through and hang it on the pitcher

I heard about whey and protein whey, both in the form of powder, for a long time. I only heard about liquid whey when I started fermenting whole grains and vegetables.

It sounded difficult talking about it, but it’s actually very fun and easy to make.

If you like cream cheese, you’ll like making liquid whey as you get homemade cream cheese from the process too.

You can use liquid whey in all kinds of soaking and fermentation of foods, so if you want to start a new way of eating through fermentation, it’s very handy to have on hand. It keeps in the fridge for up to 2 weeks, but I usually use mine up quickly and make it fresh almost every week.

Here are the things you need:…

Being Thai, pomegranates are no strangers to me. For some people, pomegranates look like something from a different world. I know, we can’t just pick one up, wipe it off with our shirt, and eat it. Pomegranates require more work, but every single seed of them is worth your patience!

Pomegranates are full with precious goodness. I have read that pomegranate juice (real 100% juice) has 3 times higher antioxidant activity than red wine or green tea.

Now that you know about the great benefits of eating them, you might wonder how on earth to eat them fresh without fighting to peel them. I have gone through years of frustration trying to add them into my daily fruit dishes when they are in season, and finally I have mastered the technique. I’m proud to share this quick and easy method so pomegranates don’t have to be love-hate fruits to anyone anymore.

The skin is tough, but not too tough to give up eating them. Pomegranates have so many different color varieties, from clear-pale transparent, light pink, light brown, red, to very dark red. It takes a little bit of luck choosing pomegranates, as sometimes they look perfect from the outside but bad when you cut them open.…

Organic whole grain cereal and whole oatmeal were the ideal options for healthy breakfasts in my family for a long time. It was easy and convenient to open a box of cereal, or to cook oatmeal straight from the storage jar in the morning. However, I completely changed my way of eating whole grains since 2013, when I learned how phytic acid might be associated teeth problems.

Soaking and fermenting whole grains can reduce phytic acid, and this method was how people in the past prepared their grains before consuming them. Unfortunately, nowadays, people aren’t spending time doing it much. I was fascinated with what I learned, and it steered me to prepare grains in these ways.

Are you ready to try eating fermented whole grains properly prepared in a traditional way?

I’m going to show you first how to soak or ferment and cook raw whole grains, and the second one is how to soak rolled oats & barley flakes. I used both of them mostly for breakfast….

Vegetables are my main food each day, and garlic has become an important part of offering them extra tasty flavor. I used to fry garlic at the same time I cooked each dish, like this one, but I soon realized it’s much easier and faster if I have fried garlic ready to go.

This method is a time saver, and I can get my vegetable dishes done as fast as I can think of what to make with fried garlic on hand!

Things you need:

2 heads of garlic or more, depends on how much you want.
2-3 Tbs (30-45 ml) of coconut oil

…

In southern Thailand where I was born, turmeric is very common, and I grew up eating turmeric as part of my daily diet. We put turmeric in almost every dish, and we even have one dish called “gaeng leang” or “yellow curry” because we use so much turmeric in it. Whenever I helped my mom in the kitchen, my fingers got stained for days!

When I first moved to the U.S, I found that turmeric was not so common, and that made me forgot about it for a while. Like everything, when it’s out of sight, it’s also out of mind.

It came back to me when I happened to read an article about the benefits of turmeric. Some research says curacumin in turmeric has a powerful anti-inflammatory, which is a strong antioxidant that can fight or even cure some kinds of cancer. The article brought so many memories of eating turmeric back to me. How could I forget about that yellow root I didn’t like when it stained my hands?

I wanted to add turmeric back to my diet, so, I started to search for it again. To my happy surprise, it wasn’t hard at all to find turmeric powder. Sometimes, I can even buy fresh turmeric like we use in Thailand. As more people know about its benefits, it seems to be more popular nowadays.

One day, I was craving the salty taste of garlic and turmeric in my mother’s fish dishes so much. I decided to try making that dish, but replaced the fish with tofu. It turned out very similar to what I wanted, and satisfied my craving!

So, here is another way to add turmeric in your diet:…

For sentimental reasons, what I’m going to write in this post reminds me so much of my childhood and what my mom did raising us. It’s been so long since I left my Thai home. Thinking about my memories gives me a lump in my throat–oh how I miss those days!!

I remember seeing my mom’s joy of growing vegetables in our garden. I also remember her pride in cooking and fermenting vegetables in our kitchen. We had a great garden by a river in our backyard, and my mom would plant everything she could think of in it all year round. I can still hear my mom’s voice asking me and my sister to stop playing and go to the garden and get what she needed for her.

Vegetables such as lemongrass, Thai chilies, or limes were typical things for us then. Back in those days, seeing my mom work so hard to get simple food, that at the same time was sold everywhere, I wished she would go to the supermarket and buy everything just like other “modern families” did. I’m so glad she didn’t do that now, and instead she went the extra mile to feed us well….

The easiest dish I ever prepared was the dish for my daughter when she started to eat solid food. At the time, I didn’t have to do anything besides giving her plain steamed vegetables. I gave her one cooked vegetable at a time to observe her reactions with each type. I tasted everything before I fed her first, and was surprised they actually tasted good the way they were–plain. When I was finally sure that she wasn’t allergic to anything, I started to add some seasoning to her vegetables and thought she would love to eat them even more. Hmm. . . no, she didn’t like them any better than the plain ones. So, I adjusted how I cook vegetables to the way my daughter liked to eat, which was incredibly simple.

That made me realize that we are actually born to eat food close to its original form. Ever since, I have kept this idea in mind and tried to keep my food as simple as possible. I love how I can tell what each vegetable tastes like just by looking at it.

Here is one of my many plain vegetable dishes. With just broccoli, garlic & coconut oil, a pinch of salt, and lemon juice, it’s so plain yet very tasty:…

Roll your own Sushi, or eat it as Nori Wraps

My First Steps in Blogging

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About Gourmet Vegetarian Kitchen

How to

Roll your own Sushi, or eat it as Nori Wraps

My First Steps in Blogging

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Archives

About Gourmet Vegetarian Kitchen