Healthy Vegetarian & Plant-Based Foods
This Vegan Cultured Cream Cheese & Brie with Tomatoes recipe is extremely tasty. You can choose to make cream cheese, or go further it turning it into brie!
It’s great for quick healthy snacks, an appetizer for special gatherings, and to satisfy cheese cravings.
If you have made almond ricotta cheese, this should be very easy for you. If you have made almond brie, this is also going to be easy.
Let’s jump into the recipe!…
Simply ferment cashews with Penicillium Roqueforti and age it at least 4 weeks. It’s hard to believe this Vegan Blue Cheese is not made from dairy?
I stopped eating any kind of meat since 2004. It wasn’t too hard to make up my mind not to rely on other lives to live, although I still ate dairy cheese.
A few years later, as I learned more about the dairy industry, I tried to give up dairy products altogether as well.
However, giving up dairy wasn’t easy. There is dairy in almost everything, and the most difficult item to give up is cheese.
I have tried replacing my cheese cravings with commercial vegan cheeses on the market, but one I bought was so bad that I couldn’t finish it. It was highly processed with some unfamiliar additives in it–not what I wanted to put in my body.…
vegan cheese (cashew camembert)
Take a bite of this Vegan Cheese and you’ll be amazed that it’s not dairy cheese. Not only does it look exactly the same, but it also tastes the same–even better!
Knowing how much the dairy product industry impacts our health and the environment, my family cut down dairy product intake by more than 80% over the past few years.
Whenever I talk to people who are trying to go plant-based, most of them say the same thing: that giving up cheese is the hardest.
It was hard for me too. I started to look into it more seriously to find something to replace the dairy cheese we ate. Unfortunately, most Vegan Cheeses on the market are highly processed and the tastes are unbelievably bad. …
This Stir Fried Baby Bok Choy will give you a quick & healthy side dish. It goes well with everything, and it can also be a simple light meal by itself. Just chop up fresh baby bok choy, and stir fry them with 4 simple ingredients that you probably have already in your kitchen. This healthy dish can be done in a wink!
Whenever I see local, fresh, baby bok choy, my dinner plans change–Stir Fried Baby Bok Choy comes first. I love to see them when they are still in their perfect, beautiful shape, basically the day I get them. The leaves are bright green and very delicate, and I’m always afraid they might get damaged if I keep them in a fridge.
The perfect combination of a little bit sweet, savory, and a quick saute on medium heat, gives this Stir Fried Baby Bok Choy dish a fresh flavor with the crunchiness you can’t get from other kinds of vegetable.…
Salad Rolls with Almond Butter Sauce are the most fragrant and healthy way to eat salad as a finger food. They are easy to make, and so much fun to eat!
With a lot of vegetables folded into rice wrappers, and dipped in almond butter sauce, this dish can be great for a party dish or for meals.
We usually eat Salad Rolls during summer when we can pick fresh herbs such as mint, basil, and cilantro right from our own garden….
enjoy them with minced garlic, olive oil & vinegar
White Asparagus is a famous appetizer in Spain. You can cook or buy them easily everywhere in the north. They are so pretty, tasty, and most of all very healthy!
I’m sure most of us know how healthy asparagus is, although green asparagus is more common for cooking than the white variety.
Living in spain, we cook White Asparagus more as it is available locally, especially from early April on when they come into season. Even though we eat them as an appetizer, they are very filling, and can end up being full before dinner–that’s actually nice and easy!
However, cooking White Asparagus requires more work as they are bigger, tougher, and the skin is more bitter than green asparagus. First, we have to peel the skin, then boil them ‘til they are soft. From there, we can either eat them plain with vinegar and olive oil, or use them in other dishes.
There is a special kind of a tall pot for cooking asparagus that most people have in Spain, but since we don’t, I use a regular pot I have, and it works fine.…
Stinky Tofu is a famous snack both in China and Taiwan. If you go there and don’t get to try Stinky Tofu, you are not there!
I lived in Taiwan for a year, and I loved having Stinky Tofu as a snack or sometimes, even for a light dinner. The combination of the special marinated tofu, sautéed cabbage, and the spicy sauce give a very unique flavor. It’s the first thing
I used to ask for whenever went back to Taiwan.
However, soon after I learned the secret ingredient to make the traditional stinky tofu was fish or shrimp, and I stopped buying it completely. I tried searching for vendors who make Stinky Tofu without marinating tofu with fish, but there were none. So, I started to experiment my own way. Unfortunately, no matter how much I tried, I can’t make it the same.
I gave up trying to make it to be the same, and started doing it my own way. With just simple ingredients, pan fried instead of deep fried, and the Stinky Tofu vegan style is very healthy and tasty. Are you ready to give it a try?…
Fermented Bean Salsa ideas always come to mind when I want to make a quick and easy, yet healthy appetizer. It’s so good for when we crave Mexican-American type foods, and also great for entertaining guests before meals, or simply for taking to picnics and potlucks!
Why fermented beans you may wonder? In case you are not familiar with fermented beans, let me pass on some info I have learned in the past few years. All beans and legumes contain anti-nutrients that make it hard for our bodies to digest them. Fermenting and sprouting before consuming them are the best way to to reduce the anti-nutrients, and to make the beans more digestible, thus causing less gas.
Other benefits you get from cooking your own beans are staying away from the BPA in can linings, and helping to reduce container use.
If you want to know more reasons why I ferment beans (and whole grains) check out my post about why I ferment whole grains.
However, the process of fermenting and sprouting requires some time, and is probably the reason why most people and canned bean companies don’t do it. So, the best way is to do it by yourself. I found it’s hard at the beginning, but not once I got used to it. With some planning, I always have fermented beans on hand….
These Roasted Sweet Potatoes are both healthy and filling, and a little bit of good oil and salt make them taste great right from the stove top!
Sweet potatoes are high on hearty-healthy food lists. I like them because they are versatile, and can be used in many different dishes: from thanksgiving dinners and soups, to simple, healthy snacks such as Roasted Sweet Potatoes.
However, living abroad or somewhere without an oven in the kitchen can be challenging when you want to bake or roast sweet potatoes. I struggled with that and avoided making them for quite some time.
With some effort, I created Roasted Sweet Potatoes in a frying pan. It’s perfectly doable, and in fact it uses less energy when I want a small batch. I can do a small amount of them at a time on a burner instead of heating the entire oven. When I realized how easy it was, I started making it much more often.
If you’d like to try roasting sweet potatoes on a stove top, come along with me, and I’ll show you how….
Som Tam is a well known Thai salad made with raw papayas pounded in a terra cotta mortar–a unique way to make salad. It’s very healthy with a combination of sweet, tangy, savory and spicy flavors. In Thailand, Som Tam is everywhere from street venders to high-end restaurants and food courts. If you like Thai foods, I’m sure you will like or have already tried Som Tam before!
My family and I love eating Som Tam, and we can eat it almost every day, which we often do when we go to Thailand. However, it can be hard to make Som Tam the same way they do in Thailand if you can’t get raw papayas, or don’t have a terra cotta mortar. Where I live in the US, it’s easy to get everything I need to make Som Tam and other asian dishes. When I travel though, especially now in Spain, I can’t get raw papayas, and don’t have a mortar either.
To make Som Tum like we always do, I substitute carrots & cabbages for raw papayas. Sometimes, I add cucumbers too. These vegetables are more common and easy to find everywhere. For a mortar, I just use a regular salad bowl instead. The result is not exactly the same, but it’s healthy, and tasty in a different way.
Before we talk more about making Som Tam with cabbage, I would like to mention something about it first. Even though I grew up hearing that eating raw cabbage is not good for you, I never found out why. Instead, I avoided consuming it raw altogether.
However, a few years ago, I decided to look into the reasons. I read a few articles and found out that cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage should be cooked before being eaten as they contain chemicals that block the production of thyroid hormone in your body. Here is the link to the article I am talking about. You can use your own intuition whether to consume it raw. I still think eating it raw in moderation is ok, and I like it that way sometimes….
The Thai appetizer, Miang Kham, is one of the healthiest snacks. It’s a perfect mix of savory, sweet, and tangy, along with healthy raw vegetables. It’s actually an appetizer, but we often eat it for dinner!
However, the original Minag Kham recipe from Thailand has fish sauce, shrimp paste, and dried shrimp, all of which we don’t eat. It also requires a lot of palm sugar to make the sauce thick, but I find it too sweet, and substitute a lesser amount of regular, unrefined cane sugar, that is always easy to find. To thicken the sauce, I use shallots or red onions with toasted coconut flakes, and minced crispy tofu instead. I substitute soy sauce for the fish sauce, and replace the shrimp paste with nutritional yeast. It turns out just the way I like, and I enjoy the flavor very much. It actually tastes as great as the authentic dish, but it feels even healthier and is easier to make!…
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:…
Sawatdee Ka, my name is Jeem Elliott and I’m Thai. I'm the creator of Gourmet Vegetarian Kitchen.Com. I have a background in Read More…