Healthy Vegetarian & Plant-Based Foods
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….
Red Cabbage Sauerkraut Salad is a dish I make when I want to eat something healthy and quick that can be done in no time. It’s sour, savory, and has a little sweetness that is extremely healthy and beautiful.
I adapted this dish from my childhood memories eating fermented and salted bok choy. In Thailand, there is a simple vegetarian dish that I chose over any meat dishes called stir fried fermented bok choy, and I sure loved the taste of it.
As I always have all kinds of fermented vegetables in my fridge, including Red Cabbage Sauerkraut, it’s a very convenient way to make Red Sauerkraut Salad. One of the good things about eating simple and healthy is to accept food for not being “authentic,” and to enjoy what I create from what I find. I also think it’s better environmentally to eat local instead of trying to get things from different parts of the world to make them just like the original.
So, Red Cabbage Sauerkraut is no different, it’s not exactly the same from the original I ate, but it has the same deliciousness & healthiness!…
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….
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!…
I discover many of my dishes through a lack of ingredients and equipment due to circumstances, and blue cheese salad is one of them–adapted from traditional Greek salad.
My family loves Greek salad, and we include it in our dinner a few times every week.
My daughter always asks for seconds, but I only give it to her when she finishes other things on her plate first. Yes, I’m very strict when it comes to eating a well-balanced diet.
When we were living in Taiwan in 2013, I couldn’t find all the ingredients to make the same greek salad like I used to, so I had to come up with a new kind of simple salad, and we have all loved eating salad that way ever since!
Besides not being able to get all the ingredients, I didn’t have a salad spinner either. Knowing we would be there for one year, and that we didn’t want to pack so many things back afterward, a salad spinner wasn’t on the essentials list.
I wash all vegetables before I cook or eat them fresh, and I don’t usually eat salad from pre-washed bags. Sometimes I do if I have no other options, but I re-wash first and drying it can also be chaotic without a salad spinner.
The new way I found worked great with whole heads of lettuce. I tore all the leaves apart and rinsed them thoroughly, shaking the water off them one by one. Then I tore them into bite-size pieces and seasoned them. During that time, I just squeezed some lemon juice on my salad, sprinkled on some salt, and drizzled olive oil over it before mixing–that’s it. It was so simple, but imagine the smell of fresh-squeezed lemon juice mixed with some good salt, all carried by the olive oil….
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…