vegetables

Hot Pots are one of the easiest and healthiest dishes in Asian cuisine. There are so many different kinds of Hot Pots in restaurants to choose from: Japanese shabu-shabu, Sukiyaki, and Taiwanese style. These meals are a fun way to eat with a big group of friends and family.

The ingredients of Hot Pots are mainly soup stock, protein from meat or plants, and vegetables. As each individual chooses what to put into theirs, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian friends can eat together as each Hot Pot can be fixed differently.

Eating and having fun conversation, sometimes we can easily stuff ourselves. The good thing about overstuffing ourselves eating Hot Pots though is we don’t feel bad afterwards as most of what we eat are vegetables and soup broth.

However, eating Hot Pots at home can be intimidating if you don’t have all the equipment and ingredients to make the sauce the same way they do in restaurants. I don’t have the equipment, and I can’t find an similar healthy replacement for the sauce. So, I have come up with an easier and more practical way to eat it home. It’s also fun, healthy, and tasty.

Whenever I feel like eating a light, but warm and easy dinner with a lot of vegetables, I make Hot Pots. The first few times of trying to make it at home, I followed every step I learned–even preparing soup stock first. However, I realized that the soup stock is not really necessary. The way we eat Hot Pots is to cook everything including vegetables in boiling water, and the water automatically turns into stock, so we get the stock in an easier way….

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….

Spanish omelette (AKA Tortilla Patata) is one of the most famous and most common dishes in Spain. It was the first dish we ordered when we got here, and it’s a dish we often order when we eat out. It’s very filling, yet healthy. With both potatoes and eggs in it, we get protein and carbohydrates at the same time.

When I saw a Spanish omelette for the first time, I thought it must require an oven to make. It seems impossible to make anything look like that without baking, but soon I learned it doesn’t. However, there are two main things most people use to make it perfectly round and golden: a non-stick frying pan, and a lot of oil. Nonetheless, after watching our friends and others make it a few times, I knew I could make it my own way.

I experimented making it with a stainless steel frying pan, but it didn’t go well, and as a result, I burnt a few batches before getting it down. Finally, I have both the recipe and technique down to the point I’m comfortable to share it.

Like most dishes I cook, I adjust the original recipes to fit our way of living and eating better. For the Spanish omelette, I use a moderate amount of coconut oil, as well as adding some vegetables too. You can use any kind of vegetables you have on hand, but I often use spinach, broccoli and mushrooms. Even though most restaurants in Spain have plain tortilla patatas with only eggs and potatoes, some places offer various fixings like this too.

I use cooked potatoes instead of raw for making this, and it turns out better. To me, raw potatoes make it a little bit too starchy, and take longer to cook. I usually cook a lot of potatoes at a time, and have them ready to use in other dishes too. This is convenient, and fits my cooking routine well.

As far as other ingredients go, it’s hard to believe I only use salt to make it taste so good. The vegetables really enhance the flavor, especially with a few kinds together….

Vegan Miang Kham

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!…

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….

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….

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:…

Vegan Miang Kham

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Vegan Miang Kham

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