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How to Eat More Vegetables: Tip #6

We all know we should eat more vegetables. But how, how do we do that, really? What real-life tips and ideas work? How can we build our lives around the healthiest of all foods, vegetables? Every Saturday, the 'veggie evangelist' shares practical tips and ideas from her own experience, her readers and other bloggers.

FIRST, MORE ABOUT SMOOTHIES Last week's tips came from two readers who are serious about their smoothies. In an e-mail exchange afterward, Kathleen H from New Mexico explained why smoothies are so very important to her health. I've updated the post, How to Eat More Vegetables Tip #5.

AND NOW For this week's tip:

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Baked Sweet Potatoes ♥ Recipe & Temperature

Baked Sweet Potatoes
Back to Basics: How to roast or bake sweet potatoes in the oven. It's as easy as easy can be: just rub the sweet potatoes with a little oil and bake. (We're baking whole sweet potatoes here, no need for any knife work at all!) This is a great way to cook a lot of sweet potatoes at once, also my favorite way to cook just a couple of sweet potatoes for dinner or for later when the oven is already on. Not just vegan, "Vegan Done Real".

The other day, I needed to cook a pile of sweet potatoes for a recipe calling for cooked sweet potatoes. (The recipe's not ready for posting but shows much promise!) My choices were:

Steaming or boiling – but I thought the sweet potatoes would be too wet.
Cooking the sweet potatoes in the microwave – it's a good technique for one or two sweet potatoes, not so much for a bunch.
Roasting chopped sweet potatoes wouldn't work either, I didn't want the crispy caramelized edges that develop.

So instead, I baked a trayful of whole sweet potatoes, then stripped off the skins to yield beautiful cooked sweet potatoes. Baked Sweet Potatoes were the perfect solution!

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How to Eat More Vegetables: Tip #5

We sure love our smoothies!
We all know we should eat more vegetables. But how, how do we do that, really? What real-life tips and ideas work? How can we build our lives around the healthiest of all foods, vegetables? Every Saturday, the 'veggie evangelist' shares practical tips and ideas from her own experience, her readers and other bloggers.

And now for this week's tip, more submissions from readers, this time Kathleen H. from Gallup, NM and Shawna M. Thanks, guys! You so perfectly expressed our love for smoothies!

UPDATE: After I posted these tips, Kathleen explained further exactly why smoothies are so important to her health. She wrote, "I really think that veggie smoothies have played a major role in my cancer survival. I ordered the Vita-Mix two days after my first lung cancer diagnosis in March of 1999. I've used it at almost every meal I've eaten at home since then -- fruit, seeds, whey protein powder for breakfast and veggies at lunch and dinner." WOW. Here's to more healthy smoothies -- and to continued good health for Kathleen and all of us. (A Vita-Mix is a high-performance blender. It's not cheap but people rave about them.]

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Hot & Sour Chickpeas ♥

Hot & Sour Chickpeas
Vegan Done REAL, it's this easy.
Quick and Easy and Vegan Too: An easy vegan main dish, no processed food required, just the kind of recipe that inspired Vegan Done Real. Weight Watchers, 3 or 5 points.

Vegan Done Real
Some times you have to act. What follows is the reason I've conceived Vegan Done Real, a collection of 52 whole-food vegan recipes from myself and nine other vegan and omnivore bloggers. I hope you'll share it with your friends, real life and Facebook, because we just cannot afford to let the commercial food product companies co-opt the concept of a plant-based diet all in the guise of 'healthy'. As my friend Karen, one of the contributors, wrote on Twitter: "Oprah went processed vegan; these bloggers are keeping it real: 52 recipes." [Note to Vegetarians]

The Background
I'm a glass half full kind of gal. When something looks off, looks plain wrong, I might feel frustrated or even angry for a moment, but then, well, I shrug it off, I let it go. I choose to look at the situation with kindness and generosity, to accept that I might not share, let alone understand, someone else's motivations.

But it's been more than a month now and I'm still steamed at the lost opportunity when Oprah and her staff ate a vegan diet for an entire week. (Wow, quite a commitment, eh? A whole week. But okay, thinking with kindness and generosity. One meal counts. A week is a big deal.) So that was good. And of course, Oprah being Oprah, there was a show devoted to the experience. Michael Pollan was on.
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How to Eat More Vegetables: Tip #4

Bowl of vegetables by Flickr Elle_Epp
We all know we should eat more vegetables. But how, how do we do that, really? What real-life tips and ideas work? How can we build our lives around the healthiest of all foods, vegetables? Every Saturday (oops, unless she's caught up in cooking for a Mardi Gras party, in which case, on Monday), the 'veggie evangelist' shares practical tips and ideas from her own experience, her readers and other bloggers.

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Polish Dill Pickle Soup ♥ Plus Some Fun News!

Polish Dill Pickle Soup
Polish Dill Pickle Soup: It'll grab you!
Today's soup recipe: A potato soup like you've never imagined, completely potato-y but also pickle-y, dill pickle-y to be exact. The creamy-sharp combination takes you by surprise. "Oh that's good," you just might say. We did.

So yes, today there's a fun recipe but first, the reason why it's especially fun: it's featured in the weekly column that I'm writing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the big local newspaper here in St. Louis. (Pinch me, yes, I'm really writing that!!! It's really true!)

The column is called 'Special Request' and is the Post's popular restaurant recipe request column. On Wednesdays, it appears in print in the paper's food section and online at stltoday.com. Each week, a new restaurant and a new recipe is featured. (Pinch me again. Really. DO.)

What does a proud home cook know about restaurant recipes? Well so far, the recipes that Post readers are requesting are far more humble than haute. The recipes from the first two columns are actually "very Alanna".

Today I'm sharing the oh-so-surprising recipe for Polish Dill Pickle Soup from The Fountain on Locust, a funky little restaurant here in St. Louis. We did the tasting (yes, they call this 'work') on a snowy-icy January night and the hot soup took us completely by surprise -- it's a potato soup, sure, but there's this definite and distinctive dill pickle flavor. Aiii, it's something special!

And last week on Kitchen Parade, I shared the recipe for this lovely three-ingredient raspberry dessert that I call Sugar-Free Raspberry Bliss from the Saint Louis Club. How pretty is THAT, eh?!!
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Beetroot Recipes

A friend asked for a few beetroot recipes as she has a glut and is looking for inspiration, so here goes:

Pickled Beetroot (Fowlers Vac style)

8 medium beet
1 litre of vinegar, either malt or white
1/2 cup granulated sugar
25 g Sausetta Blended Spices (or just an italian herb mix) if you're not using this recipe in the 70's!

1. Wash beetroot to remove soil, taking care not to break skin for beets bleed easily;
2. Place in saucepan with sufficient water to cover, bring to the boil, simmer for 1 1/2 to 2 hours or untiol, when beets are pinched, skin removes easily;
3. Remove beets to cold water. REmove skins;
4. Cut into slices, quarters or dice;
5. Place rubber rings on throughly clean and just rinsed FV  jars/bottles;
6. Fill bottles with prepared beets, shaking or bumping bottle on palm of hand to pack firmly, leaving 12 mm gap from top of bottle;
7. Combine venegar, sugar and Sausetta, cover, bring to boil, then cool. Strain through a fine nylon sieve or muslin.
8. When cold, pour over beets to the brim of the jar, using a pakcing stick to remove any air pockets;
9. Place covers and clips on bottles;
10. Place in the preserver with required level of cold water (mine is thermometre manual type, so i'd do 3/4 of the way up the jars;
11. Process in presever using 'standard pickle preserving method'. (see below)

Standard pickle preserving method:

THERMOMETRE CONTROL: Bring temp slowly up to 92 deg celcius, taking at least 45 minutes, then maintain this temp for 45 mins.
THERMOSTAT CONTROL: Turn thermostat dial to 92 degs, switch on at power point, and leave on for 1/14 hours. Remove jars from preserver to a wire cake rack or wooden board to cool for 12-18 hours. Remove clip. Test for vacuum seal. Wipe bottles clean with damp cloth. Label.




Hugh Fearnley's
Chocolate and Beetroot Brownies
(Clair, if you make these, I want one!)

Ingredients
  • 250g/10oz good, dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids), broken into pieces
  • 250g/10oz unsalted butter, cut into cubes, plus more for greasing
  • 250g/10oz caster sugar
  • 3 free-range eggs
  • 150g self-raising flour (we used wholemeal self-raising)
  • 250g beetroot, boiled until tender, peeled and grated
Method: How to make chocolate and beetroot brownies
1. Preheat oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4. Grease a baking tin of approximately 20 x 30 x 3cm and line the bottom with baking parchment.
2. Break up the chocolate into pieces, cut the butter into cubes then mix them up a bit in a heatproof bowl. As the oven begins to warm up, put the bowl onto one of the shelves for a few minutes until the chocolate and butter starts to melt. Stir, and put back into the oven for a few more minutes to melt completely.
3. Whisk the eggs and sugar together in a bowl until combined, then beat in the melted chocolate and butter until smooth. Gently fold in the flour then the beetroot – be careful not to overmix or it will make the brownies tough.
Be careful not to overmix or it will make the brownies tough.
4. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and smooth over the top with a spatula. Bake for about 20 minutes. A knife or skewer pushed into the middle should come out with a few moist crumbs clinging to it. Don't be tempted to overcook them! Remove the tin from the oven and leave on wire rack to cool before cutting into squares.


Roasted Beetroot and Orange Chutney
880 g beet, trimmed and washed;
zert of 1 orange
150 ml white wine vinegar
150 g white granulated sugar
1 cinnamon stick
1 medium red onion, peeled and finely chopped

Preheat oven to 200 deg c
Wrap beetroot in foil and bake for 1 hour, or until tender. Remove and cool a little before peeling. Grate the cooked beetroot.
Finely chop the orange zest and place it in a saucepan with vinegar, sugar, cinnamon stick, and onion, and bring slowly to the boil. Cook for 5 minutes, then add the grated beetroot and cook for 10 minutes until reduced. Remove from head, pour into warm, sterilised jars and seal.
Sterilise in a hot-water bath for 30 minutes, or store in fridge.

(Syd Pemberton - Jams & Preserves)

Beetroot and Apple Chutney

750 g beetroot, peeled and grated
500 g apples, peeled, cored and chopped
1 onion, chopped
750 ml malt vinegar
500 g white granulated sugar
1 tablespoon grated fresh giner
200 g raisins

Place all ingreds in a preserving pan, and leave to stand for 2 hours. Place pan over a medium heat and slowly bring contents to the boil. Simmer for 1.5 to 2 hours until reduced, thick and syrupy. Remove from heat, pour into warm, sterilised jars and seal.

also, check out one of my older posts for Beetroot Icecream!
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