Mmm, veggies.

After last weeks dessert post, I felt the need to make up for it by talking about something even healthier, and sometimes just as tasty: vegetables. Why? Because I love vegetables.

No, really. I honestly love vegetables. Do you know why I love vegetables? They tend to be really good for you, high in vitamins, low in bad things (assuming you follow the dirty dozen and clean fifteen rule, or just buy them organic), and delicious! That is, vegetables can be delicious, if you cook them in delicious ways. No, this does not mean that you have to drench them in butter and salt. There are a lot of ways to make vegetables delicious, and include them in your diet, which is especially important given how many people tell me that they hardly ever eat vegetables. Enter Kate's ideas for including vegetables (and some veggie-like fruits) in your diet!

I eat vegetables every day. At least, I'm fairly sure that's true. This is pretty much just going to be a little shout-out about all the ways in which I include veggies, and why I actually enjoy eating them. So, here we go (everyone cheer, another list! My favorite! Aside from exclamation marks!):

1. Try to throw veggies into your main dishes as often as possible.
That's right, just throw 'em in there! GO DO IT RIGHT NOW. There are certain veggies that I keep around all the time, just for the purpose of adding extra veggies. Plus, they taste good! Any time I make anything with a red sauce (pasta, ravioli, gnocchi, etc) I throw handful of torn kale pieces into the water, and let it boil with the pasta for the last couple of minutes. Sometimes I add spinach, too. I add peas to cream sauces and carbonara, I add random handfuls of greens to soups. I put peppers and broccoli in curry. I find that, more often than not, these little additions actually add to the dish. They not only add nutrition, but they usually add different colors and textures, which can be nice.

2. Make veggie side dishes (but make them interesting and healthy at the same time).
Now, I know everyone knows this one. This is how most people serve vegetables, on the side of some kind of protein and some kind of starch. One big problem, though, is that people get stuck on this rule and get really bored of veggies. Don't fall into the rut, but don't discount it, either. Another big problem is that a lot of the time, people make these veggies really unhealthy in order to try and create flavor (adding butter, salt, cream, etc). There are plenty of other ways to add flavor, though, and it all involves herbs, spices, cooking method, and usually a little olive oil and vinegar. One really delicious way to eat vegetables is to roast Brussels sprouts, cipollini onions, and sweet potatoes in the oven. I also like to cook at least one bunch of rainbow chard (kale's often forgotten cousin) pretty much weekly. I just strip the stems of the leaves, chop the stems into small, even pieces, and throw them in a saute pan with some onions, garlic, about a tsp of olive oil, a little salt, red pepper flakes, nutmeg, 1/4 cup of stock, and a couple tablespoons of cider vinegar. Then I cover it and let it all soften on very low heat for about ten minutes. Take off the lid, add the leaves of the chard, torn into pieces, and let it all cook down for another five minutes or so. Add vinegar and salt to taste. SO good, and it's a side dish that tastes good with pretty much anything.


3. Make main dishes primarily out of veggies.
I make a lot of very healthy main dishes. Rachel and I pretty much follow the same rule of thumb: cook mostly vegetarian at home, and eat meat out, if we want to. This is great for us and our wallets, because humans are not actually supposed to have meat with every single meal. That being said, of course, I did just cook a pretty kick-ass cassoulet the other day with chicken, turkey bacon, white beans, and acorn squash. Anyway.
Most of the main dishes that I make are vegetarian. Since neither of us eats a lot of dairy (lactose intolerance plays a big part here), I make a ton of meals full of veggies. I also use goat cheese and beans a lot, to add protein. Another good way to add protein is to throw in chia seeds. The example I'm going to give here is one that I make pretty often, and that's pizza. Now, of course, you're all thinking that I don't actually eat healthy food. That's not actually the case, because the kind of pizza that I make always involves a very thin whole wheat crust, caramelized onions, pizza sauce, whatever squash is in season, arugula, and goat cheese. It's super versatile, and never involves mass amounts of melted cheese. I actually just made one the other day, so I'm going to show you how awesomely veggie-tastic pizza can be. Yes, I said "veggie-tastic," so feel free to slap me with a piece of pizza.

[Okay, everyone, I'm going to give you some food porn here. I actually considered making a regular post called Food Porn Fridays, because it might be a really good way to show some pictures and give some recipes from my cooking experiments that worked out. Anyway, we'll see if that happens or not. Now onto the pictures.]

Delicata squash, ready to be roasted

The aforementioned chard. Yes, I decided to put my sauteed chard on my pizza, because why not?

Onions in the process of caramelizing. Fun fact: putting caramelized onions on pizza will often make a pizza with very little cheese feel more satisfying. Another fun fact: if you add about a teaspoon of olive oil and put the pan on very low heat and cover it, you can cook down the onions until they're soft without the use of butter at all. Just uncover them when they're soft and brown them a bit using a little more olive oil, red wine vinegar, nutmeg, salt, and thyme, and they're delicious.

Partially assembled pizza: thin whole wheat crust with red sauce, caramelized onions, and squash. As a note, you can but thin organic whole wheat crust in two packs from various stores. Alternatively, there are a lot of good recipes for no-rise whole wheat crusts.

Enter chard. Yum!

I put on my sprinkling of goat cheese, and some sliced heirloom tomatoes from our garden

Top it all off with arugula, and get it ready to bake! A lot of people are skeptical about this step, but I find that it gives the pizza a very pleasant peppery flavor.

The final product, after it baked for 10 minutes (and was promptly consumed by me and Rachel. Whoops).

4. Keep veggies in your house at all times.
If you're like me, you hate wasting food, and hate throwing it away. The thing that really got me kick-started on eating veggies? Buying them from the store and keeping them in the house. When I realized that I had a bunch of chard in the fridge that I had to use up before it went bad (which rarely happens now, because I LOVE chard), I was far more likely to eat it. You don't just have to plan out a recipe that uses veggies. You can actually just buy them and keep them in the house. Odds are, if you don't shove them behind the bread and peanut butter and mustard and forget about them (and don't forget them on purpose. Remember, they're actually good for you), you will use them up. This idea also goes back to the first point on this list! You have to keep veggies in the house to be able to toss them into main dishes on a whim. I keep fresh kale, frozen kale, frozen spinach, and usually chard, in my house at all times. Sometimes it's raw, sometimes it's already in one of the dishes I made. Either way, I'm going to end up eating it.

5. Make veggies into snacks!
Like I just said, I always keep fresh green kale in my house. It's cheap, even in its organic form, and really good for you. Usually I keep one bunch to throw into main dishes on a whim, and turn one into kale chips. Kale chips, which I'm sure most of you know about by now, are delicious when done correctly and stored properly. How I make my kale chips is by pulling one bunch of kale off the stems, tearing it into pieces, tossing it in olive oil, salt, and garlic powder, and putting it in my convection oven on convection bake at 325º for ten minutes. Don't crowd it! Put it on two sheets! I also recently discovered the most magical amazing trick for keeping kale chips fresh and crispy, which I'll show you here. Seriously, it was a miracle. Cool the kale chips completely. Then, just put a layer of uncooked rice on the bottom of the Tupperware you're going to keep the chips in. The rice absorbs the moisture, keeping the chips crispy.

See the layer of rice in the bottom?

Still crispy, two days later! Then, Rachel and I proceeded to eat the entire batch.

Other veggies are good snacks too. I like to make a cucumber yogurt dip to keep in the fridge (kind of like tzatziki sauce, but better, because it has tahini and hot sauce in it). It's amazing on veggies. There are a ton of good dips and sauces out there, quite a few of them made with healthy things like nonfat organic Greek yogurt (which is a food that I like to think of as a gift from the magical yogurt god. You can replace sooo many things with it).

6. Recognize that sometimes you need to compromise (and not only count on eating green things).
I realize that sweet potatoes are starch, and most types of winter squash, such as butternut, are starchy vegetables. Don't discount them, though! I love to cook seasonally (more about that in my next post), and consequently have been using a lot of sweet potatoes and winter squash. The nice thing is that sweet potatoes and squash are full of all kinds of awesome vitamins! So use them! I've been making some pretty awesome things with these items lately: root vegetable soup, chicken and acorn squash cassoulet, sweet potato gnocchi, and a baked alaska pie with sweet potato ice cream for a friendsgiving party we had (okay, so that one isn't actually healthy). I'm also half in love with spaghetti squash. I just made a low-fat carbonara (using leftover turkey bacon from the cassoulet) and mixed in spaghetti squash instead of pasta. The result was something delicious. Anyway, realize that you can't always have green veggies, so embrace the starchy vegetables; they can turn out some pretty awesome things.

P.S. Gnocchi! The purple is purple sweet potato, simply because I thought it would add some fun color.

Three different sweet potato colors, pre-gnocchi

Rolling out/end result gnocchi. Yum!

SO, long story short, eat your veggies! Now that you know how delicious veggies are, you have no excuse not to.

Oh, and a tip that I forgot to mention in my last post, for baking...

Tip #9: Consider alternative milks
Consider using soy, almond, hemp, or other milks in place of regular milk. We already drink low fat lactose free milk in our house (lactose intolerance), but whenever a recipe calls for whole milk, I usually use soy instead. I also tend to use soy for buttermilk (I make my own by using a tbsp of lemon juice for each cup), because the consistency is more accurate to what the recipe calls for. Almond is great for this, too! Just remember that with nut milks, there is usually a bit of a flavor difference. The version of soy that I usually keep in my house is WestSoy brand Organic Unsweetened Vanilla. Unsweetened vanilla is the closest I have found to the flavor of regular milk, so it tends to work really well when I bake with it. VERY IMPORTANT, though, is to make sure that you look at the ingredients on your alternative milks and make sure that they don't have carageenan in them--carageenen is used as a thickener and stabilizer, and is all around gross and bad for you. This is why I go for WestSoy.

Speaking of baking, I have been baking up a storm lately. Or, rather, I've been cooking up a storm. Yay! My next blog post: how to shop for and eat organic food on a three school a week plus work schedule, and a $300/mo (roughly) paycheck. I'm going to create that blog post specifically per request of one of my classmates at Dominican who is having a hard time with her meals. Hopefully, it'll help! Anyway, till then!