What common sense has known for centuries is increasingly demonstrated by scientific research. A well-maintained microbiome, having a wealth of bacterial bugs in your belly, is clearly positive for your body’s immunity. Reversely, an unhealthy gut is known to be the source of many physical and mental diseases. This list is very long, from benign or mild (skin rash, burping and farting, acid reflux, stress…) to serious and even life-threatening issues (Crohn’s, various cancers, Alzheimer’s…). 

The short of it is: want to leave a healthy, preferably long, life? Take care of your gut!

Have Chronic Pains? Pay Attention!

Here’s something you might want to try. It’s called food combinations.  I have tried this for a few weeks, and I see results already: I’ve lost a few pounds, my belly is flatter, I sleep better, my feces look better…

The theory behind food combinations is very simple. Macronutrients (carbs, proteins, fats) are digested differently. Your body produces different enzymes for each sort of foods. Starches are digested by the enzyme amylase, among others. Amylase is present in your saliva. Fat is broken down by the enzyme lipase, made in the pancreas. Lactase breaks down dairy products. Proteases help digest proteins, like meat products and are produced in the stomach and pancreas…

Hopefully you get the picture: digestion is a complex process. The production of enzymes calls upon various organs: glands in your mouth, pancreas, liver, intestines. For each sorts of food various organs are used differently.

For more information, consult this article or this one.  

Food Combinations

For the body to process food efficiently and effectively we need to combine macronutrients wisely. This helps your body use a minimum amount of energy and absorb nutrients optimally. If you combine foods poorly, you exhaust your digestive organs AND miss nutritional benefits.

The bad news is that combining food healthily requires a radical new approach to preparing meals. There are a few good combinations and unfortunately, many bad ones. See below the illustration.

I am not making this theory up. It has been documented by Jan Dries, among other people, in various books. Jan is among other things the author of “The New Book of Food Combining: A Completely New Approach to Healthy Eating”. You can purchase this and other books by Jan on Amazon.com and Bol.com.

Good News!

The good news is that you can combine most vegetables anyway you want. There are a few exceptions as some vegetables are very rich in starch or fat so they fall in those categories. The way it works is that you may combine any category of food with another compatible one in the same meal. For instance:

• Breakfast – Overnight oats with plant-based milked (mostly water), avocado or any vegetable of your choice
• Lunch – A greens salad with nuts and seeds, with an egg omelette
• Diner – Stir fryed vegetables with rice.

In the illustration below you see a more comprehensive view of good and poor food combinations.

Fruit is a different story. Fruit is digested quickly, it leaves your stomach within approximately 20 minutes. You can best eat fruit separately, as an appetizer 20 minutes before any meal.   

What About Legumes?

Legumes, like white beans and chickpeas present an issue! They naturally are rich in protein and starch. As you can see in the drawing those two ingredients are incompatible in terms of food combination. This combination is also present in cereals but the ratio is better, the amount of protein in cereals is far lower than in the case of legumes.

In order to digest legumes well combine them with lots of vegetables. For instance mix a little bit of lentils in a salad with lots of green leafy vegetables.

A Good – and Tasty! – Food Combination Recipe

To make it clear that food combinations are compatible with a tasty meal, here’s an example. Thanks to Boerschappen again for the great ingredients and creative recipe!

The dish: celery medallions with truffle potatos, oven baked beets and (vegan) pesto.

Ingredients for two persons:

• 400 grams truffle potatoes
• 400 grams beets (the original recipe is with carrots but I replaced them)
• 200 grams celery
• Mustard, flour, water, pepper for seasoning
• Coriander / cilantro or whichever fresh herbs you have.

This foods combination is “green”:

1. Celery, beets, fresh herbs = vegetables 
2. Potatoes and flour = starch
3. Pesto = fat

Slice the beets in cubes and bake them in the oven on a tray for about 20 minutes. Boil the potatoes and cook them as you like.

Grate the celery. Mix that with a good spoonful of musterd, pepper, salt, some flour and water to bind the celery. Make little balls of the mixture. Throw the balls in a hot pan (use coconut or rice oil) and flatten the balls to create hamburger style paddies. Bake those 4 minutes on each side. 

Put celery medallions, sliced potatoes, beets on the plates, drizzle pesto. the chopped cilantro or other herbs on top. Enjoy!   

This recipe forms a great way to present vegetables in an original and very satisfying fashion. Hopefully I won’t horrify Japanese people with the variations and liberties presented below! Should you want to chip in with your experiences and variations, please do so.

Apart from the fact that I really like the taste – especially thanks to the sauces – I also really enjoy the concept of a warm dish that is in addition relatively complete from a nutrition standpoint. Looking at the Daily Dozen this recipe ticks the following boxes:

• Cruciferous vegetables (cabbage
• Other vegetables (carrots, onions)
• Whole grains (flour)
• Beans (soy sauce, OK not that much but every bit helps)

Ballast Substances

Furthermore, I am pleased to introduce a concept never afore mentioned on this blog: that of “ballast substances”. Nutritionists call ballast substances the components contained in food of plant origin and cannot be digested. They are especially abundant in fruits and vegetables and completely absent in animal proteins.

Ballast substances are composed of cellulose, fiber, etc. They benefit your digestion, helping to solve a lot of problems. The main advantage is a long digestion time, which gives you a long feeling of satiety. Ballast substances moreover remove bile acids, lower cholesterol levels, and ensure a normal stool (a type 4 on the Bristol stool scale).

And by the way: those seemingly useless compounds offer the additional advantage of having virtually no calories in them. So: you feel fulfilled, and you don’t put on weight. In this recipe you’ll absorb plenty of ballast substances through the cabbage and carrots.

Okonomiyaki Pancakes Recipe

Enough theory. Let’s get cracking on our okonomiyaki pancakes! In this case they are almost completely plant-based, vegan. The only exception: a little fish sauce.

Ingredients for the pancakes:

• Cabbage, whatever you have available: green, red, savoy… (100 grams per person)
• Carrots (100 grams per person)
• Onions, preferably spring onions or shallots (1 or 2 per person)
• Whole grain flour (50 grams per person)
• Vegetable broth (100 ml per person)

Regarding the measurements you can pretty much improvise here. You can mix the vegetables in whatever ratio you prefer. You can also add flour and broth to obtain your preferred thickness and consistency. My preference: go light on the flour! You can choose by the way any flour that binds well.

Ingredients for the sauces:

For the okonomiyaki sauce – if you can’t find it ready-made in the store:

• Soy sauce or Worcestershire sauce (two soup spoons)
• Fish or oyster sauce (one soup spoon)
• Ketchup or chipotle (one soup spoon)

For an additional kick: mix (vegan) mayonnaise with wasabi or Dijon mustard.

Steps to follow:

• Prepare the sauces by mixing the ingredients.
• Grate or chop the cabbage and carrots into fine or rough slivers.
• Slice the shallots or spring onions into small rings.
• Mix the vegetables in a large bowl. Set aside about a quarter of the mix to serve as a salad side dish.
• Add the broth and sprinkle the flour into the rest of the chopped vegetables. Mix to create a batter.
  

• Heat up coconut or rice oil in a frying pan (coconut and rice fat sustain higher heat than your traditional olive oil). Medium heat.
• Pour the vegetable batter to create one pancake at a time. Bake the pancake three minutes per side. Use a plate to flip the pancake.
  
• Slide the pancake on the serving plate, add the salad vegetables on the plate, sprinkle some vinegar and oil.
• Pour the sauces on the pancake with a spoon. Create nice looking crossed lines or dots.

Optionally: crack seaweed chips and on top of the pancake for additional texture.

Enjoy your meal!

His website (nutritionfacts.org) is a donation-driven nonprofit, and he doesn’t offer any products. In fact, his main recommendation is to avoid any products and just eat whole, natural food!

“How Not to Die”

Greger is also a prolific author. It’s personal but I really enjoy his borderline cynical sense of humor. Check one of his videos on YouTube to get a taste. In his great book “How not to die” Dr. Greger demonstrates how nutrition and lifestyle choices help prevent the top causes of premature death. Each of the first fifteen chapters of the book describes which disease you do NOT want to die from: heart conditions, cancer, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s, high blood pressure, liver diseases, infections depression…

The Daily Dozen

In the second part of the book Greger goes in to explain how to put his recommendation in practice. He summarizes his recommendations of all the things you should try and fit into your daily routine: the Daily Dozen. It’s basically a checklist. There’s even a Daily Dozen app!

This checklist contains the building blocks essential to remain healthy, including in which quantity one should take them. Greger: “Each day, I recommend a minimum of three servings of beans (legumes), one serving of berries, three servings of other fruits, one serving of cruciferous vegetables, two servings of greens, two servings of other veggies, one serving of flaxseeds, one serving of nuts and seeds, one serving of herbs and spices, three servings of whole grains, five servings of beverages, and one serving of exercise.”

Let’s add B12 vitamin to this list. Greger clearly promotes veganism and B12 is the only vitamin the body cannot produce naturally. Trust me: although it takes some thinking, it is easy to check all the boxes every day.

Winter Lasagna Recipe

Allow me to help you with your servings of flaxseeds, herbs, cruciferous vegetables, greens and other vegetables with this “tricolore lasagna”. To challenge myself I experimented with vegan bechamel and made this recipe gluten-free.

Start by chopping broccoli. Greger states that the full benefits of this cruciferous vegetable’s enzymes are released when you cut this veggie 45 minutes before you cook or eat it. To boost the cruciferous content, I added brussel sprouts with I halved so they fit more easily in a lasagna layer.

Start the baking process by frying garlic and onions. Sauté the vegetables. Add fresh spinach leaves, or frozen green peas or whatever veggie you feel like. In this case I used zucchinis (not a winter veggie, but these are available year-round in Dutch supermarkets thanks to the prolific greenhouses here).

Once the vegetables are warm, add tomato sauce or diced tomatoes and chopped freh herbs. Keep this mix warm while you prepare the bechamel.

Vegan and Gluten-Free

As one of my relatives has difficulty processing dairy and gluten I decided to create a gluten-free bechamel and to use gluten-free lasagna pasta. Instead of milk I used a non-dairy alternative, a hazelnut-rice milk by Zonnatura. Check the ingredients list of your “non-dairy milk”: they mostly contain water and additives such as sunflower oil, a commonly used trans fat. As trans fats are bad for you, prefer products that don’t contain them. More on that topic in a future blog!

To create a thick sauce, I dissolved two spoons of corn starch and two spoons of broken flaxseeds to the hazelnut-rice milk. I slowly brought this mix to a simmer until it thickened.

The process of making lasagna is well-known: a layer of base mix (the vegetables), add the lasagna pasta, pour some bechamel, repeat. On the top layer, next to bechamel I added grated vegan cheese and pumpkin seeds. Vegan cheese, by the way, isn’t that healthy but it helps create a for the eye pleasing gratin look.

In summary, here’s how this lasagna helps tick Daily Dozen boxes:

• 1 of one serving of cruciferous vegetables
• 1 of two servings of greens
• 1 of two servings of other veggies
• 1 of one serving of flaxseeds
• 1 of one serving of nuts and seeds
• 1 of one serving of herbs and spices
• 1 of three servings of whole grains

This squash is very low in calories (27 per 100 gram), it’s almost completely fat free and it is loaded with nutrients: fiber, vitamin C, manganese, vitamin B6… It also contains carotenoids, which the body converts into vitamin A. Although it is mildly sweet this squash contains little sugar (2,5 gram per 100 gram). (source)

Why is it called spaghetti squash? I’ll come back to that later with a recipe. Allow me first to finish praising its health benefits.

Antioxydants

Winter squash varieties like spaghetti squash are loaded with antioxidants. Antioxidants search and destroy free radicals from the body cells and prevent or reduce the damage caused by oxidation. “Oxidative stress can damage cells, proteins, and DNA, which can contribute to aging. It may also play a role in development of a range of health conditions, including diabetes, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.“ (source)

In laymen’s terms: antioxidants are good for you!

Fiber

Eat a lot of squash and other veggies: the value of fiber cannot be underestimated. Fiber is a type of carbohydrate that the body can’t digest. Fiber helps regulate the body’s use of sugars, helping to keep hunger and blood sugar in check.

Fiber comes in two varieties, both beneficial to health (source):

• Soluble fiber, which dissolves in water, can help lower glucose levels as well as help lower blood cholesterol. Foods with soluble fiber include oatmeal, nuts, beans, lentils, apples and blueberries.
• Insoluble fiber, which does not dissolve in water, can help food move through your digestive system, helping prevent constipation. Foods with insoluble fibers include whole wheat, whole grain couscous, brown rice, legumes, carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes.

And squash? Well, it’s highly soluble. So it’s a good idea to complement it with insoluble fiber. In addition note that spaghetti squash is low in protein so it’s also a good idea to mix your squash with an additional source of protein. Let me get back to that in the recipe!

Fiber, from fruits and vegetables, is good for your gut health. For some reason I have come across the gut health topic a lot in the past few of weeks. The brain-gut connection, the gut microbiom and other gut-related topics are fascinating and definitely deserve a lot of attention. I shall get back to this in the future. 

For the time being remember that fiber and a diversity of nutrients are necessary to feed the  microbes that keep your gut in balance. Fat and animal proteins don’t contain any fiber, hence favour carbohydrate-heavy, organic and real (unprocessed) foods.

Spaghetti Squash Oven Dish Recipe

Having said all that, here is at last a delicious Spaghetti Squash recipe. As mentioned earlier I discovered this ingredient thanks to our weekly subscription to Boerschappen. 

You can find the original Boerschappen recipe (in Dutch) here. 

The recipe in English with my tasty additions. You need, for 2 persons (single dish) or 4 persons (side dish):

• Spaghetti squash (1)
• Tomatoes (200 gram)
• Spinach (100 gram)
• Lentils (tin, strained)
• (Vegan) feta (200 gram)
• Lemon
• Onion (1)
• Garlic (2 cloves)
• Fresh ginger and turmeric / kurkuma (a thumb-like piece) 
• Fresh herbs like celery or sage leaves.

Instructions:

• Switch your oven on and set it at 180 degrees Celsius.
• Wash the squash and then cut in two equal halves. Remove the seeds using a spoon.
• Sprinkle the inside of the squash with a bit of oil, peper and salt. Place the squash in the oven faces up, directly on the grill or in an oven dish.
• Bake the squash in approximately 35 minutes.
• Throw the onion, garlic, turmeric and ginger in a small electric chopper and chop them roughly.
• Heat (rice or coconut) oil in a pan and put fry your spices mix. If you don’t have fresh turmeric or ginger, use the dry powder alternative instead.
• Cut the tomatoes in rough cubes and add them to the pan, stir the spinach and fresh herbs. Having strained the lentils you can add them to the mix and warm the whole thing up.
• Once the tomato-spinach-lentils mix is slightly cooked, remove the pan from the heat. 
• Once the squash is ready proceed to scrape the flesh from the shell using a fork. That’s where the spaghetti-shaped strings appear. My wife thought the texture felt like sauerkraut, but the acidity is definitely absent. 
• Mix the squash strings with the rest of the vegetables and divide the mixture over in the two empty shells.
• Dice the (vegan) feta and push the cubes into the mixture. 
• Bake the squash in 5-7 minutes in the oven.
• Once it’s ready add lemon juice to the squash and serve.

Adding fresh spices and lentils to the recipe helps 1) create a balanced meal thanks to the protein of the lentils, 2) add Asian flavour and heat which I particularly like.

Enjoy!

Alternative Plant-Based Burgers OK?

So what to do as a vegetarian or vegan? I have tried a couple of alternatives from the supermarket but can’t say their taste blew my sock off. On top of that: I looked at the ingredients’ labels… That too did not please me. Those “fake meat burgers” contain a rather long list of vague ingredients like flours and E numbers.

Why stop eating meat and choose an alternative that is unhealthy and has a unnecessary high carbon footprint?

Let’s take advantage of the protein transition to create a “eat healthier” transition!

Should you know of a healthy, carbon-neutral and tasty alternative, please let me know!

Home-Made Mushroom-Lentils Burgers

In the meantime, here is a good solution in case you crave a good burger: make one yourself.

Inspired by a delicious lentils meal earlier this week I looked for a recipe that combined those with mushrooms, one of my preferred Umami ingredients. Below is my version of De Hippe Vegetariër’s mushrooms-lentils burger.

Ingredients:

• Dry lentils, about 100 gram
• Mushrooms, 250 gram
• Shallot, one
• Garlic cloves, two
• Soja sauce, a couple of teaspoons
• Miso, a teaspoon
• Oats, a tablespoon
• Chia seeds, a tablespoon

Cook the lentils in water in about 30 minutes (follow the instructions on the package).

In the meantime: chop the garlic cloves and heat them up gently in a pan. Blitz the mushrooms together with the shallot and the soja sauce.

Add the mushroom mix to the hot pan with garlic and cook that up. Turn the oven on, around 180 degrees Celsius.

Using the same mixer, chop the oats fine and after about fives minutes add the oats, lentils and chia seeds to the mushrooms in the pan. Season it with salt and pepper. Let this simmer at low heat until the water is absorbed and the mixture feels consistent.

Turn the mix into six or eight paddies, lay them on a baking sheet and set this in the oven.

Turn the paddies after 5 minutes; they’re ready after another five minutes or longer if you prefer them slightly toasted.

Serve your plant-based as you like. Unfortunately I did not have fine bread buns today so I served them together with corn and romanesco with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

Hope you enjoy those! Please let me know what you think.

This piece was triggered by a health incident that happened to a family member. An acute pain in the lower back led to a short stay in the hospital and a series of investigations. We are not sure about what exactly happened but it was caused either by a small kidney stone or by a beginning bladder infection. Either way this incident led me to look into the phenomenon of our body’s pH. To stay healthy we need to maintain a balance between the acids and bases in our bodily fluids and gases. This is called homeostasis. You can find more info on Wikipedia, among other places.

As a high-schooler I learned about the concept of pH (water is neutral, pH = 7), alkaline (ph > 7) and acidic stuff (ph < 7). Never until said incident did I realize that our body also needs to maintain a stable pH, around 7.4, between 7.35-7.45 to be precise. Alkaline is better than acidic for our body. Why it matters? Because a disturbed balance can lead to health issues.

Eat Alkaline, Avoid Acidic!

Let’s not dwell on the consequences. Just remember that acidity is bad for you. Your digestive system functions optimally if your pH remains neutral. The short-term issues of an acidic system are annoying: fatigue, diarrhea, constipation or bloating, heartburn, loss of libido… In the long term the impact can be serious: osteoporosis, chronic digestive problems, arthritis, joint and ligament problems, and yes: kidney stones! Read this piece, “The effect of body acidity on health” if you want to know more.

There are clearly enough reasons to avoid becoming acidic. The bad news is: acidity grows as we grow older and our body decays. More bad news: some foodstuffs are acidic and contribute to this process. So let’s try and avoid those.

The good news: there is plenty of foodstuff to eat your way toward maintaining a balanced and healthy pH. The recommendation is to eat 80% alkaline and 20% neutral to moderately acidic foodstuff.

As could be expected, plant-based ingredients fall mostly – but not completely – in the first category. And yes, as could be expected, what’s bad for you falls in the acidic category: sugars, alcohol, animal-based proteins, processed food. Surprisingly this category also includes fruits (sugar) and nuts.

Read a complete article on the “Total Wellness” website. Here’s an overview for your convenience.

An Alkaline Recipe

We recently ate at a nice restaurant in Breda, Chocolat, and were treated to a delicious “tomato steak tartare“ appetizer. Here’s my interpretation. Good news: it’s alkaline and it’s quite simple!

Your choice of tomato? Whatever you find but the meatier the tomato, the better. On the photo’s you see “Coeur de boeuf”.

Skin off: slightly slice the bottom and dip the tomatoes in boiling water for a few seconds. Dip them then in cold water and peal the skin off.

Dice it: slice the tomatoes and remove the seeds and excess water. Then chop the fruit (vegetable, whatever) in the smallest dices you possible can chop. Leave the chopped pieces in a strainer to drain.

Season it: prepare the seasoning of your choice. To add umami to the tomato I used two little shallots, chive, tea spoons of chopped capers, a little smoked paprika powder, cayenne and regular black pepper, sweet chili sauce and balsamic vinegar cream. Start with small portions, taste and add seasoning to your taste.

Rest and serve: leave the mix in the fridge to let it geld colder. Drain the water.

Spread the tartar on fresh bread or toast, add sprouts for decoration, crunch and some more alkalinity.

Enjoy and stay healthy!

Let me give you a real-life example and the list of my go-to pantry and freezer ingredients.

One of our favorite dishes is pasta. Fortunately nowadays it is simple to find delicious and healthy, plant-based pasta. By “healthy pasta” I mean one that is not based on wheat but on alternative flours like peas or lentils. Read here why I prefer to avoid wheat-based products.

A tasty sauce begins of course with chopped onions and garlic. Luckily onions and garlic stay good for a long time so hopefully you had some on hand before going away. That was my case today.

To add some heat and umami I like to use peppers. Have a jar of jalapeno peppers in your pantry if you don’t have fresh ones. Want some more bite and a little bitterness? Add chopped olives to the mix, think traditional puttanesca sauce: add capers if you have some. In my case I didn’t have any and I used green olives. No worries, the taste is still great.

No fresh tomatoes is not an issue either as long as you have a jar of passata, ready-made tomato sauce. Stock up organic passata, preferably in a glass jar instead of in metal tin. Glass is tasteless and resistant to acids. Some of the plastics that are used to coat food tins have come under criticism. The BPA / BADGE (bisphenol-A diglycidyl ether) that they contain can be passed on to the preserves in small amounts. This substance is suspected of being a possible carcinogen. So to remain on the safe side: choose passata in glass instead of in tin.

While your sauce warms up, set water to boil for the pasta. Add whatever greens and beans you have to your sauce. Luckily I had fresh spinach in the fridge and a tine of cannelloni beans in my pantry drawer. Although not on the picture I also added frozen peas to the sauce. Once the sauce and pasta are ready, throw the pasta in the sauce pan and serve, with or without added cheese or cream as you like (grated parmesan, mascarpone, plant-based cream…).

As promised, here are a few suggestions of things to keep handy in your pantry in jars, tins or frozen, year-round:

• Plant-based milk (oats, coconut, soja…) milk
• Legumes (beans, lentils, chickpeas)
• Vegetables (green peas or runner beans, spinach, broccoli, canned diced tomatoes)
• Sauce bases (coconut cream or milk, passata)
• Grains or non-wheat-based carbs (rice, quinoa, couscous, plant-based pasta)
• Condiments (mustard, sambal, jalapeno peppers, grilled bell peppers, capers, olives)
• Spices
• Dry or canned fruits

Enjoy the summer and your vacation. And upon return: enjoy your meal!

A Plate Full of Knowledge

Those three items are keeping me intellectually busy:

• Two students in Nutrition & Health from the Wageningen University & Research, Eva Everloo and Ella Stephens, have produced an excellent online course on EdX – “Plant Based Diets: Food for a Sustainable Future”. I will share some of their wisdom and insights later. The course is now closed for enrollment but I reckon it will reopen one day.
• The new book “The Plant Based Athlete” finally reached my home. I’m on chapter 3, “It’s time to have the protein talk”. This book is well written, I highly recommend it already. It’s exciting as it promises to help you make a personalized choice, regardless of what your motivation and fitness levels are.
• I picked up a new hobby: reading labels on packages in the supermarket. The webinar “Food as Medicine”, in Dutch (“Voeding als Medicijn”) organized by Ivo Houben of How2BeHealthy, among other things, how to recognize healthy ingredients on food labels.

Glass Half Full: Protein Transition

Whether it’s DNA, karma or education, I have had to train myself to take a positive outlook on life. It is sometimes challenging to discover a silver lining in the flow of negative messages surrounding us. I choose to see the three aforementioned nuggets of knowledge as anecdotal evidence that the world is warming up (no, not talking about the climate) to the idea of a protein transition.

We need to eat less meat and adopt a plant-based diet. For the sake of our health, that of our planet and – yes, these are big words – the survival of the human race. Obviously I suffer, like everyone else, a condition called “confirmation bias”: I look for evidence that reinforces my convictions.

Hence my pledge to back my standpoint with objective evidence. Thanks to the sources I mentioned before I will come back to that!

Orange Dish

In the spirit of the European Football Championship (Soccer) and as the Netherlands are playing tonight I’m happy to close this piece with an orange dish. Thanks to Boerschappen for this “Oranje AVG”, it’s delicious. It is yummy and it is based on locally sourced ingredients, as always with Boerschappen.

• Just mix small potatoes with oil, pepper, salt and paprika powder and bake them in your oven for 30 minutes.
• Grill orange cauliflower (it’s extra full of vitamin A) for a few minutes in a pan and add them to the potatoes for the last 10 minutes and put a little (Dutch) cheese on top to melt.
• In a pan saute some garlic and onions and bake mushrooms and/or a vegetarian burger in a bit of butter (learned from Ivo: to bake, real butter is beter than olive oil).

Voilà: an orange potatoe-vegetable-burger dish. Full of healthy carbohydrates, proteins and fat and micronutrients. My photograph doesn’t do the dish justice. It really is delicious!

Based on a this dish, here is a reminder of what constitutes healthy foods, based on the Canadian government’s food guide.

Source: https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/

Enjoy, and stay tuned!

About Nightshades

Did you know that eggplants, peppers, tomatoes and potatoes (the traditional white kind, not the sweet ones) are part of the nightshade family?

We were recently made aware of this group of veggies by one of our children. He was complaining about digestive issues and was diagnosed by a dietician with a low digestive energy. To give his gut a rest the recommendation was, among other things, to remove dairy products and nightshades from his diet. At least for a couple of months.

Ocean Robbins wrote a good piece about nightshades so I am happy to refer you to it: Are Nightshades Safe? Are They Healthy? The bottom-line is that these vegetables are very healthy. They provide fiber, potassium, folic acid, various vitamins and antioxidants… all sorts of good stuff that feed and protect you. See also Ocean Robbins’ piece about the benefits of tomatoes.

Nightshades can, however, be harmful to some people. They contain stuff like solanine and tomatine which – in large quantity – can induce an inflammatory reaction in your bowls.

All About Balance

When he stopped with dairy, nightshades, soy products and also stopped drinking before and during meals our son experienced the disappearance of his issues within a couple of weeks. He is eating nightshades again, but in reasonable amounts.

This experience and reading about these vegetables remind me of two things:

1. Everybody is different. Listen to yours to identify what best works for you and what doesn’t. In other words: “Become the Boss of Your Body”.
2. Vary and balance your diet, avoid eating the same things ever day.

Barbecue Tips

Having said all this, I am now pleased to share my nightshade barbecue tips.

Smoky Eggplants

Eggplants are great to prepare for guests, even meat lovers because of their meaty texture. They are low in protein so they’re not a true replacement. Here’s a simple and quick way to prepare them:

• Slice your eggplants in have a centimeter thick discs
• Cover them slightly with oil, with a brush or your fingers
• Sprinkle your preferred mix of spices, smoked paprika and cumin for instance, on both sides of the eggplant slices
• Grill them on a medium heat, turning the eggplant slices every three minutes or so until they are soft.
  Serve them with a tahini-based vinaigrette and fresh herbs like coriander or parsley.

Grilled Tomatoes

For this use firm tomatoes that are not overly ripe. Cut the tomatoes in half and remove the seeds and watery fluid. Season the tomatoes with salt and pepper and drizzle them with oil.

Grill the tomatoes with the open, cut side down. Leave them on the grill for about 3 to 4 minutes. Service them with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and basil leaves.

Sweet Bell Peppers

Peppers are full of vitamin C and I find they are easier to digest and sweeter when warm. To best grill them, first cut them in quarters or thick strips. Do the same with red onions to add sweetness. Mix the peppers and onions with olive oil, salt and pepper. Variation: marinate the peppers and onions with (balsamic) vinegar for at least fifteen minutes.

Grill them for about 10 to 15 minutes, turning them a few times during the process.

Enjoy the summer! And please share your own tips.

If you have read my manifesto you already know my agenda: I want to seduce as many people as possible into adopting a plant-based lifestyle. For the sake of your health, for the future of humanity on our planet and to improve animals wellbeing.

What is not helping my cause is that humans have evolutionary learned to love meat. That’s because the taste of meat signals calories and proteins and evolution has taught us to crave those! As a matter of fact, one of the questions vegetarians often get is “what about proteins”? Even though we know from the blue zones that we don’t really have to worry about that.

Psychological, cultural, political issue

I came across this theme in a psychology article entitled “The Solution to Sustainable Eating Is Not a One-Way Street“. One of the interesting quotes: “The barriers to eating enough vegetables and fruit may be of psychological, physiological, social, and cultural nature.”

According to an article in US news outlet Axios this week trying to turn meat eaters into plant lovers is even a political topic. I won’t get into that!

There are two obstacles that we need to surmount in order to turn meat lovers into green eaters: texture and taste. People love meat because of its rich, savory flavor and fleshy texture. That last part, that’s what umami is about! Along with salty, sour, bitter and sweet, umami is one of the five tastes. Sum it up as “savory” or “meaty”.

Umami

So, if we want to satisfy our basic evolutionary human needs, we need to add umami to our culinary arsenal. And we also need to think about meat-like textures.

To create plant-based umami think about layering several umami-rich ingredients into a dish. Spices and spice blends provide rich and complex layers of umami.

Miso paste is a fermented soybean paste and is perfect when you want to add vegan umami flavor to your dish. Beware: it’s pretty salty! I like to use miso as a finishing ingredient in soups or sauces. Use a tea spoon at a time until the taste is to your liking.

Mushrooms have a naturally meaty texture, so they’re excellent options as the star of vegetarian dishes. Stir mushrooms with some miso, add some fresh spinach and blue cheese at the end… Voilà: a great filling for a quick and delicious pasta.

Want to emulate pulled pork or stewed beef? Think of jackfruit as a replacement. You’ll find jackfruit in tins, probably next to pineapple cans. Take your time to stew it to give it the taste and texture you’re looking for. Tip: prefer the young sort. I find the older, mature jackfruit too sweet for savory dishes.

Another tip for plant-based umami: marinade, smoke or grill your vegetables. I particularly enjoying eating grilled cauliflower, celery and eggplant. It is oh so simple to create a meaty texture that is also so fulfillingly tasty. Chop your celery, sweet potatoes or celery in cubes. Toss them on an oven plate, sprinkle spices and grill them in your oven (5 to 20 minutes).

Spicy ingredients (ginger, garlic, peppers, capers), spicy sauces (French musterd, sambal, tabasco, harissa), soy-based sauces all form the base for great marinades. Here’s my personal box of tasty umami tricks:

Quick Umami-Full Recipe

I made today a great wok noodles dish thanks to the ingredients and recipe of Boerschappen. Here is how this wok noodles with paksoi, mushrooms and black bean sauce looked like:

If you can’t read Dutch here are the steps, for two-three eaters (it’s for two persons but we have leftovers):

• Peel two garlic cloves and put them with 3 cm of ginger in a bowl.
• Add the fluid and a quarter of a tin of black beans in the bowl; add four soup spoons of soy sauce and of water, a tea spoon of chili flakes and mix until you obtain a smooth sauce.
• Add the rest of the black beans and set this aside.
• In the wok pan scramble four eggs and when done set that aside. Skip this step for a fully vegan version .
• Set a pan of water to boil.
• Chop an onion and fry that in your wok.
• Throw two sliced paksois and 250 grams of sliced mushrooms in the wok and bake that for about 3 minutes.
• Add the black beans and sauce and cook for an additional 3-5 minutes.
• Prepare rice noodles (about 150 grams) in the boiling water and when done add them to your vegetables.
• Set the scramble eggs on top and serve.

Be creative, use texture and umami taste and go convince meat eaters that plant-based dishes are just as satisfying.

Want to share your own umami tricks? Please contact me!