nourishing the body
Here’s a salad to nourish the body with life giving phytonutrients. They say you should eat the rainbow. This certainly fits the bill. Inside is purple cabbage, carrots, yellow bell peppers, pickled daikon radish, cucumber, sprouted moth beans and sprouted peas. I made a dressing from fresh grated ginger, mayonnaise (ok, not completely vegan), rice vinegar, soy and wasabi. It was filling and delicious. I feel so healthy.
Hang on to your hats because I’m going to be posting some stir fries over the next couple of days. The are so easy to prepare and with just a few simple ingredients you have a quick and delicious meal. Let’s start off with a simple vegetarian stir fry.
I used bok choy, carrots, celery, onions and bean sprouts for this dish. Many times I flavor my stir fries with some red chili flakes in oil from the Asian market. I like the brands from Szechuan. I start with a hot pan and add some oil. I drop in a bit of the chili in oil or sometimes a garlic chili paste along with some chopped garlic and chopped ginger. These vegetables all cook pretty much the same so I tossed them all in together.
I can even toss them! When the vegetables were just starting to wilt I splashed in some soy sauce and rice vinegar for seasoning and that’s all! Simple and tasty.
I know ragu is traditionally a meat-based sauce but I think these mushrooms are ‘meaty’ enough to consider this sauce a ragu. Combined with homemade semolina pappardelle, this was a home run hit for dinner. My sauce started with a combination of baby portobello and button mushrooms.
They were halved and sliced.
I also cubed up a whole eggplant for this dish.
Of course you can’t have a pasta sauce without garlic and onions!
First the onions and the mushrooms were cooked down until softened and tender. Then the garlic was added to the pan.
The eggplant was combined with the cooked onions and mushrooms.
Everything was sautéed until the eggplant began to soften.
A bit of red wine was added to the pan.
And a can of tomato paste was stirred into the sauce.
The ragu was covered and cooked down until the eggplant dissolved and the sauce was rich and delicious. A little water was added during the cooking to keep the sauce from getting to dry.
Meanwhile, a pasta dough made from all purpose flour, semolina flour and eggs was prepared and rolled out into sheets using my pasta roller.
The pappardelle was cut by hand into wide noodles.
The noodles were boiled until al dente and tossed with the ragu. Finally I topped it off with some parmigiano reggiano. 
Can you stand more soba noodles? I can. This time I put them into a stir fry dish. I cooked up some carrots, cauliflower and red, yellow and orange peppers with some garlic and ginger. I quickly boiled the noodles and added it to the stir fry pan. The whole dish was seasoned with soy sauce, a bit of garlic chili sauce and sesame oil.
On New Year’s Day I wanted to use black-eyed peas. There is a tradition in the South that black-eyed peas should be eaten on New Year’s Day for good luck. Instead of the typical peas cooked in a soup or with ham or something, I decided to make a mixed grain and legume base for a vegetarian stir fry. I first just tossed together some Thai brown rice, kamut, spelt, wheat berries, mung beans and black-eyed peas in a bowl and soaked them in water for a couple of hours. I then put everything into my rice cooker and put it on the brown rice setting. An hour and a half later I had this wonderfully healthy grain/legume mixture.
For the stir fry I used baby bok choi and cauliflower. I first steamed them for a few minutes just to start getting them tender and make the stir fry easier. I fried these up with garlic, ginger and red chilis in oil. Near the end it was seasoned with soy, sesame oil and thickened with just a bit of corn starch. It was oh so tasty.
