Spring cleaning season is upon us!

Did you know with a few simple steps, you can convert your pantry to encourage healthier eating options, while also saving yourself some money.

🍽️ How to Stock Your Pantry for Healthy Eating

🍽️ Delicious Quinoa and Chickpea Bowls with Fresh Vegetables and Herbs

🍽️ Marinated and Grilled Portobello Mushrooms!

Healthy News Dose

Spring Cleaning: How Should We Stock Our Pantry for Healthy Eating?

It’s time to reset your pantry for the Spring!

The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University looked at some of the best foods to include in your pantry for healthy eating. 

Here are SIX INGREDIENT CATEGORIES they encourage stocking-up on in your pantry:

1. Canned and dried beans, peas, and other protein-packed legumes

2. Nuts, seeds, and butters made from nuts

3. Whole grains, such as oats, brown rice, and whole-grain pasta

4. Canned tomatoes – I use these all the time!

5. Root vegetables like onions, garlic, beets, turnips, and sweet potatoes

6. Cooking essentials (like oils, vinegars, and seasonings)

I loved their ideas, although I suspect my personal list of “cooking essentials” is far too long. 

With vinegars, for example, I’ll always have a bottle of sherry vinegar, red wine, white wine, balsamic, and champagne vinegar for use in standard salad vinaigrettes. 

But I can’t live without my apple cider vinegar, malt vinegar, distilled white vinegar, black Chinese vinegar, rice vinegar, and few other specialty vinegars at home for pickling or sauce-making!

This approach provides me the flexibility to cook dishes across a range of cuisines, but is probably a bit excessive for the average home cook.

If you notice your pantry is filled with highly processed foods and sugary snacks, consider getting rid of them, or giving them away—sometimes it helps to simply remove the temptation and set yourself up to eat healthy!

In terms of other useful pantry items, consider stocking up on some:

• Coconut milk

• Vegetable stock

• Quinoa, which we talk more about in our FREE RECIPE below!

The Cooking Corner

Quinoa and Chickpea Bowls with Fresh Vegetables and Herbs 

I’ve always been fascinated quinoa’s status as a complete protein that includes all nine of the essential amino acids.

*Other plant-based complete proteins include tempeh, tofu, buckwheat, and other items, although I love quinoa for its versatility and usefulness in grain bowls.

This sounds like a ton of ingredients (and it is a lot!) but you can simplify down to quinoa, chickpeas, cucumbers, tomatoes, and red onions, with some fresh herbs, and you are good to go!

You can also view this process as an opportunity to improve your knife skills—and if you want to hear more about knife sharpening or upkeep, let us know in the comments!

If you aren’t a big fan of quinoa, try this recipe with some steamed brown rice. Add a fistful of fresh herbs, chopped vegetables, a squeeze of fresh lime juice, some extra virgin olive oil, and enjoy!

The following recipe provides six servings, and stores well in the fridge for use the following day.

Ingredients: 

• 1.75 cups vegetable stock, or water

• 1 teaspoon black sesame seeds

• 1 teaspoon Kosher salt, for the quinoa

• ¼ teaspoon dried oregano

• ¼ teaspoon ground cumin

• ¼ teaspoon garlic powder

• 1 cup dried quinoa

• ½ red onion, finely diced

• Zest of 1 lime

• Juice of 1 lime

• 1 red bell pepper, finely diced

• 1 English cucumber, peeled and cut medium dice

• 2 ripe tomatoes, cut medium dice

• ½ teaspoon Kosher salt, for the cucumber and tomatoes

• 1.5 cups cooked chickpeas, drained and rinsed

• 2 teaspoons olive oil

• ½ teaspoon togarashi spice mix, or paprika

• ¼ teaspoon Kosher salt, for the chickpeas

• ½ cup fresh parsley, finely chopped

• ¼ cup fresh cilantro, finely chopped

• ¼ cup fresh chives, finely sliced

• 3 Tablespoons fresh basil, finely sliced

• 3 Tablespoons fresh mint, finely sliced

• ½ cup prepared hummus, for serving

• ½ cup Greek yogurt, for serving

• A drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, for serving

• Fresh lime wedges, for serving

Instructions: 

1. Add the vegetable stock to a rice-cooking pot, and bring the stock to a simmer.

2. Add the black sesame seeds, Kosher salt, dried oregano, ground cumin, garlic powder, and then mix in the dried quinoa.

3. Bring to a simmer again, and reduce the heat to the lowest possible setting.

4. Cover the pot with a tight-fitting lid.

5. Cook for fifteen minutes, or until the quinoa is completely tender.

6. Fluff the quinoa with a fork, and then cover again with the lid, off the heat.

7. In a small bowl, combine the diced red onion with the zest and juice of one lime.

8. Allow the red onion to pickle in the lime juice for about ten minutes.

9. In a large bowl, add the diced red bell pepper, diced cucumber, and diced tomatoes, along with some salt.

10. Let the pepper and cucumber and tomatoes sit for ten minutes, and then drain the liquid.

11. Mix the drained and rinsed chickpeas with the olive oil and togarashi spice mix, along with an extra drizzle of olive oil and some Kosher salt, if desired.

12. When you have drained the salted cucumber and tomatoes and peppers, mix in the chickpeas, along with the pickled red onion with lime juice from earlier.

13. Add in the quinoa, along with the fresh herbs.

14. Taste, and add some extra lime juice or salt, if needed.

15. Serve in bowls, along some hummus, Greek yogurt, olive oil, and fresh lime wedges.

Want to try the 30-day healthy eating challenge? Click here!

Not Eating Fermented Foods Yet? You’re Missing Out BIG Time!

Harvard Medical School points out the benefits of fermented foods, noting that, “Health benefits come from the live microbes that thrive in foods such as yogurt, kimchi, and sauerkraut.”

The live microorganisms in fermented foods improve our bodies’ ability to digest our food!

Not only are fermented foods beneficial for your gut microbiome, but they have a long shelf-life, and taste wonderful! 

If you are making fermented foods at home, like our super simple fermented garlic honey recipe, include them in your pantry for this week’s Spring Pantry Reset—you will thank me later when you add it onto pizza crust, or as a dipping sauce for spicy grilled tofu.

If you are interested in stocking your own pantry with some fermented foods, our team has created a fermentation course and cookbook with dozens of recipes, tips, and tricks to help you!

Chef’s Word of The Week:

Have you heard the term, “bouquet garni”? This is traditionally a mixture of fresh thyme, parsley, bay leaves, and other aromatics that are included in stocks, soups, or sauces to add flavor.

In Culinary school, you would traditionally wrap your bouquet garni in cheesecloth, and tie it up with butchers’ string, so that you can easily remove it all as one piece when it is done imparting flavor.

Because you were generally in a rush for time during class, one student would inevitably forget to take the bouquet garni out of their pot before blending it up in the food processor, along with the soup contents—you could hear the motor of the poor food processor screaming from across the room as it tried to blend the cheesecloth and kitchen string—I will never forget it.

*For items like thyme, you can use the longest whole sprig of thyme to gently tie up ten or so sprigs of thyme into a tiny little bundle, just to keep them all together. This eliminates the need for the cheesecloth and butchers’ string, and you can remove the bundle of thyme once it has imparted its flavor.

Upgrade your plate…with Marinated and Grilled Mushrooms!

My wife makes tasty grilled portobello mushrooms, which are marinated in garlic, olive oil, parsley, balsamic vinegar, freshly-ground black pepper, and Kosher salt.

You can use this approach with mushrooms of different varieties, although the cooking times will differ.

For each large portobello mushroom top, marinate it in a mixture of:

• 2 Tablespoons of olive oil

• 2 minced garlic cloves

• 1 Tablespoon chopped parsley

• 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

• A few grinds of black pepper

• A sprinkle of Kosher salt

Let the mushrooms sit in the marinade for a few hours, and then lightly grill them at 400˚F until they are tender.

To serve, add a drizzle of olive oil, some fresh parsley, and a few drops of balsamic vinegar.

*If cooking these mushrooms in the oven, note that they will release a lot of water as they cook. You can take the mushrooms out of the oven and discard this water early in the roasting process, and then return the mushrooms to the oven without the liquid.  This will help your mushrooms cook better, with more browning, and less steaming.

And sadly, that’s it for this week. 

Although I would love to hear more from you about your healthy eating journey or food questions! 

For instance, 

• What are you cooking lately as your favorite meal?

• What are your healthy eating goals for the rest of the year?

Feel free to reach out and send me your thoughts on additional topics you wanted to see included in subsequent newsletters down the road.

Better yet, I’m about to start THIS challenge. Will you join me?

Andy G

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