Eat Your Vegetables!(You DO Need Your Nutrition)
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Everyone knows the importance of vegetables for daily nutrition, but still many find it only too easy to skip.What's an easy way to eat a greater variety of vegetables in a single day? Think "melange" (a tonier way to say mixture!) and you'll have the right idea.
I often start with a base of sliced onions, sauteed, with maybe a bit of garlic. Make use of sliced red (and/or yellow, or orange) peppers--adds sweetness and a bit of tang.Great with green beans, or frozen asparagus in the winter. An especially nice treatment (my husband would say disguise) for green beans: An orphan canned tomato or two in your fridge can be broken up and put in with the almost finished onion and garlic, together with amodest sprinkling of the herb(s) of your choice-- dried basil, oregano, or rosemary. Cook until most of the liquid is evaporated off, add the cooked green beans, stir and serve.
Raw carrots are fine for fiber, but cooking them unleashes their full nutritional potential. Claim you don't hold with cooked carrots? Try this: cut your average carrot into 2 inch chunks, split each lengthwise down the center, and then cut each of the resulting halves into julienne strips. Put a small knob or a bit of oil in a pan set on a medium hot burner, swish it around and add the carrot strips and a sprinkle of salt, pepper, and small pinch of nutmeg per carrot. Stir them until all turn bright orange.
Now pour in a bit of water and cover the pan for a couple minutes. Check for progress and for moisture, adding a bit more water if it looks suspiciously dry. Cover, let cook, and check again. When they are almost but not quite done to your taste, drop in a some Chinese or snow pea pods, and keep stirring for a couple minutes, adding a spoon of water to keep the carrots from sticking and to help quickly tenderize the pea pods. It only takes a minute!
Add a bit more seasoning if necessary. Vegetables cooked the "melange" way are an especially potent way to give next days lunch a nutritional upgrade to first class: They make a great cold "salad" or an add-in for pasta or soup.
Another way to improve your vegetable consumption is to invest in seasonings mixes and then-- I kid you not-- keep them in the freezer door where they'll stay just-opened fresh right down to the bottom of the jar. Penzey's is a terrific source. Their products are available online, by catalog on telephone (their sales reps are unusually friendly and helpful: that's Wisconsin for you) or via mail order, but "natural" supermarkets like Whole Foods and local food-coops usually have a decent selection.
Beware of buying this type of seasoning at conventional supermarkets, however: for some reason they tend to be hideously expensive and not very fresh (hmmm... wonder why?)
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