YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Carrot-Zucchini Soup

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Here’s a lovely plant-based soup that I tossed together a couple of weeks ago. I made it in a little green Staub Cocotte that I’ve had for a very long time. It always seems like everything I make in that pot comes out so flavorful and delicious. Any soup pot will do of course, but it’s always nice when you have a favorite.

2 Tbsp. olive oil
8 green onions, sliced thinly
1/2 red onion, diced small
6 garlic cloves, chopped fine
2 Tbsp. tomato paste
2 medium-sized carrots, peeled and sliced into 1-inch rounds
2 medium-sized zucchini, quartered lengthwise and then sliced into 1/2-inch sections
15-oz. can chickpeas, rinsed well
1/2 tsp. cumin
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. black pepper
1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp. turmeric
5 cups boiling water
1/3 cup tri-color or red quinoa
juice of 1/2 lemon
garnish with parsley

Heat olive oil on medium-high heat in a medium (2-quart) soup pot until fragrant, and then add onions. Fry onions 6-8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they are beginning to brown at the edges. Push onions to the outer edges of the pot, and add garlic and spices in the center, stirring constantly for 30 seconds. Add tomato paste and mix together the contents of the pot. Slowly stir in the boiling water. 

Carefully add the carrots, zucchini, and chickpeas, and reduce the heat to low. Cover the pot, and cook at a slow boil for 30 minutes. Then remove the cover, sprinkle the quinoa on top of the soup, and replace the cover. After 10 minutes, check the quinoa and push it down below the level of the liquid. Continue to simmer 10 minutes more until the quinoa is completely cooked. Check the liquid level at least once, and add more if it has been absorbed by the quinoa to a greater extent than you expected. All the quinoa should be just barely submerged. And it’s okay to use white quinoa if that’s what you happen to have in the cabinet — I just like the colorful varieties.

Turn off the heat, and squeeze in the juice of one-half lemon. Allow to rest 5-10 minutes prior to serving. Makes 4 bowls or 6 cups.

 

  

    

I Like My Patients to be Vertical

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Throughout my years of practicing medicine, I liked to say that I preferred my patients vertical. As opposed to horizontal.

If and when I could help it, I wanted to make sure that no one got a disease that could have been prevented. Sure, accidents happen. And illnesses, sometimes serious, are diagnosed every day in the lives of people who did nothing to deserve them, and who could have done nothing to prevent them. But not all illnesses. Continue reading →

Three Kinds of Charoset 2024

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At our upcoming Passover seders to be held on Monday and Tuesday nights this coming week, we will be serving a number of different kinds of charoset (kha-ROE-set). In addition to our traditional apples-and-walnuts charoset that I make each and every year, we’ll be serving two other truly extraordinary charoset recipes. I want to share for a moment that my mom and my Grandma Rosie actually taught me to make charoset in a large wooden chopping bowl (such a special memory), a bowl that continued to hold a place of honor in my parents’ house for many, many years after Grandma Rosie was gone. Things go much faster now with the food processor, though I always process each ingredient separately almost to the desired consistency, and then add them all back together for a big stir with a big fork. Otherwise you are likely to get fruit-nut spread, which is a different recipe entirely.  Continue reading →

Slow Living & Horseradish

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A few years ago I received a message from a friend asking if I knew where she could find some fresh horseradish. Now, as it happened, I had planted a horseradish root, a left over from our Seder plate, a few years prior. Then I had forgotten about it completely until I got her message. So I happened to know the answer to her question. Continue reading →

The Zen of One Fried Egg

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This is one of my favorite old posts. Last fall, my sister came to Cleveland for a visit and for the wedding of an old friend’s daughter, and I enjoyed seeing the smile on her face as she mentioned this post from years back. Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about reposting it. In honor of my sister, and in memory of the chickens we used to have before a few raccoons and other wild things destroyed our coop one miserable day a few years back, I repost it here today. We are hoping to get our coop back on line this year so that we can resume telling stories about our chickens.  Continue reading →

Is it Really Food?

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While talking with patients about how to improve the nutritional value of their meals, we used to talk about real food that had not been processed, refined, stripped, polished, fortified, enriched or otherwise modified. Fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, grains, fish, eggs, dairy products, and meats. And that’s about it.

Here are some guidelines: The first is not to eat anything you have to be told is food. If you have to be told it’s food, it isn’t. Like “processed American cheese food.” Talk about truth in advertising. Some products at the supermarket have names that have nothing whatsoever to do with food. Like Miracle Whip®. Or Cool Whip®. These are not foods either, and that’s why I’m not buying. Continue reading →

Some Exciting New Developments

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A lot has been happening lately in the field of research into the the health effects of ultra-processed items, and that’s what I want to talk about today. Last month, the results of a huge study, involving almost 10,000,000 (ten million!) individuals, were published in the BMJ [British Medical Journal], “one of the world’s most influential and respected general medical journals,” and they were…shall we say…most informative.  Continue reading →

YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Two Kale Salads

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This past Monday we had bookclub at my house, and it was really nice. We read Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, and ate a whole bunch of delicious things, including a fantastic sweet potato soup (from Amy Chaplin’s Whole Food Cooking Every Day), rainbow carrots and baba ganoush from the West Side market, and Lynne’s fantastic kale salad, which she throws together with tahini dressing and a homemade mix of spiced almonds, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds. One of these days I’ll have to get the recipe, but I can already see her laughing and tossing back her head as she says, oh I don’t know, I just toss it all together! So, at least for now, your guess is as good as mine.

Continue reading →

YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Bob’s Red Mill Quinoa Salad

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You may or may not have heard, but last month, on February 10th, Bob Moore, a founder of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods, passed away at the age of 94. And I felt the need to write a post about this man who made such a remarkable difference in our food supply. Continue reading →