Heat and Eat

We often associate healthy, vegetarian cooking with mountains of prep work, chopping of veggies, and generally slaving over a hot stove for hours. It really doesn’t have to be this way for you to serve up a well-balanced, sustaining, and nourishing meal.

In this new column I’d like to share with you some nutritional and practical tips and tricks I have learned over the years, things that make meal preparation not only a breeze but a pleasure.

This month’s recipe is a great example of what I like to call one-pot cooking, a meal that cooks itself while you keep adding ingredients as they are ready. For a healthy vegetarian meal, you need at least vegetables, fresh seasonings, and some beans, served with a whole grain of your choice. I also like to add nuts and seeds to a recipe where possible. These ingredients will give you the vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, carbohydrates, proteins, and good fats that you need for strong immunity and good health.

Not only that, you’ll be consuming plenty of soluble and non-soluble fibre–critical for helping to detoxify and cleanse your intestinal system. Once the liver has finished breaking apart toxins, chemicals, and carcinogens, fibre then binds the toxins and safely removes them from the gastro-intestinal tract.

In my clinic, I’ve seen vegetarians who are eating a lot of processed and refined foods suffering from increased colds and flu due to their less-than-balanced eating plan, so it’s important to prepare whole foods on a regular basis…which brings us back to simplicity and easy recipes.

This delicious stew has a delightfully complex flavour. The yams are an excellent complex carbohydrate for staying warm through the winter and provide beta-carotene and vitamin C in large amounts. The chickpeas are an easily digested protein and almond butter can be used instead of peanut butter, if you like, to add more calcium. Simply keep chopping and adding ingredients to the pot and a scrumptious vegetarian delight will be on your table in just 25 minutes.

African Nut Stew