Whole almonds vs. blanched almonds

From the who-knew-but-it-should-be-obvious file, Andy Bellatti of Smart Bites reports that almond skins are good for you. (The less processed, the better, right?) Apparently they are high in flavonoids.

Lesson learned: I'll be sticking to the whole almonds from now on.

Delicious healthy asparagus recipes

I love eating with the seasons, for a lot of reasons. It's partly because I like eating local foods and it just feels right to eat what's available right here and now. But also, it makes the whole year an exciting journey of exploration. You can't get tired of anything because it disappears so fast and you're on to the next thing.

Right now, the spring vegetables are all over the place, like asparagus. Asparagus is a vegetable that it's worth waiting for because the local stuff is so much more tender and flavourful. Here are some recipes to try.

Asparagus, Goat Cheese and Lemon Pasta
This recipe from Smitten Kitchen is super easy - the asparagus is blanched with the pasta then drained and tossed with goat cheese, lemon zest, tarragon and olive oil. It's a perfect spring weeknight dinner.

Simple Roasted Asparagus
For a simple side dish that's a change from your standard steamed asparagus, try this roasted version.

Creamy Asparagus Soup with Poached Egg on Toast
From Jamie Oliver, this blended asparagus soup is made into a full meal with the addition of toast and a poached egg. Yum!

Raw Asparagus Salad
Every food has a slightly different nutritional profile when it's cooked vs. raw. This salad recipe from Maria Rodale via the Huffington Post flavours the asparagus with fresh basil and mint.

Are you ready for Meatless Monday

Have you heard of Meatless Monday? It's a movement for people to eat less meat by designating Mondays as a meat-free day. The idea is that it will help people make healthier and more eco-friendly food choices by making it easy: don't worry about going vegetarian, just don't eat meat on Mondays.

I love this idea because it simplifies things. You don't have to count anything, measure percentages, figure out how much you're eating of this or that. Just cook vegetarian on Mondays. Easy.

Here are some of my favourite meatless recipes to help you get started:

Vegetarian Cassoulet
This is a Smitten Kitchen pick. Cassoulet is a French casserole that's traditionally very meat-heavy. This veggie version is super delish and on Tuesday, you can throw in some bacon or sausage if you like.

Warm Butternut Squash and Chickpea Salad
Another one from Smitten Kitchen, I love this because it's easy to pack for lunch. Make it as a Sunday-night side dish and then have it for your Meatless Monday lunch alongside a big green salad.

Quick Black Bean Soup
This one is super easy and makes a yummy soup. Try it - you won't miss the meat!

Fresh Ginger Recipes: Cake, Cookies and Smoothies

I looove ginger, in both savoury and sweet dishes. So when I saw a ginger cake recipe in the Culinate newsletter I was excited to share some fresh ginger recipes with you.

First off, their recipe for gingery gingerbread cake, with fresh and dried ginger. I'm bookmarking this for an upcoming baking session – it looks divine!

Then there are these fresh ginger cookies from All Recipes. I never find ginger cookies gingery enough so maybe the fresh ginger will do it.

I also love to add fresh ginger to my smoothies. I used to grate it first but I've found that my blender can handle chunks - so I just peel and chop now. Pear and ginger is a great combination, or pineapple and ginger, or mango and ginger. I always use bananas too, and protein powder, and fresh nut milk (but you could use the milk option of your choice). Honey goes well with ginger in smoothies too.

Enjoy!

How to eat local for cheap

Eating locally grown and produced foods (the "locavore" diet) is becoming more and more popular, but let's be realistic: a lot of local foods are kind of expensive. Doesn't mean that they're not worth the price, or that the other foods aren't artificially underpriced, but a dollar's a dollar, you know?

So I love this article from awesome food website Culinate on 8 ways to buy local on a budget. Save yourself some cash and eat better, too!

5 fast and healthy dinner ideas

A classic problem is coming home after work, tired and hungry, and not feeling like cooking. Easier to get takeout or eat something out of a box than to cook something healthy, right?

Not so fast! Takeout takes longer than these quick meal ideas you can throw together in no time. Just think of how much better you'll feel after having a fast and healthy dinner.

1. Cornmeal-Crusted Chicken Salad

Self magazine has some of my favourite healthy recipes, and this fast chicken salad is no exception. Chicken strips are coated in a cornmeal mixture and baked for 14 minutes, and added to a mixture of salad greens, avocado, roasted peppers and goat cheese - all topped with a grapefruit juice dressing. Yum.

2. Egg Salad BLTs

Egg salad is one of my standbys for a quick meal - sometimes I just throw some together quickly, put it on toast and serve with a side salad of greens and vinaigrette. This version is a bit fancier, but still light on the veggies, so serve some on the side.

3. Herb-Baked Salmon

This is a super fast and easy way to cook salmon. While it's in the oven, throw together a side salad or heat up some soup.

4. Eggs in Tomato Sauce

Another hit from Smitten Kitchen, this one tastes best with the highest quality (homemade?) tomato sauce.

5. Easy Chicken Masala

This one requires marinating the chicken for at least two hours - but you can do it in the morning or the night before.

Trying new restaurants across the country

Sorry for the delay in posting... it's been a very busy winter! But now it's spring and I'm ready to start blogging again.

One of my favorite things to read about in food magazines like Bon Appetit is the travel sections. I love to try new restaurants when I travel and to dream about new restaurants even when I don't have time to travel. I recently found this guide to the best farm-to-table restaurants in the country on epicurious.com and it's really inspiring. Unfortunately I'm not planning a trip to any of those cities in the near future... but if you are, enjoy your meal!

Squash recipes I love

I love fall, it's the best time for cooking - the weather is cooler so you don't mind turning on the stove, and there's so much amazing fresh produce. Squash is one of my favourites. Acorn squash, butternut squash, pumpkin - I love them all.

I've made a few delicious squash recipes lately. Here are some of them.

Smitten Kitchen has a couple of recipes, of course. I love her Butternut Squash and Chickpea Salad with Tahini Dressing - it's easy to make and good to pack for lunches.

The November issue of Bon Appetit had a recipe for a Squash and Kale Bread Pudding. I made it and it's pretty amazing.

There's a great roasted squash soup recipe in the Rebar Cookbook. Squash soup is lovely and freezes well.

And I made a stuffed acorn squash recipe recently that was a mashup of a few recipes I found online. Basically, I roasted it in halves and then filled with a mixture of cooked quinoa, stir-fried kale and onions, pine nuts and grated Grana Padano cheese. So good!

And don't forget to roast the seeds! You can do all kinds of squash seeds, not just pumpkin.

Healthy recipes for green bean casserole

Green bean casserole is such a classic recipe, but it can be so unhealthy! It's a great example of how just because something contains a vegetable doesn't mean it's good for you. Canned mushroom soup is handy but it's not something I like to cook with very often - it's so high in fat and salt. Here are some healthy green bean casserole recipes I found to try, let me know what you think!

Green Bean Casserole - eatingwell.com

This one uses a pinch of grated nutmeg - yum! It also has fresh mushrooms and you can use fresh or frozen green beans.

Vegan Green Bean Casserole

If you can't eat dairy, try this recipe with vegan substitutes.

Green Bean Casserole (Shine)

This recipe uses buttermilk powder, which I'm curious about, because you can apparently use it (reconstituted) for buttermilk in recipes, and I hate buying buttermilk for recipes because I always end up having to throw some out!

Healthy Green Bean Casserole

This recipe uses homemade cream of mushroom soup to make it healthier.

Butter and nutrition (and desserts!)

Butter is kind of a symbol to me of how crazy the world is when it comes to health.

It used to be, in certain cultures, butter was just what you had. You had a cow, you milked her, you skimmed off the cream and made butter. It was the fat you had around and you used it. And it tasted good! No one worried about nutrition facts or saturated fat or the differences between butter and other fats for cooking.

Then butter became evil, according to health experts. And they told everyone to stop eating butter, so they ate margarine instead. Of course, it turned out that margarine wasn't so nutritious either, so a lot of people have gone back to butter - after all, it tastes better, and it's more natural.

Other experts say that we should be using oils, like olive oil, or flaxseed oil (but don't cook with it!), or even coconut oil, which is supposed to be very good for you.

But you know what? Butter tastes good. Especially in desserts. And it doesn't even take much - but a cookie with some butter in it tastes a million times better than something made with a butter replacement. And I love olive oil, but not in a cookie.

Nutrition is such a complicated thing.

So I like to use butter in moderation. (Good nutrition is all about moderation.) For savoury things, a lot of the time I'll use half butter and half olive oil, which I think is a way to get the best of both worlds. And in baking I use butter but sometimes I'll use some oil, or some applesauce or banana and just less butter. Desserts are better with butter, so you know what? Just eat less, and enjoy it.

What do you think about butter and nutrition? What fats do you use to cook?

Healthy dessert cookbooks I want to buy

I'm a cookbook junkie - I could spend all day browsing through Amazon or in a cookbook store. But I can't buy them all! One thing I love is cookbooks that focus on healthy desserts. It's amazing how many tricks there are for making dessert recipes healthier. One thing I do, for instance, is I almost always reduce the sugar in a recipe. Even if you cut out only 1/4 of the sugar, think of how much less sugar that would be over a year!

I was just looking through Amazon again today (so far I haven't spent anything, I'm being good!) and here are some of the cookbooks I've put on my wish list:

Don't they all look good? A couple are vegan - not that I'm a vegan, but I like to experiment with different techniques, and they get pretty creative when they can't use dairy or eggs. That fruit desserts recipe book looks to die for - I'm sure it would be pretty enough to put on the coffee table, even if you didn't make anything out of it (but how could you resist?). I like the book of bite-sized desserts because you can make really decadent dessert recipes in small portions and that way it's a healthy indulgence.

What are your favourite healthy dessert cookbooks?

What does healthy cooking mean to you?

Our culture is so confused about food, don't you think? We like to think we want to be healthy but I don't think many people really understand what it means. Eating healthy is mixed up with losing weight, and depriving yourself of food that tastes good. People think that unhealthy tastes good and healthy tastes bad.

I think that is so not true! To me, healthy food is satisfying food. When I eat junk food, I end up craving more and more - the food doesn't satisfy me. When I eat really good tasting food, I can eat a smaller amount and be happy. Healthy food does taste good, but I guess if you're used to fast food you might have a hard time liking vegetables or foods that aren't really fatty or sugary.

Healthy to me means cooking real food that tastes really good. I try to cook from scratch and use good ingredients. That doesn't mean eating low fat, or low calorie. But I try to balance everything out. If I know I'm making a pie for dessert, I'll make a dinner that's smaller. I always think it's better to have a smaller portion of really good food (yes, even with butter!) than to eat a lot of food that doesn't taste as good.

What do you think? What does healthy cooking mean to you?

Healthy recipes to make with peaches

I love fresh peaches, and there are so many good ones this time of year. I won't buy peaches in the winter, they just aren't the same. But do you find that you buy too many and all the peaches get ripe at the same time? That means either you're eating 10 peaches a day or you have to throw them out, which is kind of tragic.

So instead, save some to eat fresh and cook up the rest to make something delicious. There are so many things you can cook with peaches and they don't all have to be fattening desserts! (I also like to put sliced peaches on a salad - yes, with vegetables - try it, you'll like it!) You can make lighter recipes and healthy ones, too. Here are some I've found that I want to try.

Dolce Pesca (Sweet Peaches)

These are soaked in a lot of alcohol, so you have to like wine and brandy to like the recipe! I would probably reduce the sugar, peaches are sweet enough.

Peach Salsa

I love this idea! You can serve it with fish or meat, or I would even serve it on crackers with some goat cheese.

Fuzzy Navel Smoothie

This recipe is so simple and sounds so good! Just bananas, peaches and orange juice.

Peach and Blueberry Cobbler

This is a healthy version of a cobbler. I like that it cut out some of the butter but not all - you have to have some butter for flavour. Peaches taste so good with blueberries!

Peach Ricotta Pancakes

Do you not want to make this recipe right now? Click through, they're so pretty. You add peach slices to each pancake after you put them in the pan.

Peach Bourbon Hand Pies

Have a light dinner before you eat these to balance out the calories. But they look so good!

White Peach, Cassis and Champagne Floats

What a fun dessert for a party!

What are your favourite things to cook with peaches? Do you have any peach recipes to share?