Sweet & Salty Edamame

When it comes to snack time, salty wins over sweet any day. And a little salty on top of sweet ain't so bad either :) 

It wasn't that long ago when I first tried edamame.  With a quick steam and a sprinkling of sea salt, this quickly became one of my go-to favourite healthy snacks.

Until....I was at a restaurant with a friend who had ordered an appetizer plate of edamame and I tried a bite...

Whole. New. Ballgame. 

Gawsh, drooling just thinking about this. 

Of course, I had to jot down the flavours, the sweetness followed by a salty zing, I couldn't forget these lip smacking tastes! A few attempts to make this at home and I got there quickly. After my last attempt at this recipe, while in between bites my husband proclaimed "YOU NAILED IT!!"  So fast and easy to make, and such a great snack when watching your favourite binge worthy Netflix series.  

Ok, now for the healthy scientific stuff...

Soy is a great source of Energy, Protein, Fiber, and Calcium and contains all essential Amino Acids to name a few.  They're low in calories, & there is no cholesterol!
But as much as I love to nibble on this healthy snack, I try not to eat these on a regular basis.   

Edamame are the not-yet matured versions of the soy bean. Soy (young or matured) has high amounts of the hormone disruptor phytoestrogen, which increases estrogenic activity in your body and can cause many issues, including reproductive problems.  Whether you're young, old, male or female, hormones play a huge role in our whole body health. Something I'm learning about more and more as I get older. 

Also, when you buy any soy (beans, edamame, soy milk, tofu etc.) you should always buy Organic. Soy beans grown in North America, are most likely from Genetically Modified (GMO's) soy beans, which are linked to all sorts of health problems, issues, bigger issues and even bigger ones. You can read more about GMO's here. 

Organic soy are not GMO, so you're safe there.  

Bottom line, eat or drink your soy in moderation and always organic, and you'll get all the positive and healthy benefits from this little bean.  

Back from my babble... 
...if after all that, you're still interested in this recipe, here it is! 

Ingredients :

2 cups frozen Organic Edamame (in shell)
Sauce: 

1/2 tsp Garlic (approx 1-2 cloves) peeled and grated or minced

1/2 tsp grated Ginger* 

1 Tbsp Maple Syrup

1 Tbsp Organic Gluten Free Soy Tamari

1 & 1/2 tsp Sesame Oil

1 Dash Vegan Worcestershire Sauce

Pinch or two of Flaked Sea Salt

1/2 Tbsp Sesame Seeds

Equipment Needed : 
1 skillet or frying pan
1 small pot and basket steamer 
(or small pot will do if you don't have steamer)
Tongs or Slotted spoon

How To :

1. Add about an inch of water to small pot, add steamer basket. Cover and bring to a boil.
2. Once water is boiling, add frozen edamame into steamer basket, cover and cook for about 4 minutes or until beans are tender. (If you don't have a steamer, you can boil also for about 4 minutes.)
3. While waiting for water and edamame to boil, pull out a skillet and get your sauce ingredients ready.
4. Grate the garlic and ginger and add to skillet.  Add the rest of the sauce ingredients mixing to incorporate everything. Turn heat onto low -just enough to warm up- and give it a quick stir while waiting...
5. When the edamame are ready, scoop beans up while straining water, and drop into the saucy pan mixture and give it a quick stir to cover the beans. Turn the heat up on your skillet slightly and stir for about a minute. You don't want this to bubble or boil. 
6. Remove from heat and add sesame seeds and salt.   
7. Serve.

* An easy way to grate ginger is to keep a nub of ginger in your freezer.  This makes grating much easier! 

Enjoy!

Cilantro Pesto Tapenade

Until recently, Cilantro's pungent smell and taste kept me away from really giving it a fair chance.  So I avoided it, until one day it showed up in my fridge when my sister stopped by and brought a container of cilantro pesto she picked up at the store.  Pesto is one of my favourite food condiment's, any kind really! After learning of Cilantro's big heath benefits I knew I couldn't avoid it any longer and had to give this one a try. I pulled out my trusty Organic Purple Tortilla chips from Neal Brothers, which is always in my pantry stockpile, and I scooped in.  

The pesto definitely had a distinct strong cilantro taste about it but I was determined to get past the pungency of it. I was already deeply invested into the taste testing, and wasn't ready to give up just yet, it was pesto for goodness sake! I looked in the fridge for something to offset the taste of the strong cilantro and found a container of Kalamata Olives. I had one to clear my pallet. I went in for another scoop of the pesto, then an olive, another scoop, olive...you get the point. It was working. The two flavours, cilantro and the olives, two very powerful yet distinct flavours were working so well together that they started to become their own unique taste.  The lightbulb went on, I got my notebook out and started to scribble my thoughts  on making this a one stop dip. 

So that's how my little concoction of this cilantro pesto tapenade was born.  Olivesto? Cilanpestonade? Tapento? Whatever you want to call it...  

Cilantro is really good for you!

Cilantro is high in Vitamin K & A, it's a great source of Vitamin C, along with potassium, manganese and other essential vitamins & minerals not to mention all antioxidants & dietary fibre it carries while it can also help cleanse your body of toxic metals....Just to name a few things

While I enjoy this as a dip, others enjoyed it also while I played the "guess what ingredients are in this dip" game.  I had my fun and it was time to move on and find some other uses for it.  My first thought was to put it onto pasta, but it needed to be more special.    

When I decided  a few years ago to eliminate pretty much everything I loved to eat, including wheat,  I was stumped when it came to pasta.  I quickly jumped onto the brown rice pasta band wagon.  Which has expanded to Quinoa pasta, buckwheat pasta, amaranth and corn pasta. I’m good with that, even though I’m eating a little more gluten now, I don't enjoy wheat pasta.  A quick and easy go-to meal for me is pasta with pesto.  When I make any kind of pesto now, I make it in big batches and freeze it in ice cube trays so when I need a quick meal, I pull a couple out of the freezer and voila!

While I do love pasta, I've been trying to incorporate more vegetables back into my diet, so what I love even more is the idea of having a plate of vegetables pretending to be pasta! The first time I tried Zucchini noodles, I used my mandolin to create strips of noodles, boiled up some buckwheat spaghetti, mixed it in with the raw zucchini noodles, and topped it all off with diced tomatoes and EVOO. It was pretty simple but "Baby steps" I said to myself.  

Holidays came and went and I finally had some time to try out my newly gifted addition to my appliance family, my spiralizer!  My first attempt was zuchinni.  I sautéed the strands in a  little Extra Virgin Olive Oil, added some of my olive pesto cilantro concoction...and the rest is history! 

Check out my Cilantro Pestonade recipe below...

It's really simple to make.  Have it as a dip, use in your pasta, or as a marinade! I'm sure I'll be testing this one out on so many more dishes! Let me know what you think, or what you've tried it with!

Ingredients :
makes about 1 & 1/2 cup

Bunch of Cilantro, roughly chopped -including leaves and stems (approx 100gr.)

1/2 cup pitted kalamata olives (approx 16)

2 large garlic cloves

1/4 cup pumpkin seeds

Zest of 1 lemon

1/4 cup lemon juice

1/2 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)
1/4 tsp sea salt

Pinch of chili pepper 

Pinch of black pepper

How To :

1. Add pumpkin seeds to food processor and process until finely chopped. Set aside in separate bowl
2. Add olives and garlic to food processor and whirl to a rough chop (about 15 seconds) scraping down sides along the way.
3. Add cilantro and continue processing, about 30 seconds- scraping down sides. 
4. Add finely chopped pumpkin seeds, lemon zest, lemon juice, EVOO, salt, chili and black pepper and whirl everything together until you have a fairly fine consistency. 

Enjoy! 

Yogurt: A Healthy Snack

When I photographed this yogurt dessert for Clean Eating Magazine a few months back, I was thrilled to have some new inspiration to my favourite plain yogurt snack.

.........................................,........................................Jan/Feb 2010 Clean Eating Magazine

My night time snack preference is a bowl of plain yogurt. It satisfies any cravings that I might have, plus, the calcium in the yogurt helps me sleep better at night, not to mention what it does for my body while I sleep!

Those television commercials weren't lying, there are so many benefits to eating yogurt! Well, they were sort of telling us the truth. See, most yogurts that are advertised are flavoured yogurts and they have way too many unnecessary ingredients such as sugars, (aspartame and sucralose found in sugar free choices) corn starch, dyes, preservatives, gelatin and cream (to name a few). Plain yogurt is your other option which should really only have 2 ingredients: live cultures and milk. Plain yogurt is really the healthiest option and you can always add to it.

If you like your fruit flavoured store-bought yogurts, here's a little eye-opener for you. Once fruit is cut up, it begins to ferment and so additives and/or preservatives are added to the flavoured yogurts to keep the fruit from rotting. Also, there can be anywhere from 5 or more teaspoons of sugar added to one of those little yogurt container (where fruit already contain natural sugars)! One of the great benefits to plain yogurt is all the healthy bacteria that it provides, however, in the flavoured yogurts, the good bacterial cultures are interfered with when yogurt is flavoured. So in the end, all the "good stuff" you get from plain yogurt is lost when eating those already flavoured yogurts.

If my little eye-opener has turned you off flavoured yogurts, let me share with you the benefits of the plain, natural yogurts.
Fewer calories (while flavoured yogurts have the added sugars, plain does not), lots of calcium, protein, and my favourite, the friendly bacteria which is so good for your digestive tract. We've been hearing a lot about "Probiotics" in tv commercials and on product labels, all with good reason. Foods containing probiotics (such as plain yogurts) contain (good) bacteria like those already found in your intestine. Choosing yogurts containing natural bacteria strains as Lactobacillus Acidophilus and Bifidobacterium Bifidus can provide the healthy bacteria to your digestive system which can help inhibit yeast infections, assist in digestive issues, promotes colon health and can boost your immunity.

I always prefer plain organic whole milk or low fat yogurt .

Although I find plain yogurt yummy on it's own, like the 6 packs of mini flavoured yogurts found in your grocery store, I like some variety. Adding chopped walnuts and honey is my fave, while chopping up strawberries, banana's or pineapple are up there as well. My favorite snack while visiting Greece is fresh yogurt topped with walnuts and honey. It's so popular there that most restaurants there will have this snack on their dessert menu's! The yogurt in Greece is unlike anything I've had here, and believe me, I've looked! The closest thing would be a balkan style yogurt. My favourite plain organic yogurt these days is from Stoneyfield Farm. It's comparably priced which is great as I go through the 32 oz tub's I buy, so quickly!

*A little tip if you normally pack yogurt for lunch, pack some plain yogurt in a container. Separately pack a whole banana, strawberry's or your fruit of choice, you can also include granola, nuts, dark chocolate, coconut (possibilities are endless!). When it's lunch time, chop up your fruit and mix in with yogurt.

You can also substitute yogurt for sour cream, top your butternut squash soup, or your baked potato, mix it in with your fruit smoothies! I've even found some people substitute yogurt in their baking! (I'll have to try that some day)

The new inspiration from my Clean Eating Magazine photoshoot, couldn't of come at a better time. We had shot the yogurt image this past summer, right about the time of a dinner party I was having which included 5 good friends and a great big bbq'd feast. When it came to dessert, I realized, I hadn't made any! We had just shot that Yogurt story for the magazine and since some of my refrigerator staples included yogurt and fruit, I used my new inspiration and mixed it with my old favourites to pull together an impromptu dessert for 6.

This mixture is per person, so 1 cup/1 person, 5 cups/5 people.

• In a large bowl, mix 1 cup of plain yogurt (per person) with 1/2 teaspoon of real vanilla extract, and 1 tablespoon of ground flax seed**.

• Then scoop out 1/2 cup yogurt mix into a dessert dish, layer some strawberries, then the other 1/2 cup of yogurt mix.

• Top with more strawberries, and then finish it off with chopped walnuts and honey.

**Flaxseed is high in fiber, omega-3 fatty acids and phytochemicals called lignans. You can grind whole flax seeds in your cleaned out coffee grinder!

Needless to say, the dessert went off without a hitch and was loved by all!


Thank You to my sister Lisa and her nutritional expertise found on Naturally Savvy. Here's some more great information she's written on the benefits of plain yogurt, along with the link above on probiotics.