Question
Mark Rappaport
Can you share any ideas on how to make more flavored beans, lentils, quinoa and tofu to have as staples during the week, without using oils and other saturated fat and sugar dense ingredients to do so?
Answer
Yeah, so I do this all the time and I think that one of your best things you can do for yourself in this category mark, is to experiment a lot. Um, grab ideas from all over the place. Uh, I will make a kind of a Cuban style bean or I'll cook down, you know, um, maybe some onions and some black beans, um, and put in some, like, I might even do like some Creole spices or something into that as well. Um, but, you know, kind of diversify out. So you can go with a kind of a standard, you know, kind of a Mexican Latin American st style bean where you're using cumin and maybe a chili powder in those beans with the onions, and that's great. You could go a whole different direction and, uh, add a whole other set of flavor profiles to that too. So if you're going with something like rosemary and oregano, you can make it more of a Greek influenced, right? And a little bit of lemon juice over the top. The same with the lentils. The lentils can be diversified in all kinds of different ways, which is fantastic to see. Uh, you can cook lentils down into like a doll, so a very simple kind of an Indian dish, or you could soak them and blend them up and make them into like flatbread, which is fantastic. Um, all those things are, you know, not using any oils or saturated fats in them as well too. Um, quinoa and tofu, again, in the same kind of area. I'm a bigger fan of using quinoa as kind of a kind of a guest star to a dish, right? So I'm, I'm not a big fan of just using quinoa as the main player in something. I'll mix in a lot of other, uh, ingredients into those. So quinoa specifically, I might add in some diced, uh, you know, red peppers and some shallots and maybe some mushrooms, uh, some garbanzo beans. And then take the flavor profile where I want to as well too. So I might add that lemon juice or maybe a little sumac or something to it to be able to change that up. And then tofu again, as I mentioned earlier, kind of absorbs anything you want to. So, um, you can look at flavor profiles from all over the world and tofu can actually adapt to that, which is fantastic. That's one of the reasons I love it so much as an ingredient. I don't eat it daily or anything. In fact, we don't eat it, you know, we probably eat it twice a week at most or something like that. Um, but I love the diversity of it to be able to have it in different forms, different textures and different flavor profiles at the same way. So, um, I think, uh, the best answer for you, mark, is to experiment a little bit. Um, you can get out cookbooks that you've had from, you know, before you went whole food plant-based as well too, and get the ideas out of those to be able to look at them. I can't say how many times or how many cookbooks that I own that aren't plant-based, but I love to be able to look through them to be able to get the ideas of flavor profiles and recreate those in a plant-based way. I just did that the other day with beer and tacos, um, which is typically made with either goat, um, or beef, um, and then a mole, you know, know kinda a thing. I transformed the entire thing using a oyster mushroom as my base, uh, cooking the mole into those, doing corn tortillas from scratch, then doing a tomato consomme to be able to dip the entire thing in as well too. And it turned out fantastic. It was a bit of work, but it was really, really nice and something I'd not been able to try, um, you know, as, uh, somebody who's been plant-based for over 27 years. So it was great to be able to take an existing, very well-known, um, you know, chef's recipe and convert that over into something that was plant-based and get the flavor profile at everybody's kind of loving.
