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A Little Bit of Chocolate, Anyone?

If you want something sugary with just a bit of chocolate for this Valentine’s Day, you will love these Maple Sugar Cookies with Chocolate Glaze — gluten-free and vegan. Sometimes a little chocolate goes a long way, as it does perfectly when these cookies are drizzled with an easy vegan glaze. If you prefer, you can cover each cookie with chocolate frosting to match the Valentine’s Day mood. Either way, these Maple Sugar Cookies are quite delicious while they easily can be categorized as healthy (or at least healthier) comfort food.

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Holiday Dish for Vegans, Vegetarians, and Omnivores Too!

If you want to make a dish that will win enthusiastic applause from your family and guests during these holidays, look no further than this colorful plate of Roasted Butternut Squash with Greens. Foodies of every persuasion—regardless of food preferences and sensitivities—will ooh and aah when they taste this exquisite special-occasion dish (even if I do say so myself! After all, it was a gift to me from Annapurna, the goddess of food.)

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Cooking with Roses

While summer’s denouement may usher in relief or wistfulness, you can celebrate deliciously with a slightly exotic and cooling dish of Rose Petal Pudding. This vegan dessert fits my definition of the ultimate healthy comfort food. I promise it will elicit a chorus of ooohs and aaahs when you serve it to family or friends!

Consuming rose petals may seem exotic to those of us who grew up eating a standard American diet, but these beautiful flowers are a long-standing centerpiece in Indian and Middle Eastern cuisines.

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Cooling Salads for Hot Days

Warm greetings to my gentle readers who have patiently awaited a new recipe while I took some time off this summer. I’d like to reward you with a quick and easy dish to cool you off during these hot summer days—a satisfying and totally yummy Tofu Salad that even omnivores will enjoy (much to their surprise)!

You can serve this as a side dish to a summer soup, on a bed of salad greens, or as the added protein on a colorful vegetable plate. Hmmm…I’m envisioning sweet potato fries, quick asparagus or green beans, and corn on the cob with a half-cup of tofu salad in the center. If you love a sandwich for lunch, pile some tofu salad on your favorite bread. (The salad’s moisture will be a good balance to bread that has become dry, making it easier to digest.)

Summer guidance from Ayurveda

When the “dog days” of summer arrive in August (or, sadly, much earlier across the globe this year) it is important to eat cooling foods that help your metabolism avoid overheating. You’ll also feel cooler on hot days if you choose cooling foods over those that are naturally heating.

Did you know that symptoms such as irritability, headaches, itchiness and sleeplessness (if you wake 2 to 4 a.m. and have difficulty going back to sleep) are often linked with too much heat in the body? This is the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda, which may also be your intuitive understanding. Fortunately, food is our friend when we pay attention to a food’s qualities and the ways these impact our bodies, minds, and emotions.

What are cooling foods?

As you may know, Ayurveda classifies foods in several ways, including whether a food is inherently heating or cooling.

You shouldn’t be surprised to see Ayuveda’s list of cooling foods because we turn to them instinctively when the weather turns hot. Some of the most cooling foods include these:

  • Lettuce, cucumbers, celery, fennel
  • Summer squash, zucchini, asparagus, kale, and spinach
  • Coconut, apples, red and black grapes, and all melons
  • Mint, cilantro, coriander, cumin, and rosewater.
  • Tofu

Balanced cooking

Yes, on its own, tofu is naturally cooling. Combine it with other cooling foods such as fennel or celery, cilantro, and mint and you’ll create a perfect summer dish loaded with protein. However, this combination of foods is so cooling that I added some garlic to the recipe, not only for flavor but for a little balancing heat to aid digestion.

Other foods like dates, figs, cruciferous vegetables, and avocado may not seem to be obviously cooling. This is especially true of avocado because many people make guacamole by adding intensely heating ingredients such as raw onions and jalapenos to avocado—making most guacamole something to avoid during the summer! Certain legumes are also cooling, but they are more easily digested when they’re cooked with generous amounts of warming herbs and spices such as fresh garlic, fresh ginger, turmeric, and other Indian spices including fenugreek and black mustard seeds.

Just as warming spices can balance overly cooling foods such as legumes, you can enlist the help of cooling herbs and spices any time you cook foods that are inherently heating. For instance, Ayurveda classifies carrots as heating, so I serve carrots with lots of cilantro, mint, and a drizzle of coconut milk to make a perfect summer soup.

Enjoy this cooling Tofu Salad throughout the summer, and always feel satisfied at the end of your vegan meal.

PS Looking for more summer dishes? Try these summer soups: Summer Sweet Potato Soup, Corn and Avocado Soup, Broccoli Carrot Soup over basmati rice, PeanutButter Cucumber Soup, Beet and Fennel Soup, Creamy Zucchini Soup in 20 minutes or less.

 

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Easy Meals for Holiday Weekends 

As spring eases into summer with frequently warmer days and delightfully cool nights, you will enjoy this delicious gluten-free, vegan Spinach and Mushroom Pasta. (And if you don’t like mushrooms, leave them out for a simple yet satisfying meal.)

I occasionally make a dish with shiitake mushrooms because I love that umami flavor and because their well-documented health benefits include immune support and anti-inflammatory defense. Many vegans and vegetarians see mushrooms as a meat replacement. Although I personally don’t think of them as an instead-of-meat choice, they do add texture, volume, and another layer of flavor to this dish that will be welcome to any mushroom lover.

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Easy Spring Salads that Transition to Summer

Honoring the abundance of asparagus with a new recipe each spring is a Sacred & Delicious blog tradition—and today I offer you a flavorful and colorful White Bean and Asparagus Salad. As with many of my recent recipes, this recipe is open to variation. (See my postscript below if you’re looking for more asparagus recipes.)

Here are some easy variations you can make to this recipe:

  • For readers who shy away from beans, you can switch out the beans with quinoa or rice and still have a tempting dish.
  • Serve it as a side dish with a bowl of soup for a complete meal, or just eat lots of bean salad! I suggest either my recent recipe for Sweet Potato and Spinach Soup or my favorite summer Carrot Soup, which you can find in Sacred & Delicious: A Modern Ayurvedic Cookbook.
  • If you don’t like cilantro, the salad will be equally delicious with fresh basil or dill.
  • Adding mint made the dish sing for me but the recipe still works well without it.
  • If you avoid garlic, substitute fresh ginger.
  • Serve it warm or cooled, whatever suits your taste—though I think it’s best when just a little warm or room temperature.
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Healthy Comfort Food 2023 Spring Edition: Gluten-Free Vegan Pot Pie

With family coming home this week for holidays and spring breaks, it’s a perfect time to make a delicious—if perfectly imperfect— Vegan Gluten-Free Pot Pie. No doubt, this dish is a project if you make your own crust, so working folks will want to save it for the weekend unless you make the crust the day before and refrigerate it.

I call it perfectly imperfect because I am not a pie crust aficionado. Although my mother was an excellent (and revered) math teacher, she was not a baker, so I never learned to make pie crusts by her side. My friend and baking mentor, Martina Straub, helped me perfect a spelt crust many years ago when I was hoping that low-gluten goodies were good enough to support my health. But alas! I needed to go 100 percent gluten-free to heal my gut and related inflammatory conditions.

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The Last of Winter Soups

Wouldn’t you love some Sweet Potato and Spinach Soup to help you stay warm during these last frigid winter nights! Despite an early spring color extravaganza in the Carolinas since the first of February, we’ve been thrust back into the mid 30s every night—which means that hot soup is definitely on the menu!

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