Read Forks Over Knives: The Cookbook Online
Authors: Del Sroufe
Forks Over Knives: The Cookbook (14 page)
WHISK
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For combining baking ingredients and whipping up your own dressings and vinaigrettes. It’s most convenient to have a variety of different sizes.
Although there are many items in the equipment list above, many recipes in this book can be prepared with one pot or pan. Aside from that, you could get by with just a blender, for making smoothies, and a slow cooker, which allows you to start your meals in the morning and then come home from work or class to have dinner ready (or to prepare breakfast overnight—see
Slow-Cooked Steel-Cut Oats
. Many salad and wrap recipes require little or no equipment. (See also “If You’re a Student and Living in a Dorm,” below, for more about cooking equipment for college students.)
Every August and September, students move into dorm rooms on their college or university campuses. If you live in a dorm, you are usually required to purchase a meal plan as part of your housing contract, tying up any monetary freedom you may have to pursue healthier options. A few food service providers allow students to use their meal plans to purchase ingredients to use in community kitchens for meal preparation, but if not, cafeteria food may be all that is available to you, and you will have to make do with it, whatever its limitations.
If your goal is to eat a whole-foods, plant-based diet based on recipes like those in this book, even the most progressive campus dining services may prove challenging. While campus dining services are more aware than they’ve been in many years that many students don’t want to eat just pepperoni pizza and hamburgers, a whole-foods, plant-based diet may still not be on the radar of most food service directors. Your ability to educate and influence these directors will vary from campus to campus, as will your ability to navigate the available food choices.
At the very least, seek out and speak with the food service director about making some of the foods already available more healthy. Ask that steamed vegetables not be tossed with oil, or that veggie burgers be made with whole grains and without added fat. However, some colleges and universities do make an effort to work with students to improve their campus food. Penn State (University Park), for example, has a vegetarian advisory board where vegetarians, the executive chef, the Campus Dining Director, and others meet to discuss student issues and new recipe ideas. The board even has a Facebook page to facilitate easy communication.
Larger universities usually have many options for dining—cafeterias with salad bars, fast-food chains, and even smoothie stands. Nearly all colleges have salad bars, which are usually a good bet. Fresh tofu and vegetables, brown rice, beans, mixed salad greens, fresh fruit, and whole-grain breads are staples of the best-stocked salad bars. You may even be able to use salad bar ingredients to prepare your own healthy meals in a community kitchen (see “Cook in a Community Kitchen” below). Raw vegetables, beans, and grains can be found in salad bars and used in many of the recipes in this book. (One problem with that approach, however, is that many meal plans do not allow you to take more than a piece of fruit from the dining hall.)
Depending on the facilities provided by your college or university, you may be able to cook for yourself, but the ability to prepare healthy meals in a dorm setting can vary greatly and depends on a number of factors—the housing contract governing your dorm, the type of food service offered on campus, the availability of community kitchens, the willingness of campus food service to work with your diet, and your budget. Some campus dorms have
community kitchens, stoves, ovens, microwaves, and maybe even cooking utensils. Others may have only a microwave and a 2-by-2-foot refrigerator.
If you are cooking the recipes in this book in your dorm room, and a microwave is all you are allowed to have, you can still prepare most of them. The one big drawback to a microwave is that it does not brown foods well, so if you can afford one, and are permitted to, buy a microwave that doubles as a toaster oven—this will allow you to prepare foods that are browned the way you would expect them to be if they were prepared in a conventional oven.
Other options include:
BECOME A MEMBER OF YOUR LOCAL FOOD CO-OP OR START A BUYING CLUB IN YOUR DORM
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Buying in large quantities is a great way to reduce the cost of foods. It’s also a great way to create community wherever you live. Focus on whole-food staples, such as rice, beans, and local fruits and vegetables.
START A COOKING CO-OP
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Being a part of a cooking co-op can save money, and it can also reduce the amount of already limited time most of us have to cook. By sharing food preparation with another person, or group of people, you may only have to cook every third or fourth day, depending on how many people are members of your co-op. Keep in mind that you will want to find people who want to cook the way you do, with a whole-foods, plant-based approach.
If you want to start a cooking co-op, approach the food service operation on campus and see if can use your meal plan to purchase ingredients for your community kitchen. Campus food service providers have amazing buying power and access to a huge resource of raw materials, and many of the recipes in this book are made with ingredients that can be found in most grocery stores, or easily through wholesale distributors.
COOK IN A COMMUNITY KITCHEN
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If you have access to a community kitchen, you can stock it inexpensively by purchasing equipment at thrift stores or garage sales. I buy stainless steel pots and pans when I can find them used, but I usually avoid purchasing used nonstick pans—they are often chipped, and I don’t want Teflon flakes in my food. I also purchase food processors, blenders, slow cookers, and most of my utensils used. Most of the time these appliances are in good to excellent condition and cost only a fraction of what I would pay for new ones. If you can afford one, buy a vacuum sealer. It allows you to make large batches of food, individually package them, and then freeze them. You can then reheat the packages by dropping them into a pan of boiling water for 5 minutes or so. It’s not only a cheap option—it’s a great time-saver too.
IN AN IDEAL WORLD, everyone would be eating whole foods that arrive without any kind of plastic packaging and, therefore, without that long list of ingredients telling you what’s inside—some of it good, much of it bad, and some of it simply mysterious, such as strange compounds that sound less like food and more like something concocted in a chemistry lab.
In the real world, however, even people who have considered themselves healthy, whole-plant eaters for years consume some multi-ingredient foods, which are therefore processed to some degree. Some of these even contain those mystery ingredients. Given this reality, here is some advice on choosing processed products when you must purchase them.
The ingredient list is the most important piece of text on a product’s packaging because it shows, in descending order by weight, everything you are about to put into your body. Be wary of label manipulation. For example, manufacturers often alter their ingredients lists to make it seem as if certain foods are included in lesser quantities than they actually are. This happens most often with sugars. In a practice commonly known as “ingredient splitting,” manufacturers use more than one kind of sweetener, such as cane sugar, corn syrup, beet sugar, fructose, and so on, to push what might have been the top-listed ingredient (i.e., heaps of sugar) farther down the list so that healthier ingredients can be listed first.
Likewise, expect the unexpected. Foods that you may imagine to be whole and healthy may not be. For example, you may think that you know which foods are high in sodium and which are low, but look again: A seemingly innocent can of vegetable juice may contain up to half of your daily allowance of salt.
Unwanted foods pop up in unexpected places. Dairy appears more often than you would think in products that may not seem to be dairy foods at all: potato chips, breakfast cereals, tomato sauces, and many other non-dairy foods. Even some so-called dairy-free “cheeses” actually contain cow’s milk derivatives. These dairy products are often listed using terms that you might not recognize, such casein, whey, whey protein, albumen, caseinate, sodium caseinate, lactose, lactic acid, rennet, and rennin, to name a few.
Serving size and the number of servings per container are two other key pieces of package information. One of the ways that manufacturers fool consumers into buying their products is to make them seem lighter on calories and fat by reducing the serving size listed on the container. For instance, there’s one product in most kitchens whose label indicates that it contains no fat, and yet it is 100 percent fat—cooking spray. The reason cooking spray can be all fat and yet call itself “nonfat” is that, according to the Food and Drug Administration, any food that contains less than a half-gram of fat per serving can be called “fat free.” A single serving of cooking spray is one incredibly quick spritz—small enough to be less than a half-gram of fat—but most cooks use much more than that. Remember: Cooking spray is just fat under a “fat free” label. And, if you aren’t careful to check the number of servings included in that bottle of juice or can of soup (often 2.5 servings or more), you may think you’re consuming a lot less sugar or sodium than you in fact are.
Of course, one way to avoid confusion over food labels is to purchase only whole-plant foods. Broccoli, cabbage, bananas, oats, lentils, and other whole-plant foods need no ingredient lists. However, if they had labels, they would look great! Because the recipes in this book rely on ingredients like these—no mystery ingredients there—you can feel confident when cooking them that you’re giving your body just what it needs and nothing else.
In short, choose wisely when you must choose packaged foods—and the rest of the time, focus on whole-foods, plant-based recipes made in your own kitchen, like the ones you’ll find in the following pages.
