Episode 9
Introduction
Hello and welcome to episode nine of the Beyond Nourished Podcast. This is the podcast designed to help everyone - from the beginner to the advanced cook - to become a better, more efficient and health-focused cook.
I'm your host, Rachelle Girardin. I'm the founder of the Vancouver-based private chef company called Beyond Nourished. I’m also a private chef myself and the creator of the Holistic Chef Certification and Business Training Program - you can find out more about that here.
Let’s Talk “Condimeat”
In this episode, I am talking about ways that you can sneak more vegetables into not only your diet but into specific recipes.
I've just wrapped up a three-part series on how to cook mouth-watering and meat, but I never want to undermine the power of veggies and including vegetables in your diet.
One of my favourite functional medicine doctors, Mark Hyman, has a concept called “condimeat” and that we should view our relationship to meat in this fashion. Basically what he's saying is, for a healthy diet is that meat should no longer be the centrepiece of our plate, but instead, it really should be just a component to a much broader plate with much healthier ingredients. This could be grains, this could be plants - but really just no longer seeing meat as the only thing that we should be concentrating on building our beautiful plates around.
I've developed some strategies on how to balance your meat-eating with more vegetables, and the obvious thing (this isn't the sneaky part) is just to make sure that when you're eating a whole piece of meat, like a steak or a chicken breast, that the remaining part of your plate is primarily vegetables.
Getting Sneaky with Veggies
The more sneaky approach involves adding veggies to the specific recipes, and I'm talking mostly about one-pot dishes like meat sauce or meatballs, stews, soups and curry.
I'm going to break this down into more specifics so that you guys know how to integrate this into your recipes. First, when using ground meats for making meatballs or meat sauces, what you can do is start by grating in vegetables like carrots or zucchini. You can also finely chop up vegetables like peppers, celery, carrots or zucchini - it is so easy to hide these vegetables in dishes like that!
And when it comes to making meatballs and even incorporating this sneaky little trick into meat sauces, by adding in these veggies, you’re also adding a ton of flavour, and the extra vegetables create really moist meatballs and really flavorful one-pot meals in your meat sauce.
Recipes with Hidden Vegetables
I make this deluxe veggie turkey bolognese for one of my regular clients. I start by finely chopping onions, peppers, and celery, add in grated zucchini and carrots, and I finish it with handfuls of spinach. We obviously also have tomatoes in there. This client has two young picky kids, but having the vegetables cut up super small, or grating them super thin, really allows for that tricky part to come into play. A lot of the adults actually just don't even love vegetables all that much so maybe it's not even that you're just trying to get more in there more for children!
I don't recommend grating in celery because it actually gets quite stringy, and typically celery in a meatball might just add in too much crunch. You want to think about what would be the same texture as the meat itself.
When I'm making my meatballs, I'm putting in almost 50% veggies into the actual ground beef or lamb or whatever ground meat you might be using - maybe it’s turkey or chicken. It's so incredible because the extra veggies also work as a wonderful binder, so you're not only getting a lot of nutrients and a lot of flavours, but you're also getting a much more moist meal.
There are so many ways that you can incorporate veggies into your dishes. I know that not everybody loves to chop things super fine though, and so if you don't love to chop or maybe your knife skills need a little bit of work, you can always turn to your food processor!
How to Chop and Prepare Your Veggies
Now, if you don't have a food processor, my favourite kind is a Hamilton Beach Food Processor. In there, you can pulse mushrooms with the blade that sits in the bottom basin, or you could use the top grater attachment, which would quickly grate carrots or zucchini. It's just so quick and so easy!
Remember that any time that you're using vegetables and you're worried about too much moisture going into your dish, you can cook them ahead of time. This allows the moisture to slowly be released and then it doesn't add too much into your dish itself.
When you're going to make soups and stews, you can finish with that kale or spinach, or if you're cooking something with Asian fusion, maybe add in bok choy or broccoli.
Aside from knowing when to add vegetables to recipes if you are wanting it to stay crunchy or to have a bit of texture to it, and not necessarily wanting to cook it down and really hide it in there, you need to add it toward the middle or the end of your recipe. This is because if you add something like frozen peas too soon, it's going to turn the peas brown. If you want to add in broccoli, but you add it in too soon, it's going to get super mushy. If you add in any greens too soon, they might disintegrate or just really lose a little bit of their wow factor - that pop of colour.
So next time you're making a meat-focused dish, be sure to consider the condimeat theory of Dr. Mark Hyman and find sneaky ways to take a larger percentage of your recipe and fill it with veggies.
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Thank you guys so much for tuning in, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode!