Monday, January 22, 2018

Vegetable Lasagna - our January 2018 Suppers/#WFPB meal at St. Helena's

This time around it was all chaos, as one of the organizers was not feeling well, but we made it work regardless.

The plan was vegetable lasagna, based on a recipe from the book The Vegan Cheat Sheet by Amy Cramer and Lisa McComsey, with a side dish of spinach, and a mixed green salad with Dr. Barnard's Roasted Red Pepper Vinaigrette. (Note: the book underestimates the amount of filling you need, in my view, so below I upped the amount of cauliflower relative to the book. We found out the hard way that we ran out of the white filling too soon.)

This is a very lovely #WFPB (Whole Foods, Plant-Based) dinner. And the #not62 health campaign in the Bronx would not be the same without it! The people of the Bronx are learning.

The Menu - Recipes

Note: these quantities were for 9 people. You can adjust them accordingly. Out of our $15 grocery money we only spend about $9, so in all there was an $6.00 refund.

To begin with, here is the salad dressing:


Dr. Barnard's Roasted Red Pepper Vinaigrette



Makes enough dressing for 1 large salad

1 large roasted red pepper
1 clove garlic
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pep per
1/2 tsp fresh thyme leaves
Place all ingredients in a blender or food processor. Serve and enjoy.

For the salad we used:
1 head of red leaf lettuce
1 head of green leaf lettuce
1 head of romaine lettuce 
1 green pepper
1 red pepper
1 yellow pepper
1 red onion
6 cloves of garlic
6 sundried tomatoes
4 fresh tomatoes
2 tablespoons of Chia seeds
2 tablespoons of milled flax seeds
(Confession, we ran out of time, and we ended up making a 3/2/1 dressing with red pepper - 3 measures balsamic, 2 measures dijon mustard, and 1 measure maple syrup), so we'll do this recipe again some other time. In fact I will make it today.)

Tomato Sauce (Red)

Note: finding oil-free pasta sauce is not always easy, though there are some on the market. You can find one at Trader Joes, see this listing of OIl-free vegan products at Trader Joes, provided by Forks over Knives. Anyway, we could not find an oil-free sauce in the neighborhood, so I made it from scratch. As it was I started a bit late, but the idea was to have the pasta sauce ready when the class started at 3 PM, so that the class could make the salad, the spinach, and build the lasagna, so we just had to shove it in the oven. So we ran a bit late this time, but the meal was enjoyable.

Ingredients:
4 28Oz cans of Organic Diced Tomatoes
4 onions, cut fine
8 cloves of garlic 
10-20 leaves of fresh basil chopped fine
7 leaves of laurel
2 peppers
2 8 Oz packs of mushrooms (one white and one crimini)
1 lb of carrots shredded
Braggs Liquid Aminos to taste 

Preparation:
  • Cut up the onions fine, and start dry-roasting them in the pan
  • add the peppers, cut up, and stir it up
  • add the garlic (first flatten it and cut it fine) and stir it up
  • add the carrots (match stick cut) and stir it up
  • add the mushrooms, sliced (note the mushrooms yield a lot of moisture) and stir it up
  • when these ingredients start to get soft and feel cooked, add the tomatoes and stir it up
  • let simmer, and finish with Liquid Aminos to taste
  • make it smooth with an immersion blender

Spinach side dish

4 bundles of spinach cut in 1.5" lengths
2 onions cut up fine
7 cloves of garlic flattened and cut fine
8 chilis sliced fine
3 jalapenos, remove the seeds
(Note: the chilis were fine for most, but a bit much for a few people, but evidently, you can vary that to taste. The jalapenos are much milder.)

Again, start with dry-roasting the onlons, chilis, jalapenos and garlic, and when it is soft, add the spinach, and let it cook slowly for another 7-10 minutes.

Lasagna filling (White)

2 14 Oz packs of Silken Tofu
5-6 cups of steamed cauliflower
(Note: the original recipe suggests 2 cups of cauliflower per pack of tofu, but in practice, I find 3 cups of cauliflower per pack of tofu is a better ratio. Be sure to cook the cauliflower really soft.)

When the cauliflower is soft, add the tofu, and make a smooth sauce with a stick blender.

3 yellow squash sliced
3 zucchini sliced

Building the Lasagna

2 12 Oz packs of Whole Wheat Lasagna, or 3 packs if they are 9 Oz
some nutritional yeast

(Note: this was the fun part, doing it assembly style... We used 2 12 Oz boxes of Ronzoni Healthy Harvest Whole Wheat Lasagna - note: it is available next door, at Chang-Li Supermarket. More and more supermarkets are starting to carry it.)
Preheat the oven to 425 F
  • start with a layer of pasta sauce
  • layer whole wheat lasagna strips in the sauce (typically 3 strips make one layer)
  • layer on the white filling
  • make a layer of sliced squash/zucchini
  • repeat until the pan is full, finish with a layer of red sauce on top.
 In the oven for ca 45 mins.

Serving suggestions:
The salad is obviously colorful.
The main dish is red/white, with a side of green.
For topping, you can sprinkle on some nutritional yeast

Conclusions

The above is a very complete and satisfying meal. And, it was fun to build with the group, even though this time we went far over schedule, mainly because I started too late to make the pasta sauce and the Cauliflower/tofu filling in advance.
As a reminder, why do we avoid ADDED oils? In other words, why did I make fresh tomato sauce because I could not find an oil-free sauce nearby? Because added oils paralyze our bloodvessels for 3-6 hours after every meal. The blood vessels can no longer expand with extra energy expenditure. It is tremendously important for heart and vascular health to understand that you do not want any added oil in your diet. Here you can hear it from the horse's mouth: Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn says no oil. I repeat, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. says: "No oil!" If you're still not clear, here is Dr. John McDougall saying the same thing.


Another feature: this meal really embodied 2 of our 4-6 daily portions of green leafy vegetables - a salad and a side dish of spinach. Green leafies provide massive doses of anti-oxidants, and by chewing them we are converting nitrates to nitrites and enabling our digestive system to manufacture nitric oxide, which is what keeps your endothelium healthy.



The point of the exercise however, remains, that in the spirit of the Suppers program, this is all about home cooking, and about creating a mutual support mechanism on a local level. Audelle has been doing Suppers meetings at her home in Throgs Neck for a long time, but doing this at the St. Helena's school cafeteria enables a slightly larger group.
Meanwhile, the idea of sharing the grocery bill, also teaches us that a very healthy and abundant Whole Foods Plant-Based meal can be made on a budget. In this case, we came out to $9 per person. The highest we ever did was $11.50 per person, but it seems that we can typically do these productions for under $10 pp in groceries. You can do it for less, or you can spend more. In the long term you are reducing your medical expenses and nearly completely eliminates the need for any supplements. In this case we added chia seeds and milled flax seed to the salad for Omega-3s and as long as you keep that in mind, the only supplement you should ever need is a vitamin B12 every other day.
If you think about it, the degenerative diseases which consume 86% of our healthcare expenditure, are diseases of affluence and can largely (ca 75%) be prevented or largely reversed with the Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet. It produces such nutritional abundance that the mere thought of supplements is silly. On top of that, there is more and more evidence that isolated supplements are not absorbed as well by the body, or even absorbed at all, as nutrients which are consumed as part of a whole foods diet. In some cases, supplements can even be toxic.

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