Christina Cooks: Back to the Cutting Board

(soft music) We hear a lot about the Mediterranean and its impact on wellness.

Is there more to this gorgeous region than blue seas and sunny skies?

S, s, s, and it's all about what's on your plate.

Time to get Back to the Cutting Board and discover the joys of the world's healthiest diet, today on Christina Cooks.

(theme music) (announcer) Underwriting for Christina Cooks is provided by Suzanne's Specialties, offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties, sweetness the way Mother Nature intended.

Additional funding is also provided by Old Yankee Cutting Boards, designed for durability and custom crafted by hand with Yankee pride and craftsmanship.

Jonathan's Spoons, individually handcrafted from cherry wood, each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

Additional funding is also provided by: Hi, I'm Christina Pirello, and this is Christina Cooks, where each week we take fresh seasonal ingredients and whip them into amazing dishes.

Is it all plant-based?

Yeah.

Is it all delicious?

You bet it is.

Did you know that just this year, for the first time in I think about a decade, the Mediterranean diet was named the healthiest diet in the world?

"Why?," you might be asking.

Well, it's basically whole grains, beans, vegetables, great olive oil, fruit, right?

They used a little animal food here and there, but it's optional.

So it is, in fact, the healthiest diet in the world, and it's delicious, so we need to pay attention.

In America, we have over 350 million people.

If you combine all the lifestyle diseases, obesity, all of it together, more of us are sick than not sick.

We gotta be thinking about the way we eat, guys.

Not just for us, but for the planet, but also it can be delicious, as you'll see in this very first dish that we're gonna make.

We're making a hot and spicy black bean soup.

Now, black beans are high in folate, they're high in magnesium, so they help your nerves to stay clam.

They're rich in fiber, they're high in protein.

They give you everything you need from a protein without any saturated fats.

So, we're gonna take-- the extra-virgin olive oil is gonna be the start of our soup.

Extra-virgin olive oil, in the Mediterranean diet, is liquid gold.

To be healthy, they recommend two to four tablespoons a day.

It's not a lot of oil, but please make sure you're using extra-virgin.

If you're buying a vat of oil for four dollars at a big box store, it's probably not extra-virgin olive oil.

The really true extra-virgin olive oil is probably about $20 for a bottle, like less than a liter.

It's worth the investment.

It's a monounsaturated fat, it's loaded with oleic acid, it's got heart healthy benefits, anti-cancer compounds.

Spend the money.

Skip the extra t-shirt and buy a bottle of olive oil.

Okay, so into this oil, without the heat being turned on, goes red onions.

Some chili flakes.

Now you may use as much or as little as you like, but remember that chili stimulates circulation and helps the body to get rid of toxins.

Now we'll turn on the heat, and you do this because you want to maintain the flavor of the olive oil.

When you eat the soup, you want that finish of, "Oh, that's olive oil."

If you're not gonna do that, if you're gonna heat it, then just use any oil that you like.

And also, something you should know, extra-virgin olive oil, real extra-virgin olive oil, is 98 calories a tablespoon, whereas other oils are 120.

Look what I just did for you.

Okay, next will go in some garlic.

We're gonna take garlic and mince it moderately finely.

The more finely you mince garlic, the stronger the taste.

So if you want it to be more mild and not a strong garlic taste, then don't mince it quite so finely.

If you want like a medium garlic taste, you do it about like this.

If you don't like garlic at all, leave it out.

But remember that garlic is antibacterial, antifungal, and during World War II, they used it when they ran out of antibiotics.

So, might not want to dismiss garlic quite so quickly.

The next thing to go in is butternut squash.

Which is loaded with beta-carotenes.

A tiny pinch of salt.

And now we can stir and start to pull the soup together.

This is a really quick soup.

You may use canned black beans, you can cook the beans from dry, which is what I like to do often.

But when I'm in a hurry, I'm not gonna lie to ya and tell ya there's not canned organic beans in my pantry.

We're gonna use canned beans today so that the soup cooks in about 30 minutes.

Next we'll take a carrot and dice it.

You just want to take the top and bottom off the carrot if it seems like it's a little bit dry.

And then we're gonna cut it into long spears.

And you do this so that the carrot is diced.

When the pieces of the carrot are small, or any other vegetable that you add to your soup, the soup becomes sweeter, right?

And the job of soup in our diet is to help us to feel relaxed in the digestive tract so that we're more easily satisfied by our food and it helps us to assimilate the nutrients of the rest of the meal.

It's kind of why soup is served first.

You never go to Thanksgiving dinner and it's all over and somebody goes, "Soup?"

It's always first.

So you just dice up the carrot.

And that's gonna go into our pot.

And then the next thing to go in is fresh or frozen organic corn kernels.

Corn is a whole grain, so it's got high fiber.

And it will help digestion.

A little stir.

You can smell the heat of the soup, right?

If you can smell it and it smells delicious, it's hot enough.

If you can smell it and you can't breathe, it's a little too much heat.

So then you add something a little sweet.

Brown rice syrup, a little white wine, to take down the heat.

Next goes a cup... ...of black beans.

Okay.

And then while the beans start to simmer, we'll add some ginger.

So we have garlic, hot spice, and ginger.

So you're gonna sweat a little bit from the hot spice, but the ginger's gonna keep the body warm.

Just gonna take two little slices of ginger.

Cut it into matchstick pieces.

Cut across those matchstick pieces into a tiny little mince.

And they're gonna go in.

They can go in at any point during your saut.

Doesn't matter.

The longer the ginger cooks, the warmer tasting the soup will get.

One last stir.

Enough water to generously cover your ingredients so that your soup's not too thin.

You can always add water, right?

If you were cooking this from dried beans, you would add four times the amount of water as beans, but since I'm using cooked, canned beans, they're gonna go in with just enough water to cover your ingredients so your soup's not too thin.

And the final thing, a bay leaf.

Now, bay leaves contain monosodium glutamic acid.

Say that with me.

Monosodium glutamic acid, which is a natural form of MSG, and it prevents you from becoming musical when you eat beans.

So that's going to go into the soup and cook with them.

In 25 to 30 minutes, we'll have a perfect black bean soup.

-Can a vegetable be a fruit?

-A fruit can be a vegetable.

What?

It can be both?

What happens if you swallow the seeds?

(unintelligible) -I don't get it.

-I am so confused.

So, I must get a million emails a week, well, maybe not a million, about confusion about healthy living and how do I get started, how do I do it, whatever.

So I thought, "Let me talk to some people who have real questions and see if I can help to clear things up."

Maybe for you at home, maybe you have the same questions they have.

So I'm with Denise Moser, who's a singer/songwriter and custom songwriter and cooking enthusiast.

And I think you have a question for me.

(Denise) I do, so, I go to the grocery store, and I see all these beautiful vegetables, and I have good ideas and I put them in my cart, and I take them home and I cook, and I'm one person.

And I sometimes waste things, and I really don't want to.

So I'm just wondering if you have a, um, just a way to think about maybe grocery shopping so that I can have a variety in my meals and not waste food.

So, food waste is a huge problem in our country.

45% of the food that's bought for homes in America is wasted.

So that's not only a problem for you monetarily, but it's a problem.

So the thing that I recommend people do is, it's not necessarily about shopping differently, but it's more like what can I do that I can make in batches and freeze in portioned containers so that-- let's say you have three different kinds of soups in the freezer or two chilis or a couple things of roasted veg, or you buy a big bunch of basil, blanche it, towel dry it, and put it in the freezer so you always have fresh basil.

You do that kind of thing.

And then if the greens are all in big bundles, just take the tie off and make a smaller bundle, because they sell them by the pound not by the bunch.

So buy smaller amounts so you get bigger variety, and cook in batches and freeze it, and that should begin to help you solve the problem.

-Sounds good.

-Cool!

(Denise) Thanks.

(Christina) So, now that we've left Spain, our black bean soup is cooking, now we're gonna move to Italy, my home away from home and where my heart lives nine times out of ten.

This is a beans and greens dish.

It's basic Italian cooking.

There's not an Italian in the world that doesn't make some form of beans and greens.

We're gonna use cannellini beans, which have been studied and are scientifically proving to help lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and plaque from veins and arteries.

They're brilliant, and they're used in almost every Italian dish, whether there's meat involved or not.

I swear if they could make a gelato out of cannellini beans, Italians would do it.

So we're gonna make a really quick, really simple dish.

So the first thing we're gonna do is visit this pepper that's roasting over an open flame.

You finally get to burn something.

You put it right on your direct flame, you let the skin get black and charred.

And what you're doing is not only giving the pepper that lovely smoky flavor, but doing what, in the Mediterranean diet, they know, wisely, is getting rid of the alkaloid solanine, which aggravates arthritic joints.

By roasting and peeling the pepper, you neutralize those so you can have your pepper and eat it too, right?

Okay.

So now we're gonna take some extra-virgin olive oil while that roasts.

And then I'll explain the rest of that pepper-roasting process.

I am generous with olive oil, just so you know.

We'll take some sliced garlic, because I want a more mild flavor here.

Some red onion.

And then we'll turn on the flame.

And while the onions begin to sweat, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit more about the roasted pepper.

So once all the sides are blackened like this, then you either put it into a bowl with a plate over it or a paper sack, and you let that skin steam off for about five to ten minutes.

And then the pepper will look like this, sort of wilted and, you know, the skin looks a little grungy, and then you simply push the black off with your finger.

Now, this all sticks to your hands.

You can wash your hands as many times as you want to.

Try not to wash the pepper, because then you wash away all that smoky taste.

Little pieces of char is okay.

You just want to make sure that you don't wash the pepper too much, otherwise you lose the flavor.

And, yeah, it's still good, but not as good as when you leave it.

Little pinch of salt.

And then we'll go back to our onions.

And we're gonna saut them until they're slightly translucent.

If you don't saut the onions long enough, they become more bitter tasting and they become the overpowering flavor of your dish.

And we want the onions to be sweet, because we're gonna combine those sweet onions with a bitter green.

So you don't want bitter and bitter, you want bitter and sweet.

Just like in life, you want bitter and sweet.

So as soon as the onions become translucent, meaning that you-- they have a little bit of clarity to them, but also when you first start to saut them, you smell a really strong sulfur smell.

As soon as that smell is gone, you're ready to move on.

You want to keep your heat to about medium, so you don't burn the garlic.

If you burn the garlic, you should just toss it all and start over.

It's probably one of the worst food flavors in the world.

Next goes in some carrot that's been diced so that it cooks quickly.

Another tiny pinch of salt.

Our roasted peppers that were diced.

When you roast peppers and you put them in the sack and you let them steam off, make sure they're pretty cool when you start to peel them, because you're gonna pull the seed bed out, and when you pull that seed bed out, if the pepper's really hot, you can get a steam burn.

So just be a little bit careful with that.

And then while that sweats, we're gonna add some diced celery.

Now the celery's not gonna cook for a long time.

I want the celery to be a little crunchy so that everything in the dish isn't soft.

When you're cooking, you gotta think about that kind of thing.

You want to create a variety of textures and flavors and colors so that your dish is really appetizing and people can't wait to eat your food, right?

One of the beauties of the Mediterranean diet is by using fresh ingredients as much as they do, and using them cooked so simply with olive oil, garlic, salt, and maybe a little lemon juice, you end up with food that people can't wait to eat.

The fact that it's healthy for them is a nice side benefit.

Touch more salt.

Just stir the celery in really quickly.

And next go our cooked cannellini beans.

I cooked these three parts water to one part beans with a bay leaf so that you don't become musical because the bay leaf has compounds that tenderize the protein and fiber in the beans so that they become easy to digest.

Cannellini beans, if you cook them a long time, will almost create their own gravy around themselves.

They're delicious.

And then our greens.

The greens are bitter.

This is escarole.

Make sure you wash it really well, 'cause it grows in sandy soil.

And while it won't hurt you, it's not a really nice mouthfeel.

And escarole belongs in the category of bitter greens, and bitter greens play a huge part in the Mediterranean diet because they help to support the liver in its function of metabolizing and detoxing in the body.

So, in Chinese medicine, we say that the liver also governs whether or not you are patient or impatient.

So if someone offers you bitter greens and you say, "I don't really like them," in that cranky way, you probably should eat them 'cause you need them if you're cranky.

So when you eat bitter greens, you're a happier camper, and everyone else around you is too.

And you just want to saut these until they wilt just a little bit.

If you overcook escarole, like you see in many restaurants, they cook it until it's a really dark green, it's really super bitter.

You want to just have it wilt.

As soon as that happens, this is gonna go right into our dish.

This dish is so quick and so easy.

It takes a little bit of time if you decide to cook your cannellini beans from scratch from dried beans.

If you want to use canned ones, this dish is ready in five minutes.

So, there's our cannellini beans, and now we have to finish off our soup.

So what we're gonna do is just take the lid off.

We're gonna season it with salt.

Maybe, since it's four cups of water, about a teaspoon of salt.

Then give it a little stir.

Let the salt cook for a little bit, and we're gonna get the garnish ready.

When you cook soups, you want to serve them with a garnish, scallion, parsley, basil, whatever floats your boat, because the soup is cooked for a while, and a bean soup has heavy protein, right?

It's got beans, it's a little bit on the heavier side.

So you want to garnish it to kind of lift the soup up again so that it tastes fresh.

So, now that the soup is ready...

I love bean soups.

I think that they are exquisite.

When you serve soup that's been cooked with a bay leaf, either cook around the bay leaf or try to pull it out or you have to give a prize if somebody gets the bay leaf.

And then you garnish it with some fresh scallions.

And the soup is ready to go.

So I know we have beans and beans, but these two dishes are totally different, do different things for the body, but both will make you incredibly healthy.

So, one of my favorite Italian cookies I hardly ever got to make because the base of them is almond paste.

And almond paste is basically almond flour and sugar to create this rich paste out of which they make things like marzipan and, you know, whatever, whatever.

But it's a ton of sugar, and I really don't want to eat it.

So one day I was playing around in the kitchen and I figured out how to make almond paste, and that's why I'm showing you these pine nut cookies today.

So, it's really simple.

You take a half-cup of almond flour.

You take a half-cup of whipped rice syrup.

You can also use regular rice syrup, but I really like the whipped for this recipe.

It's really gooey.

Okay, so that goes into your bowl.

A teaspoon of vanilla, just like this.

And two tablespoons of water.

If you say 1,001 when you're pouring something, it's a tablespoon, roughly.

Now we're just gonna whip this into a creamy paste.

And it takes on the texture of almond paste, because basically it's almond paste.

So once it's nice and creamy, just set your mixer aside.

And then I like to just pull my almond paste to the center, 'cause now I'm gonna measure the rest of my ingredients.

This is a one-bowl wonder.

I'm gonna take eight tablespoons of vegan butter, whatever kind you like.

And you can see I measure not particularly carefully.

And it doesn't matter so much.

You know, it's like the more vegan butter you put, the more moist the cookies, but seven to eight tablespoons is perfect.

A touch more vanilla.

You can also use almond extract, but be careful with almond extract because it can turn the cookie bitter.

So I tend to use more vanilla than I do almond.

You want a pinch of salt.

To make them sweet, six tablespoons of coconut sugar, which is a low glycemic index sugar that is made from the sap of a coconut tree, and it tastes like brown sugar and it's really yummy.

And when you bake with it, it's a 1:1 substitution with regular sugar.

That goes in, that goes in.

We need a half-teaspoon each baking soda and baking powder, so the cookies rise.

And then we need one cup of flour.

I tend to use whole wheat pastry or whole wheat sprouted flour because they're a nice tender flour, and whole wheat sprouted flour is amazing because it digests in the body like a vegetable instead of like a carbohydrate.

It's amazing and it's a nice, light end product.

So in goes the flour.

And then take your mixer on slow, so you don't have flour everywhere.

And you just whip this into a soft dough.

When you get about 80% mixed, stop and add a half-cup of pine nuts.

Now, usually pine nut cookies are rolled in the pine nuts so the pine nuts are on the outside, but since there's no egg in these, since I don't use egg in my cooking, I've discovered I have to put the pine nuts in the cookie or they fall off in the oven.

So I kind of want the pine nuts in the cookies, since they're pine nut cookies.

And listen, I know, I know what you're gonna say before you say it.

Pine nuts are expensive.

Can I use another nut?

Yeah, of course you can, but then they're not pine nut cookies, are they?

These are so special and so richly flavored, that, trust me, you'll want to use pine nuts.

So you're gonna roll them into a little disc like this onto a baking sheet and flatten them.

And you need to give them a little space, they are gonna rise and get a little bigger.

So I tend to use like, you know, a smaller sheet and use a dozen.

You want to put your rack in the middle oven so that the cookies bake evenly.

And you just roll these into like walnut-sized spheres.

Get 12 on the sheet.

The pine nuts peek out.

Okay, last two go on the tray.

And then I'm gonna take these to the oven.

Okay.

These cookies are gonna bake at 350 for about 12 minutes, and, trust me, once you've tasted them, it is the longest 12 minutes of your life.

So let's wait.

And wait.

(clock ticking) Okay, the cookies should be ready.

And after 12 long minutes, you have these gorgeous cookies.

And then you just place them onto a plate, and they're tender and cakelike and delicious and amazing.

And you should let them cool before you eat them, but, I don't know, instead, what are you waiting for?

Let's get Back to the Cutting Board, and I'll see you next time on Christina Cooks.

(announcer) Underwriting for Christina Cooks is provided by Suzanne's Specialties, offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties, sweetness the way Mother Nature intended.

Additional funding is also provided by Old Yankee Cutting Boards, designed for durability and custom crafted by hand with Yankee pride and craftsmanship.

Jonathan's Spoons, individually handcrafted from cherry wood, each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

Additional funding is also provided by: You can find today's recipes and learn more by visiting our website at ChristinaCooks.com.

And by following Christina on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

The companion cookbook, "Back to the Cutting Board," takes you on a journey to re-engage with the soul of cooking.

With more than 100 plant-based recipes, finding the joy in cooking has never been simpler.

To order your copy for $20 plus handling, call 800-266-5815.

Add Christina's iconic book, "Cooking the Whole Foods Way," with 500 delicious plant-based recipes.

To order both books for $39.95 plus handling, call 800-266-5815.

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