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Easy Esselstyn Diet Recipes with Pictures: Cooking Baby Steps

 

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The Basics in Meal Preparation

 

Just pick any of the recipes and try it using whatever cooking ware is available to you. Find the ingredients or something that comes close to them and use any pot or knife for doing the job. Repeat and change this receipt until the outcome is satisfying to you. That is how I was starting 2.5 years ago numbering my improved recipes in sequence. So the low numbers were my easy starters. After about 2 years of experience I felt encouraged to try more complex meals with Recipe 069 and that is when the real fun with cooking started.

 

If you like it and feel that you would like to get into this kind of meal preparation get serious step by step. Since cooking is an art and not a science, there are as many different ways of cooking as there are cooks. No one can tell you what is best for you. You must find your own way to enjoyment from your own art of cooking!

 

After a few meals, it may be time to look for some good startup cooking tools and ingredients that help making the routine tasks more enjoyable. There are four basic and repetitive tasks: Preparing, cutting, cooking, and cleaning up. So you will need a good knife and cutting board, a good cooking pot, and a few basic ingredients and utilities. Here are my suggestions for getting off to a great start.

 

Baby steps for cutting:

 

Start with a large and a small wooden cutting board,

a utility knife and a simple vegetable cutting knife.

 

 

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A vegan kitchen requires only a few routine tasks and any conventional small utility knife will be just fine. However, cleaning greens, cutting fruit or opening packaging do not require the sharpest but most universal blades. I found this in a grapefruit knife that has a slightly bended blade with a sharp point and serration on both sides of the blade. If you find such a knife in a kitchen supply store, get it because it is very handy for the most common tasks.

Whereas carnivores need many different knifes for separating meats from various bones and slicing them in countless ways, vegetarians do only one thing: cutting greens and vegetables. Contrary to meat, plants are often fibrous and hard but are easily cut with a mini-saw for generating clean cuts. Thus I found it useful if a vegetable cutting knife has small sharp serrations that can separate even tough materials without tearing.  Such pragmatic approach to vegetable cutting allows for an inexpensive knife of little maintenance. I suggest that a good vegetable cutting knife should be the first investment for a vegan kitchen.

 

A very specialized almost daily task is the peeling of vegetables and fruit ranging from potatoes, carrots and beats to apples, pears and mango. The most commonly used potato peeler is so universal that it is a must to have.

 

 

 

Baby steps for cooking:

 

The most common way for browning in fat-free cooking

is braising. The vegetables are first seared without oil in a very hot skillet

and the forming caramelized caked layer is then solubilized with vegetable broth.

 

 

 

Daily braising required a high quality stainless steel saucepan. These are the most wanted features:

1.      Thermal Barrier Handles are essential because the pot gets very hot.

2.      Glass Lid is a must have because most greens have to be cooked only very short to a point just before wilting.

 

The pictured saucepan is in use for 1.5 years and shows little wear and tear!

 

 

Even heat distribution is essential if braising is done in a skillet.

 

1.      Solid bottom plate – as used in cooking ware for electric ovens – is distributing the heat evenly.

2.      Sides must be rounded at their base for easy stirring and turning over of content.

 

 

In order to protect the surface of the steel pan from scratches only wooden spatulas should be used.

 

1.      Bamboo spatula with diagonal straight edge and rounded corner.

 

A wooden spatula is indispensable for solubilizing caramelized layers providing some mechanical help, as well as for keeping foods like beans or peas from setting, caking and browning at the bottom.

 

 

 

 

 

Baby steps for preparing:

 

The low-salt and low-fat diet relies on water-based stock flavored only with vegan products (and as indicated with no added salt and fat). An essential product is provided by Frontier and is used here in almost every recipe. As compensation for the lack of salt double amounts of broth powder are used (2 tablespoons per cup of water - according to the manufacturer) in comparison to the use of “traditional” vegetable broth powder. Thus, this broth powder should be stocked by the pound.

 

 

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Low Fat & Low Sodium

Vegetable Broth

Reduced Sodium - Powder

Frontier Natural

For resources see under Finding Products: Cooking Essentials.

Label:

Serving Size 1 tsp (4.5g), 22 Servings

Total Fat

0g

 

    Saturated

0g

 

    Trans Fat

0g

 

Cholesterol

0mg

 

Sodium

20mg

1%

Potassium

mg

 

Total Carbohydrate

13g

   Dietary Fiber

1g

 

   Sugars

2g

 

Protein

1g

 

Ingredients:

Corn syrup solids, tomato, dehydrated onion, dehydrated garlic, autolyzed yeast extract, carrot, basil, celery seed, kelp, parsley, spinach, turmeric, bay.

 

 

 

Salt-free cooking is a challenge in itself. Use herbs and spices that do let you not miss the salt!

 

General

Garlic and onion powder

Cilantro and Parsley

Carrots

Ginger, nutmeg, marjoram, cloves

Corn

Cumin, curry powder, parsley, paprika

Potatoes

Dill, paprika, sage, parsley

Green Beans

Tarragon, thyme, dill, curry powder

Tomatoes

Basil, dill, parsley, oregano

 

 

 

 

 

Finally: The kitchen cleanup

 

Almost never mentioned in cooking is the afterwards-cleanup. In fat-free cooking cleaning of dishes and utensils is a breeze because no detergent and no scrubbing are required for removing caked oily and fatty food residues. Just rinsing under hot water with gentile brushing will remove all adhering traces of cooked goods without the use of detergent or dishwasher. I am cleaning up while I am preparing the food so that, after everything is prepared and placed on serving dishes, the kitchen is sparkling clean. This takes the enjoyment of cooked meals to an even higher level of worry-free satisfaction.

 

 

The picture above is showing the cleaned pots and pans used for preparation of Brussels Sprouts Royal (003) while enjoying the prepared delicious meal pictured below.

 

 

 

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