Low in calories, high in fibre, shredded reds offer oodles of goodness to heart health as well as to your appetite. Topped with walnuts, this is the ultimate delicious side dish to any meal and hugely good for you too. Coupled with roasted garlic, red cabbage builds on heart health and immunity!
Lean into something not too heavy. This dish is best served with something a little less dry and mildly sweet. Look for a Pinot Grigio or a Gewürztraminer.
Looking for a full-meal veggie deal? Add cooked and cooled barley to these reds. Toss and dress.
Per serving:
Preheat oven to 400 F (200 C).
Slice top from garlic to expose cloves. Place cut side up in small baking dish. Drizzle cut cloves with olive oil. Add 3 to 4 Tbsp (45 to 60 mL) water to small dish. Cover tightly and bake in oven for 40 to 50 minutes, or until cloves are soft. Remove from oven. Place garlic in bowl until cool enough to handle.
Pop cooled cloves from their skins into high-speed blender. Add remaining dressing ingredients. Whirl, scraping down sides of blender, adding in a couple splashes of water until dressing is of pourable consistency. Add a pinch more salt to taste, if you wish. Transfer to jar, seal tightly, and refrigerate until ready to use, or for up to a week.
Bring pan of water to a boil. Remove from heat. Add cabbage and immediately drain in sieve and then plunge into ice water. You want cabbage to be brightly coloured but still crisp. Shake well, and spin in salad spinner. Add to large serving bowl along with radicchio and Belgian endive. Gently toss to evenly distribute.
Spoon into large serving dish and drizzle with Roasted Garlic Tahini Dressing. Sprinkle with nuts and dried berries, and serve.
Lime juice and ginger add a tropical whiff to this French-Japanese mashup, where seaweed tendrils and Dijon mustard bring out the umami flavours in mushrooms and eggplant. The ingredients might seem to be strange bedfellows, but they work. The result is somewhere between a quiche and a soufflé, with a gluten-free eggplant crust featuring punchy mustard and citrus. This makes for a hearty vegetarian main for brunch, lunch, or dinner with a side salad, or a filling side dish. Fresh or dried If you don’t have fresh thyme and parsley, use 1 tsp (5 mL) dried thyme (divided) and 1 Tbsp (15 mL) dried parsley. The flavours won’t be as pungent, but a little flavour is better than none.
These are the perfect two-bite appetizers. Though the first bite likely won’t “wow” you, the more you chew, the more the salt from the dulse soaks into the avocado and tomato. Wait for it. You can also turn these into breakfast à la avocado toast by substituting a piece of your favourite bread for a slice of baguette. What’s in a name? Theoretically, this should be called a “DLTA” because of the avocado (dulse, lettuce, tomato, and avocado). And if you left out the lettuce, you’d have a “DTA.” A DTA would arguably be a better overall eating experience, since lettuce slightly waters down the rich and creamy result and makes it harder to keep the tomatoes from sliding off the top of the crostini. But the juicy lettuce is actually helpful, since it spreads the salt from the dulse throughout the entire bite, making the “wow” moment come sooner. Besides, neither DLTA nor DTA is as fun an acronym as DLT.
This triple-threat recipe is made with (up to) three types of seaweed. Wakame is essential for the pesto, but kombu boosts the umami punch of sautéed garlic and cherry tomatoes, while kelp noodles are a low-carb substitute for flour-based noodles. Because kelp noodles can be hard to find (you’ll likely need to order them online), feel free to use your favourite boxed linguine, zucchini noodles, shirataki konjac, tofu, or yam noodles instead. You can also leave out the vongole (clams) to keep the recipe plant-based, or use mussels, which are usually more affordable than clams. Both clams and mussels are generally sustainable, as, like seaweed, they’re farmed without feed or antibiotics, unlike many farmed fish operations. Double-duty pesto Make a double batch of seaweed pesto, and enjoy it with eggs, scrambled tofu, or toast.
Spicy popcorn? You bet. This Japanese seven-spice blend combines salty and spicy notes for a healthy snack. If you don’t make your own togarashi, check the container before adding it to your popcorn to make sure it doesn’t contain salt. For an even simpler recipe, skip the togarashi and just grind a few pieces of nori and a pinch of salt in a blender or spice grinder to sprinkle on your popcorn instead. If you’re fresh out of nori, you can always grind wakame, arame, or dulse instead, leaving out the pinch of salt for dulse or any seaweed you taste and find already salty. Shichimi togarashi This customizable spice blend generally features sansho pepper, a.k.a. Japanese prickly ash, a green peppercorn with a citrusy taste, along with seaweed flakes, chili pepper, and dried citrus peel—often yuzu or mandarin orange. If you can’t find sansho, look for Sichuan peppercorn, which has a slightly stronger mouth-tingling effect. You can buy dried orange, mandarin, or tangerine peel. Or you can dehydrate your own, in which case you might as well dehydrate a 1/8 in (3 mm) thick piece of fresh ginger along with the peel. If you can’t handle a lot of chili pepper heat, reduce the pepper to your taste.