For
The Love of Your Heart
Easy Esselstyn Diet Recipes
with Pictures: Cooking
Baby Steps
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Cooking Baby Steps |
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Klaus Community Supported Agriculture Daily
Dinner Pictures for a Month Daily Diet Itemized
for a Month |
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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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! |
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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. |
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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. |
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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
Ingredients: Corn syrup solids, tomato, dehydrated onion, dehydrated garlic, autolyzed yeast extract, carrot, basil, celery seed,
kelp, parsley, spinach, turmeric, bay. |
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Salt-free
cooking is a challenge in itself. Use herbs and spices that do let you not miss the
salt!
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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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Comments: Write to heart@youworldtree.com and we
will add your contribution here. |
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