Healthy cooking is an essential part of living a healthy lifestyle. When you eat outside of the home, you put your health at risk.
One of the biggest barriers to healthy cooking is time. Although we could argue that traveling to and from a fast food restaurant will take as much time as cooking a meal for yourself, there is a perception that cooking for yourself is time-consuming and tiresome.
One of the most important kitchen gadgets I depend on for healthy cooking is a mandolin slicer. A good mandolin slicer will only cost you $30-50 but will save you a tremendous amount of time and frustration in the kitchen.
Cooking Ahead of Time
A mandolin slicer allows you to pre-chop vegetables for salads and meals for the week. Instead of spending 10-15 minutes slicing sweet potatoes into french fries or circular chips, a mandolin slicer can take down a potato in 30 seconds and offer shapes of the same exact size and consistency.
Mandolin Slicer Recipes
Most vegetables listed below can be coated with a cooking oil of your choice and cooked at 400 degrees in the oven for roughly 20-3o minutes until lightly browned or to desired tenderness.
Sweet Potato Chips
One of my favorite desserts is to bake sweet potato chips with cinnamon and a little bit of salt. Sometimes I will slice onions and roast them alongside the sweet potato. The onions become sweet when roasted and make for an interesting combination.
Zucchini Chips
Zucchini tastes delicious with just salt and pepper, but garlic or italian spices such as oregano and basil, or even cilantro can be nice touches.
Roasted Rosemary Beets
Beets also become sweet when roasted. Experiment with salt, black pepper, and even rosemary. Fresh beets are wonderful for supporting liver and gall bladder health. Don’t forget that the greens are edible as well. Saute by themselves or with other greens for a healthy addition to your meal.
Experiment with golden beets and other varieties for different flavors. Be careful when slicing, red beets can stain clothing!
Roasted Turnips
Turnips are great when roasted with onions. Use black pepper and salt until slightly brown and crispy. Remember turnip greens can also be eaten.
Bonus Healthy Cooking Tips:
- Turn vegetables length-wise for more recipe variety. For instance long strips of zucchini can be used for gluten-free vegetable lasagna. Make homemade eggplant parmesan, or glaze regular vegetables with at touch of honey and the larger shape can keep the vegetables from falling through the grill.
- If you prefer your vegetables steamed, wrap in aluminum foil with a little bit of water and put on the grill.
- It’s important to understand with all of these recipes that the thinner you slice your vegetables, the shorter time they will need to cook!
- You can use vegetable scraps for a vegetable broth. Save the week’s vegetables scraps in a bag or container and boil down at the end of the week. Strain and you have a healthy and cheap base for a soup. Take the left-over, boiled down scraps and fertilize your garden or create a compost heap.
- Take the week’s leftover vegetables and make soup over the weekend with your fresh broth while you wait for the next week’s batch of groceries.
