Vegetable Smoothie Vitamin Bomb

 

Pure Vegetable Smoothie Vitamin Bomb

Serves 2 glasses

Ingredients:

1. A handful of spinach
2. A handful of kale
3. 1-2 carrots chopped
4. 1 inch of ginger diced
5. 1/2 cup fresh skimmed milk or water

Directions:

Add all ingredients into a power blender and blend.

Additional Information:

This is a vitamin bomb. It actually tastes good on its own, at least to me. After drinking, you will feel very good. It's like your body is thanking you :-) 

It is very simple. You only need 2 - 3 main ingredients: spinach, kale and carrots. Adding any others (cabbage, beetroots, tomatoes, raspberiies, blueberries, etc.) are just bonus adding to variety and depending on what are available in your pantry.

J likes to add a banana to sweeten it, while I drink it without any sweetener.

I love my Magimix power blender. It has been with us for many years and is still working as well as ever. Worth every penny :-)

You can get Magimix from Magasin Departmental Store. They have discounts on Magimix power blender on a regular basis.

Try it :-)

References:

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/best-vegetables-to-juice#TOC_TITLE_HDR_12

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2019/06/06/nutrients-in-spinach-kale/

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/kale-vs-spinach

https://www.everydayhealth.com/diet-nutrition-pictures/best-salad-greens-for-your-health.aspx

Today's Vitamin Bomb contains spinach, kale, carrots, ginger, raspberries, fresh milk (and banana for J)

Vitamin Bomb is ready :-)

Bottoms up :-)

Yellow Smoothie

Ingredients:
1. 1.5 cup fresh skimmed milk
2. 1 tsp fla xseeds
3. 1/2 cup (30g) cabbage sliced into smaller pieces
4. 1 tsp ginger finely cut
5. 3 slices of pineapple cut into smaller pieces
6. 1 banana fresh or frozen

Directions:
Add all ingredients in the order listed above into a blender and blend until smooth.

Additional Information:
The other FECS are ok with this smoothie, although not to crazy about it. I am not really a fan of pineapple, but our Little FECS likes pineapple. Baby FECS basically doesn't want to drink any smoothies, so it doesn't matter about this yellow smoothie.

Chinese Quinoa Egg Fried Rice with Cabbage

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1. 1 cup quinoa cooked according to instructions here, or cooked according to the way you cook rice.
2. 1/3 cabbage cut into strips
3. 3 eggs
4. 1 cooked chicken de-boned (optional)
5. 2 cloves garlic chopped
6. 2 stalks spring onion chopped
7. 2 TBS cooking oil
8. 1 tsp dark soy sauce
9. 1 tsp light soy sauce
10. Salt & pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Heat 1 TBS cooking oil on pan under medium fire (no. 7-8 on my stove).
2. Fry egg, dish out and set aside.
3. Add 1 TBS cooking oil and heat up pan on high heat.
4. Fry garlic until golden.
5. Add spring onions and fry for a few seconds until fragrant.
6. Add cabbage and fry for a minute.
7. Add quinoa, fry and mix well.
8. Add back the egg and chopped it up into bite size as you stir and mix with the quinoa.
9. Add cooked chicken, stir and mix well until the heat is evenly distributed.
10. Add a bit of dark and light soy sauce, mix well, dish up and serve.

Additional Information:

We had some left-over quinoa and chicken, so I decided to make into "fried rice" today. If you don't have any cooked chicken and want to make from scratch, you can use chicken breast cut into bite size and marinade with a tsp spoon corn starch, 1 tsp soy sauce and a bit of salt and pepper and fry them in the pan separately.

Quinoa is very nutritious, more so than rice. We are trying to find more ways of preparing quinoa, so that we will eat more quinoa. This is "quinoa" fried rice done according to Chinese fried rice method. I tried it today and it is very tasty and both my Mr. FECS and our Little FECS like it.

You can find another quinoa fried rice recipe here.

1. Heat 1 TBS cooking oil on pan under medium fire (no. 7-8 on my stove).
2. Fry egg, dish out and set aside.

3. Add 1 TBS cooking oil and heat up pan on high heat.

4. Fry garlic until golden.

5. Add spring onions and fry for a few seconds until fragrant (oops, I forgot to take a picture)

 6. Add cabbage and fry for a minute.

 7. Add quinoa, fry and mix well.

 8. Add back the egg and chopped it up into bite size as you stir and mix with the quinoa.

 9. Add cooked chicken, stir and mix well until the heat is evenly distributed.

10. Add a bit of dark and light soy sauce, mix well, dish up and serve.

Cabbage Plus 6 Fruit juice

Makes > 1 litre

Ingredients:

1. 3 red apples
2. 1 red pepper bell cut into sticks
3. 1 orange peeled and cut
4. 3 large carrots cut into sticks
5. 3 kiwis sliced
6. A handful of baby spinach (approx. 200g)
7. A handful of purple cabbage

Directions:

1. Juice alternate between cabbage, baby spinach, carrot, red pepper bell, orange, kiwi and apple.

Additional Information:

Notice the color of the rainbow in terms of ingredients used? 3 carrots fully cover each of our vitamin A need. 3 Kiwis fully cover our vitamin C need.

These amount of ingredients yielded > 1 lire juice, but the color is not very attractive, although it tasted very sweet and good. 

We use Hurom juicer and we really love our juicer. It is really efficient and easy to wash and clean at the same time.

Hurom juicer comes with 2 filter, a coarser one for smoothie and a fine one for juice. We used the coarser filter for smoothie, to allow more pulp to go through as we would like to get more fiber. If you prefer your juice without pulp, use the fine filter for juice, when juicing.

We bought the Hurom Elite Juicer HF2 in stainless steel presentation. It is also available in Amazon:

http://amzn.to/1VjdNzM

Juicing cabbage

Juicing baby spinach

Juicing carrots

Juicing red pepper bell

Juicing kiwis

Juicing orange

Juicing apples

The pulp... look how dry they are :-)

The vegetable and fruit juice... yield > 1 lire, but the color is not very attractive, although it tasted good. We put the juicer to setting 2 using the filter for smoothie, meaning allowing more of the pulp to go through to get more fiber. If you prefer your juice without the pulp, choose setting 1 filter for juice.

Orange, Carrot & Cabbage Juice

Serves 3 glasses

Ingredients:

1. 3 carrots peeled and cut
2. 3 oranges peeled and cut
3. A handful of purple cabage
4. A handful of raspberries (optional, since we have in the fridge that we would like to use up)

Directions:

Just juice them in a juicer, pour into glass and serve :-)

Additional Information:

Inspired by some of my friends, we started juicing vegetables such as kale and cabbage. The trick is to sweeten it with some other fruits, and it tasted heavenly :-)

It is still important to eat vegetables especially for the fiber, but we often don't eat enough of them to meet the daily recommended intake, so juicing is a good way to complete the vegetable consumption.

Hurom is a Korean cold-pressed juicer that works much more efficient than many other juicer, and is highly efficient. The pulp produced is really dry. We have thrown away our Phillips centrifuge juicer, as it doesn't extract the fruit and vegetables well, wasting a lot of our fruits, and the high heat from the centrifuge juicer oxidize the juice immediately. You could really see the difference. Thus, we are really happy with our Hurom juicer :-)

In this concoction, we used 1 carrot each and 1 orange each for the three of us, thus fully covering the daily recommended intake for vitamin A and vitamin C - see link below:

http://www.familyfecs.com/2016/04/vitamin-just-1-medium-carrot-day.html

http://www.familyfecs.com/2016/04/vitamin-c-just-1-orange-day.html

We bought the Hurom Elite Juicer HF2 in stainless steel presentation. It is also available in Amazon:

http://amzn.to/1VjdNzM

Hybrid Hiroshima-Osaka Okonomiyaki

Makes 1 pancake or 2 small pancakes

Ingredients:

1. 100g or 1 leave cabbage thinly shredded (fill approx. 1 small bowl)
2. 1/2 onions diced (optional)
3. 1 stalk spring onions chopped
4. A handful of bean sprouts (fill approx. 1 small bowl) (optional)
5. 1 egg fried

Batter:
1. 1 egg
2. 1/2 cup plain flour
3. 1/4 cup water
4. 1/4 tsp dashi (hondashi powder)
5. 1/4 tsp salt
6. 1/4 tsp sugar
7. 1/4 tsp mirin (optional)
8. ½ cup Tenkasu (Agedama) (Tempura scraps) (optional)
9. 1 tsp cooking oil

Optional filling:
1 sliced bacon, a handful prawn, salmon, octopus, squid or thinly-sliced pork belly

Garnish:
1. Japanese Okonomiyaki sauce *
2. Japanese mayonnaise (Kewpie)
3. Japanese Bonito fish flakes (Katsuobushi)
4. Japanese dried green seaweed (Aonori seaweed)

* If you don't have this, you can make your own. Here is the recipe from Little Japan Mama:

2 Tbsp Barbecue sauce
1 Tbsp Ketchup
1 1/2 tsp Soy Sauce,
1 tsp Sugar (caster sugar or icing sugar dissolve better)
A dash of worcestershire sauce

Directions:

1. Mix dashi powder with water.

2. Add egg, flour, salt and sugar and mix well until it is smooth and there are no lumps.

3. Stir in cabbage, onions, spring onions, bean sprouts.

4. Heat a thin layer of oil in a frying pan on a medium heat (no. 7 on my stove). Pour the mixture into the pan, cover and fry for 2 minutes.

5. If using raw meat, on a separate pan, fry meat for pancake with a little oil.

6. When pancake turns golden, add cooked meat or sliced bacon on top.

7. Flip over and cover and cook for 1 min.

8. Dish out onto a dish.

9. Heat pan with a little oil and fry an egg to the shape of a pancake.

10. Add back the pancake on top of the egg.

11. Drizzle okonomi sauce on top in a line followed by mayonaise in a line.

12. Garnish with bonito flakes, aonori seaweed and serve immediately.

Video Demonstration:

http://youtu.be/XBf3mWH5Xfc

http://youtu.be/0DIqTvG8vqM

http://youtu.be/SnSsXbJAal8

References:

http://www.japanesecooking101.com/okonomiyaki/
http://www.justonecookbook.com/recipes/hiroshima-okonomiyaki/
http://www.littlejapanmama.com/2011/10/okonomiyaki-recipe-with-endless.html
http://web-japan.org/kidsweb/cook/okonomiyaki/okonomiyaki03.html
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/mar/03/world-pancake-recipe-okonomiyaki-japan

23 May 2015 (6Y2M18D) - Helping mommy to chop cabbage, J is getting very good in chopping :-)

J helping mommy to make Japanese pancake