Get the Salt Out (43 page)

271
Go nutty with vegetables:
make flavorful dishes like green beans almondine or broccoli a la walnut by oven-toasting slivered or chopped nuts until light golden brown and fragrant, then sprinkling them on top of cooked vegetables. Toasted nuts give vegetables abundant flavor all by themselves,
but if you want a bolder nutty flavor, try adding a few splashes of unrefined almond oil or walnut oil along with the nuts.
One Salt Shaker.

272
Grill vegetables to give them a unique smoky flavor.
Simply preheat a grill or broiler and glaze your favorite vegetables with olive oil, canola oil, peanut oil, or sesame oil. (Eggplant and zucchini sliced lengthwise work particularly well.) Cook the vegetables for about 6 minutes, then turn them over and cook until tender.
One Salt Shaker.

273
Stir-sauté vegetables, with or without meat.
This method of cooking vegetables is a particularly popular one, and you can make stir-fries with different ethnic accents depending on the ingredients you use. Make Mediterranean-style vegetables by sautéing them in olive oil with garlic, oregano, and basil.
One Salt Shaker.

274
Change the stir-fry to Thai-style
by switching to peanut oil and adding seasonings such as garlic, chili powder, coriander, and lemongrass.
One Salt Shaker.

275
Or prepare vegetables Oriental-style
by using sesame oil, ginger, and garlic, as I have done in the following recipe.
One Salt Shaker.

Steam the broccoli and carrots until almost tender, about 7 minutes. Heat the sesame oil in a frying pan and add the ginger,
garlic, and sesame seeds. Cook, stirring continuously, until the sesame seeds are lightly toasted, about 1 or 2 minutes. Add the steamed vegetables and stir together with sesame salt.
Serves 4 to 6.

276
Satisfy your sweet tooth by using sweet spices on vegetables.
Cinnamon tastes great on baked carrots, and grated orange peel with ground nutmeg is a delicious combination on baked winter squash. One sweet spice combination I enjoy using in vegetable stir-fries is Chinese five-spice powder, a mixture sold in the Oriental foods section of supermarkets. This spice mixture makes you totally forget about salt; it gives vegetables a sweet, slightly licoricelike flavor. To use it, sauté a colorful assortment of chopped vegetables in half a cup of low-sodium vegetable broth or chicken broth, then add cooked brown rice and ¼teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder to the mixture. Stir and serve.
One Salt Shaker.

BONUS TIP:
To make it easier to enjoy a wide variety of healthful vegetables when you don’t have the time or energy to chop them, buy ready-to-use bags of pre-cut vegetable combinations. They are becoming increasingly available in the produce and frozen food sections of most supermarkets. If your local grocery store has a salad bar, you also can select chopped vegetables from there to use in stir-fries and other dishes. These two coping skills make meal preparation ultra-quick and are lifesavers when you’re had a particularly hard day.

277
Try sautéing vegetables in the Quick Herb Stock (see tip 164) or the Garlic Broth (see tip 167).
Either of these aromatic stocks will give vegetables plenty of flavor without salt or fat.
One Salt Shaker.

If you love tomato-based dishes like spaghetti and chili,
make salt-free tomato products staples in your kitchen. You can reduce salt in your diet dramatically just by switching from using regular canned tomato products to salt-free varieties.
Here’s one example: use one 16-ounce can of unsalted chopped tomatoes and one 6-ounce can of unsalted tomato paste instead of the regular (salted) versions of these products in a recipe, and you cut the sodium in that one recipe alone by about 2,000 milligrams!
One Salt Shaker.