Vegetable Recipes balance your constitution

Gaspacho soup a great vegetable recipe for summer
Gaspacho soup for dinner in Ronda, Spain.

Here’s a source of vegetable recipes that are

  • easy to prepare and cook
  • delicious
  • good for you

 

though please, take care to eat foods that you know your body can absorb without problems!

Vegetables

Vegetables come in many forms, and people where you live may have no experience of vegetables common elsewhere in the world.

Chinese medicine developed mainly in China so uses vegetables that many in the West are still not familiar with.

The Chinese have, over the centuries, become familiar with the health qualities of the foods they eat, for instance in terms of what a given food can do for Yin and YangBlood and Qi.

You might need to eat a lot of a given food, or repeatedly, to notice quick effects in your Yin, Yang, Blood or Qi.

For herbs, which act like concentrated foods, the effects are faster, but unless the body has the energy and right nutrition, it can’t maintain the state the herb is urging on it.

So you need good nutrition to get and stay well. Vegetables play an enormously important role in providing you with good nutrition.

Raw vs Cooked

In general, Chinese medicine favours cooked food, eaten hot. While this certainly matters if you are ill, because your Stomach Yang energy is depleted when you are ill, when you are well, and assuming your environment isn’t cold, I see few problems with fresh, raw salads, for example.

In hot weather or environments, raw food is cooling. But it takes more energy to digest raw food, so if you have a tendency to poor digestion, stick to cooked food, eaten hot and regularly.

Vegetable Recipes: Soups

Celeriac soup

This is one of a number of warming vegetable recipes. However, though celery has in Chinese medicine a cooling, yin qualityceleriac is a little more warming. This recipe combines both celery and celeriac to create a yin-nourishing soup that is warming without being heating.

Once liquidised it looks like a cream soup, but there are no oils in it at all – other than naturally found in the vegetables themselves – though a different method of cooking could have introduced them – eg by gently frying the leek before adding the other ingredients.

Celeriac is a turnip-sized root vegetable that tastes rather like celery. It has a firm flesh. To prepare it, cut off the tough exterior, then chop into one-centimetre sized cubes. You’ll need a sharp knife and a bit of muscle.

For this recipe you need a chopping board, a sharp knife, a large pan with a lid, and about 40 minutes. You’ll also need a liquidiser.

Ingredients:

  • One litre of stock. This can be vegetable stock cubes dissolved in hot water or if you aren’t a vegetarian and have made chicken stock, why not use that?
  • 500 gms Celeriac, the outside removed and the inside diced into 1cm cubes.
  • 4 sticks of celery, diced into 1 cm lengths
  • I leek, thickly sliced

 

Celeriac soup before liquidising.
  • 25 gms of fennel root, thickly sliced
  • 25 gms spinach leaves,
  • optional – some ground nutmeg
  • salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • optional, a glass of white wine

Method

  1. Put stock liquid, celeriac, celery, leek, fennel root and spinach leaves into the pot. Warm over heat.
  2. Simmer this mixture for 15 – 20 minutes.
  3. Allow it to cool slowly.
  4. Put the mixture into the liquidiser to purée it in batches if necessary, to a smooth mixture.
  5. Return the mixture to the pot, add the salt, pepper, optional nutmeg and optional white wine. 
  6. Mix it up, while re-heating. Taste and adjust salt and fresh pepper unless you plan to refrigerate it, in which case add freshly ground pepper just before serving.

 

Celeriac soup after liquidising.
 
 
  • Serve either with croutons or crusty bread and butter.
  • If too thick, add more stock, or water, or wine, and mix.
  • Some people don’t like it completely liquidised: they like it to be a little lumpy!
  • Don’t put all the wine in the soup! Leave enough for a couple of glasses to drink at the same time!

Other nourishing recipes

We’ll add more nourishing vegetable recipes as we go along. For other good recipes, click the following:

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