No-Recipe Veggie Bake with Salmon and How I Roll in the Kitchen

What is the best diet for us?

It’s January and I bet many of you have been looking for an ideal diet that will fix your health, your mood, your energy levels, your weight? Low fat, low carb, vegan, vegetarian, keto, carnivore….? Cut out fat, or maybe carbs, or perhaps red meat is better to avoid, or maybe all animal products…  Sigh! I’m confused (and a bit bored) already! I bet you are too.

Working in personalised nutrition, of course my view is that extreme diets don’t work (at least not long-term because they are not sustainable) and each of us needs a different kind of eating plan. For me, balance is key and learning to love to look after your body the best way you can all the time, not just for the duration of your new diet.

Putting the blame for your ill health or excess weight on certain natural foods and focusing on elimination rather than addition, is never going to work well. Going back to basic is a much more helpful approach.

I love this quote I heard in a talk by Michael Pollan:

“Eat anything you want…
…just cook it yourself.”

I agree! The best thing you can do to your health is to start cooking from scratch, whatever your diet. When you cook your meals yourself you’ll transfer your loving energy to your food. You will not use additives, preservatives, flavour enhances, texture enhancers, synthetic vitamins or any of the horrendous, health-wrecking stuff that processed food manufacturers use all the time. When cooking from scratch, you use real food ingredients that keep you full for longer and nourish your body without making you ill and addicted to your food.

But when it comes to home-cooking, so many people get stressed, frustrated or even fearful and anxious. Fear, stress and anxiety do not belong in the kitchen or dinner table. They kill your joy and your digestion! When you can learn to relax and lean into being creative in the kitchen, you will start enjoying meal times, and that leads you to wanting to cook more often. There you will have an opportunity to really become curious and start experimenting, and then you will experience new flavours and combinations that are great together, which means that you are feeding your family, your body and your gut microbes with a wide array of goodness. Read why dietary diversity is important in this article.

My passion is to inspire you to fall in love with the creative process that home-cooking should be (and not following recipes to the letter and fearing missing a step or ingredient), so that you you can really start enjoying your health journey. And discover the power of…

JUST WINGING IT!

That’s anyway how I roll most of the time!

Take this veggie bake with grilled wild salmon, for instance. I started with staring into the fridge, brimming with fresh produce. I took out the ones that needed using sooner rather than later. So out came half a butternut squash, a couple of home-grown small courgettes and an organic sweet potato. Then I grabbed a red onion and a couple of large garlic cloves, sliced the onion and chopped the garlic.

Handy tip to increase nutrient density of your veg:
Chop onion and garlic first, then set them aside around 10 minutes for a sulphourus beneficial compound called allicin to develop; chopping and crushing stimulates this and leaving it for 10 minutes guarantees that the enzyme that catalyses the conversion of allicin has done its job. After 10 minutes, you can expose the veg to heat or acid without distroying the compound. And for broccoli and other veg in the cabbage family wait up to 90 minutes after chopping and before cooking to allow a potent antioxidant and anti-cancer agent sulphoraphane to develop.)

All the rest of the veg was sliced and layered in an oven dish with sauteed onion and garlic. I also added some of my favourite beans to the dish (use code MINNAWOOD with your first WellEasy order of over £50 to get £10 off). Along with oregano, salt, some of the liquid from the bean jar and a splash of kefir (you can use any liquid). Topped it all with blue cheese and greated cheddar.

Oven it went (somewhere around 160-180C) for as long as the veg was cooked through, the liquid in the bottom bubbling and the cheese browned. In the meantime, I took out a large fillet of wild salmon from the fridge. Spread the flesh side with Cool Chile Mojo de Ajo sauce, and splashes of Eaten Alive Jalopeno & Lime Sauce (again, don’t forget the code MINNAWOOD if you decide to place your first order with WellEasy). Popped it flesh side down onto an oiled oven dish, added a little oil, salt and pepper on the skin, then grilled it, skin side up, for about 10-15 minutes.

I overcooked my salmon a little so please check yours earlier and decide how you want it and whether you want to keep it grilling a bit less or more. Pink flaky salmon flesh is so yummy and also the anti-inflammatory omega-3 oils will be still intact so you get more health benefits. You can also pop the salmon on the top of the veggies in the oven towards the end of cooking, but you won’t get a crispy skin.

This was not only a delicius balanced meal but also very relaxing to prepare. Maybe my ‘no-recipe, just-wing-it’ style of cooking inspires you to start experimenting in your kitchen using whatever produce is in season and/or happens to be in your fridge. Be brave and trust your taste buds.

For more ideas (and some real recipes too), come and join my Facebook group Healthy You For Life and follow my posts and stories on Instagram.

Enjoy! Or as we say in Finland: Hyvää ruokahalua!