 All right, I'm going to jump in with my announcements and the library announcements. Welcome to the San Francisco Public Library Virtual Library. I am Anissa and I'm your librarian today. We'll be throwing some info in the chat, including links to library news, my email and links to all of Linda's events and socials and websites and where you can get her book. So yes, today you are here for our Summer Stride with author Linda Xu and her new book, Spicebox Kitchen. This is Summer Stride and we are midway through summer and we have many more programs to come. If you haven't signed up for your Summer Stride reading challenge, we encourage you to do so to grab that iconic SFPL tote bag and it will feature this beautiful art from Keelani Juanita. The circle image right there is what is on the tote bag. We want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Ohlone Tribal people and acknowledge the many Romutish Ohlone Tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands on which we reside here in our Bay Area. Our library is committed to uplifting the names of these lands and community members and we do this by providing factual and useful information, hosting events and I will provide a link in the chat box that has a link to a resource and reading list. We have some great events coming up. We have many literary campaigns at the library and this is our newest featuring Heather Knight and Peter Hartlock part of the Chronicle and their initiative is called Total SF and we now have a Total SF book club. The second book will be the end of Golden Gate and writers talking about loving San Francisco, loving and sometimes leaving San Francisco and they'll be having Daniel Handler and Gary Kamiah and those will be quarterly so we'll have one in November and one in February. Those are both scheduled for in-person events starting November. Our other literary campaign is called On the Same Page where we feature a bi-monthly read and encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book and we are celebrating Jacqueline Woodson and her book, Read at the Bone. Jacqueline Woodson will be in the library, virtual library August, I want to say August 12 and she'll be talking about her YA books and her children's books at that time. She's a prolific youth writer and children's book author. So come here, her speak, come read this book and the book is an adult book, it's very good. We'll also have a book club. Tomorrow the Northern California Book Awards, so a virtual house full of authors and this is going to be fun. On Tuesday we have Rock and Rolls, so Jonathan Taplin in conversation, Grell Marcus. This is going to be a fun one and now I'm going to speed things up because we do have a lot of things happening, especially this week. Our COVID Command Center Artists and Residents will be speaking. Coming up later next week we have, I don't know if you know, the San Francisco Public Library has a jail and reentry services department which services all the jails in San Francisco as well as reference by mail for every jail west of the Mississippi and also focuses a lot on helping folks re-enter and getting acclimated and it's a huge department and it's not a huge department physically, you know, there's two people but the work they do is huge and I'm so proud of all the work they do and so we have authors coming up talking about reentry and lots of stuff, lots of stuff like you can see. To check out all of our events you can go to sfpl.org slash events and this is also a JARES program that I wanted to highlight, a film screening and panel discussion afterwards and our friend Troy Williams there at the end he is a San Franciscan and does a lot of stuff for just social reform and social justice. So please come out for our JARES programs. July 31st, Herbs and Edible Gardening, I know you're all going to love that. All right so on with today's show and today we are here to see Linda Shu and her book Spice Box Kitchen Eat Well and Be Healthy with Globally Inspired Vegetable Forward Recipes. After Linda took her first French cooking class at age seven it was almost 40 years before she finally went to culinary school at San Francisco's cooking school. In between she studied anthropology and medicine at Brown with fieldwork in rural Sichuan China and Singapore. She continued her medical training at the University of California San Francisco and learned about plant-based nutrition at Cornell University. She is an enthusiastic eater and inspires strangers to copy her order at restaurants and for chefs to send her a little something special. We all want to be your friend Linda. Linda is a practicing physician in San Francisco and she also founded a popular vegetable forward teaching kitchen to inspire people to cook for health. And we encourage you all to check out her book from the library or you can purchase it from OmniBor and get it signed and we will put all of these links into the box, the chat box. We will also have time for Q&A today which please use the Q&A function and that is it. Everyone please welcome Linda Shoe. Thank you so much Anissa for that introduction and welcome everybody. I'm so excited that so many of you have decided to spend part of your Saturday morning with me. And so I'm also very excited to be doing a library presentation. Public libraries have been part of my life forever. And I was always a very enthusiastic participant in programs like summer strides. So this is really an exciting event for me which could be in person. But I'm also glad to reach more of you through this virtual forum. So today I'll be talking about my somewhat unusual path from being a doctor to becoming a trained chef and writing a cookbook. I'll be talking about what I consider to be healthy cooking and healthy eating. Take you for a walk through my cookbook, Spicebox Kitchen. And I'll also be doing a cooking demonstration with one of the recipes from the cookbook which is called Backpackers Gatto Gatto. And Anissa and Alan will be sharing the link for the recipe which has been excerpted in a recent issue of Eating Well magazine so that you can all make this recipe even before you get the cookbook. So that's the format for today and we'll have plenty of time for questions at the end. So please write down your questions as we go and we'll have a chance to talk about them later. So in addition to the little background that Anissa gave to my introduction, I'll just sort of summarize that and that I've always been a lover of food and very curious about different cuisines and cultures around the world. I grew up on Long Island, New York in a pretty semi-rural area but it was near a national laboratory which is why my family was there and my parents were research scientists and the bonus of that was that we would have these potlucks periodically with visitors from around the world so they're visiting scientists and that really gave me a lot of exposure early on and I think developed my palette and my curiosity. So I just saw something in the chat that people can't see the video. I hope that you can but first I'm going to be reading an excerpt from my introduction which will tell you a little bit more about how I got to this point of deciding that teaching people how to cook deliciously should be part of my medical practice. So this is a brief excerpt that I'll read. Eating well is about food and health but equally also about celebration and community. There is a world of flavor and the passport is spices. I connected my lifelong love of food and cooking to my work as a physician 10 years ago when I attended a medical conference that transformed the way I practice medicine after a whole decade as a primary care physician. At that time I was feeling a little burnt out. I knew that I was helping my patients but I didn't feel that I was making an impact in the way I really wanted. Despite my support and advice my patients struggled to lose weight to control their cholesterol and blood pressure and blood sugar and they were tired, anxious and depressed. I wrote many prescriptions for cholesterol medications, blood pressure medications, diabetes medications, and for antidepressants and sleep aids. My patients didn't feel better and I felt ineffectual. Then I went to a fateful medical conference called Healthy Kitchen's Healthy Lives which is co-sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Culinary Institute of America and this is held in Napa. We reviewed the latest updates in nutrition science and how this knowledge could help patients. We're also taught to cook incredibly delicious food that was also held supportive by the culinary school's chefs. That was my light bulb moment. My practice changed immediately. Before at the end of routine physical examinations I would review my findings with a patient, discuss their weight, blood pressure and lab results, and make some vague suggestions for modifying their diet and exercise routines. Typically it would have ended there but after my epiphany with my next patient I pulled out my prescription pad and wrote a recipe for kale chips. A week after that conference ended I taught my first cooking class to patients and I was hooked. I began teaching cooking classes on a regular basis and felt as exhilarated as my students were. I shifted my practice to include culinary medicine, a new evidence-based field that blends the art of food and cooking with the science of nutrition and medicine. I did this because essentially food is medicine. 75% of what we see in the office are chronic diseases and these are preventable or at least made better, made less severe by paying attention to nutrition. And I thought well you know nutrition is one thing but what what do we eat? We don't eat nutrition, we eat food. So I decided that incorporating teaching people how to cook should be part of my practice and it's low cost accessible and culturally adaptable. And as I was telling Anissa and Alan from the library at the beginning of this presentation I did my first presentations in public libraries at the time I was working on the peninsula and so I'm even more grateful to how public libraries have played a role in this and in my ability to reach many people with culinary medicine education. I'm just going to read a little bit more and then I'll move on to tell you more about this book. So this cookbook Spicebox Kitchen shares my love for flavors from around the world from my unique perspective and nutrition knowledge as a physician and professionally trained chef. Whereas most most so-called healthy cookbooks focus on nutrition over flavor these recipes celebrate eating for pleasure. At my table food is meant to be savored. I won't prescribe you a diet advise you to count calories or tell you what to eat. I believe that our food choices should be personal. The best diet for one person may not be the best for another. I do recommend that everyone eat mostly plants for many reasons including taste, variety, the environment, ethical concerns, and of course health. My goal as a physician is to improve patients health by inspiring them to cook more and eat more vegetables. My goal as a cooking instructor and recipe developer is to get people to love and crave vegetables by showing them the many ways to prepare them deliciously. And so that's really the essence of what this book is about. Anissa if you could go to the next slide please. Great so this is a picture I meant to actually show this I forgot as I was reading the excerpt but this is a picture of Masala Dava which is the Hindi word for Spicebox used in India which I named my cookbook after. As you can see it's a really handy way to keep your favorite spices at close proximity when you're cooking and because it's already in a metal container it's a great way to preserve the flavor of your spices protect them from light so just a few hints on the best way to store your spices. And as you can see the spices are very colorful and that is a testament to all the antioxidants that they contain. So the reason why I feature spices in this book so much is that they are not just for flavor but they were our first medicine in fact they were used as medicine and these days you can find some spices most notably turmeric but a few other spices as well sold in pill form but I really want you to encourage you to actually enjoy them in your food and to incorporate them that way and in so doing get some of the health benefits but also just really enjoy them and have them as a way to explore different cuisines around the world and to enhance the flavor of your cooking. So spices are really key and I'll be using featuring one spice in today's recipe which is ginger and I'll talk a little bit more about ginger when we get to the cooking demo. So I think at this point I'm going to walk you through the book a little bit. Next slide please. Great. So the first section of my book is called Healthy Cooking 101. I'm going to show you that page in the book here. Healthy Cooking 101 as you can see that there. This section is actually a big you know it's probably 25 percent of the book and this is where I try to distill a lot of the nutrition education and guide to cooking and cooking techniques. Kind of hints about meal planning that I'd share in my cooking classes which I hold at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco in Mission Bay currently virtual and those are once a month cooking classes. I know that not everybody can come to those classes although for the rest of this year while they're virtual and maybe in the future as well hopefully more of you can access those but if not the first section of this book Healthy Kitchen Healthy Cooking 101 goes over a lot of the things that I teach in my classes. And then one of those things is what are the best things to incorporate into your diets? Whether you're an omnivore or a vegetarian or completely plant-based I actually think that everybody's diet would benefit most from having the next three ingredients which we're going to highlight. So the first is legumes. As you can see here there is a wide variety of legumes out there beans and lentils and many other things that are made from those including tofu and tempeh. All of these things are great sources of protein as well as fiber and antioxidants and many nutrients and I encourage all of you to incorporate more of those into your diets. Next slide please. So another picture of legumes and you can see again the wide variety of sizes shapes which corresponds to flavors as well and textures. Next slide please. The second category of must-have ingredients that I encourage you to have in your diets are leafy greens. And this is a green that I have pictured here that may not be that familiar to many of you so I encourage you for all of you to guess if any of you know what this is to put that in the chat. So leafy greens come in many shapes sizes and flavors and if you visit farmers markets you know to give a shout out to my favorite local farmers market it's the alimony farmers market which is going on right now every Saturday morning every every Saturday of the year where you'll see farmers who come from many and heart of the city sorry about that as well as heart of the city. Many different parts growing vegetables from many parts of the world and many cultures and this is a great way to not only increase your repertoire and make greens less you know kind of less I guess standard from what you get in the grocery store but also to get a wider variety of antioxidants and other nutrients because every leafy green has a different nutrition profile. So please explore your greens the next slide has some other greens that might be more familiar to you but you may not think of as a leafy green but this is brussel sprouts and this is from a recipe in the book for what I call gateway brussel sprouts because that recipe actually makes brussel sprouts non-enthusiasts into people who love them and want every last bit. So I don't know if there was a correct answer because my chat is a little bit too far for me for the first one but that is taro leaf otherwise known as I think some I did see someone guess elephant ear I think that is actually the same vegetable and also known as kalaluu there are many other names of that it's a little bit harder to get you may find it in a farmer's market you can find it in a larger Asian grocery still a little bit hard to find but and you can find that in places that use taro root so Hawaii someone just listed as a place for that and that is one of the places many of us are more familiar with the taro root that's used in cooking but the leaves are great if you can't find that you can substitute a spinach for many recipes including one that I have in the cookbook so leafy greens are the second category next slide please for our final category of must have to make your diets healthier and more interesting and delicious are whole grains this is a recipe from the cookbook for Jamaican rice and peas using a rice cooker in this case next slide and this is another recipe from the cookbook for a Turkish inspired bulgur pilaf so there are so many whole grains out there if you want to learn more about them you can read about them in my book in terms of how to cook them what some highlighted grains are but there's also a great nonprofit called the whole grains council and they have a website which is called whole grains council.org where you can learn everything you always want to know about whole grains so whole grains as opposed to refined or you know white grains like white rice white wheat etc contain a lot more nutrients and a lot more fiber so you'll get B vitamins you'll get you'll get potassium you'll get magnesium you'll get iron depending on the grain and fiber and fiber is something that is in common with all of these three categories of foods that I've just mentioned so legumes leafy greens and whole grains all have fiber and that is something which most people are actually a little bit deficient in in their diet so you know trust me I'm actually a doctor if you incorporate more of these regardless of how you eat you will improve your health so fiber is not just for digestion and improving that but it's also important in preventing chronic diseases it ends up being anti-inflammatory and so just you can't go wrong by incorporating these three ingredients into your diet and so now I'm going to take you through what the book showcases in terms of recipes you know that's a little bit of a nutrition portion the the other remaining portions of the book are all just like a regular cookbook recipes and these come from four parts of the world that I chose because I have a personal connection to all of them and they also have healthy diets in their kind of original form that incorporate a lot of spices next slide please um oh I forgot so this is a picture of the recipe I'm demonstrating this is the Backpackers Gatto Gatto which I chose and made into kind of more colorful form from the original because it's a way of showcasing this very important nutrition point of eating the rainbow so you can see it looks very beautiful you have all the colors there but also different colors correspond to different nutrients and antioxidants so you don't even really have to think about you know are you getting all your nutrients if you incorporate as many colors of vegetables and fruits into your diet and now we'll move into the different sections of the book next slide please so first California so these recipes are inspired by San Francisco where we are based here and I've lived for the last 20 plus years and which is a place which I really think inspired my cooking a lot so these two recipes in the book are from that first section featuring California the first is California oranges with ginger in a recipe for oatmeal it also features pistachios and the one on the right is a recipe for um from from the breakfast section of that book as well for chilaquiles in this case using tomatillos and this is inspired very locally by my neighbor's next door he used to make chilaquiles for us quite often next slide please the next section is Asia it's one of the larger sections of the book because partially it's from my heritage as a Taiwanese American but also because I studied abroad and traveled a lot in Southeast Asia so these two recipes here one is for a slightly healthier version of the very popular Chinese or Taiwanese scallion pancakes in this case in which I substitute some of the regular white flour with whole wheat flour and then and that that recipe incorporates some spices as well including szechuan peppercorns the other recipe is for what I call a celebration red salad and that incorporates lots of different shades of red vegetables it's really delicious have a lot of different textures it's one of my favorite recipes in the book as well then we'll move on to the next section next section is on the Mediterranean and the Middle East my connection to this region of the world is probably less personal and more professional I should say than the other regions that I feature the Mediterranean diet is one of the best studied diets in the world or I should say eating patterns in the world that has you know great impact on reducing chronic disease including heart disease stroke certain cancers and diabetes and so it's a really healthy eating pattern for people the Mediterranean geographically includes the countries of the Middle East which use a lot of spices and I was very lucky that during my culinary school year six months actually at San Francisco cooking school locally I got to do my externship at Murad which is a modern California Moroccan restaurant right here in San Francisco right near SF MoMA and so I learned a lot about spices there and so those are the two reasons why I feature the Mediterranean spices my connection to learning about it and just the fact that it's a very healthy diet and then the final section comes from Trinidad which I know is going to be new to a lot of you here you know we don't have that many people from the Caribbean here I married a man from Trinidad so that's how I got to learn this cuisine very intimately learning how to cook the food that he grew up with and what I did was I took a lot of the Trinidadian recipes which tend to be pretty meat heavy and I made them either vegetarian or pescatarian which I think like in many cultures actually brings our modern diets back to their more original roots you know so with all these different cuisines around the world and the others that I didn't include in the book a lot of them are you know as the way people eat them now are not as healthy because of basically modernization and you know the way that we've actually made a lot of food processed so if you take home no other nutrition message from my talk today than this try to cook as much as you can at home that was the other reason why I wrote this book I think no matter what you cook where it comes from what ingredient to use if you're cooking from scratch you're automatically going to be improving your diets compared to you know eating out compared to buying processed packaged foods it's going to be much lower in saturated fat it'll be lower in salt it'll be lower in added sugar and certainly you won't be adding preservatives to your own food so no matter what you cook try to cook at home try to cook from whole ingredients as much as possible meaning things that basically look as close as they can to how they were grown things that don't have many steps in the in the processing before they get to you and that will be kind of the best way to improve your diets so this brings us to the kind of the fun part which if we could be in person you know it would be even more fun because you could you could hear smell and taste what I'm going to demonstrate to you but we'll make do with what we have and with the recipe that I've included in the chat for this backpackers gado gado you can recreate this at home so I'm going to spend about the next 10 to 15 minutes going over these ingredients which I've pre-prepped for this so that we would have time to go over it and talk about some of the nutrition benefits of those and then you can make it later at home so I'm just going to read just one more bit about the or tell you a little bit more about this recipe it's called backpackers gado gado because when I studied abroad in Singapore many many years ago when I was in college I spent some time backpacking because that was my budget around Southeast Asia and one of the favorite places that I went to was Indonesia and that's where gado gado was from it's basically a a salad typically it doesn't have all these colorful ingredients and as I mentioned before I wanted to demonstrate eating the rainbow it's basically a salad that is dressed with a coconut and peanut based dressing and it's just like one of my favorite things there just very simple taught me different things about texture and flavor and kind of the key elements that make a dish kind of more interesting delicious and fun to eat and so it's combined of different raw and cooked vegetables and in my recipe I wrote it actually the version in the cookbook which is different from the one that I shared with eating well because they wanted actually a formal recipe with measurements in the cookbook I kind of say you know use what you have and I think that's another good hint to use what you have in your pantry what you what you like it's a way of reducing food waste and mixing and matching so that you don't feel that cooking is this hard thing that you have to make it perfect this is a way that you can just kind of throw together what you have with a few key elements and they're using some cooked and some raw vegetables as a way of kind of maximizing nutrition and also making the flavor and texture more interesting and I want to be able to talk about different cooking techniques for vegetables with you today so I'll show you what we're going to put together and as you can see here I have all arrayed kind of in the roige bib of the rainbow so we have some tomato here this is raw so for our red color here tomatoes are a great source of lycopene and actually you'll get more lycopene which is a heart healthy antioxidant if you have cooked tomatoes but there's also lycopene when you have them in raw form and I don't think the cooked tomatoes would be great in this salad recipe so we have our tomatoes we have carrots which I julienne and there's a section in the cookbook on how to julienne actually on knife skills in general and so you know it's just a really nice way to have pretty looking carrots that are easy to chew and they they look festive so carrots contain beta carotene that's the antioxidant that are named after carrots actually and also our source of vitamin a good for your eyesight next we have some beans friends I've been talking about beans or legumes a lot so these are sprouted from green mung beans and they're you know equally a source just like the original bean of fiber and of protein and a lot of other nutrients I have so this rose all raw some shredded green cabbage so cabbage as a cruciferous vegetable is a great source of antioxidants and a lot of you know plant phytonutrients or plant nutrients as well as fiber and a lot of vitamins and minerals vitamin k which is important for blood clotting b vitamins which is important for your brain health for your mood also for heart health and many many others next we have so these are actually long beans and I'm just going to show you what they look like in case you're not familiar with them because they're really fun and they're in season now so this is what long beans look like they're also called snake beans I believe yard beans because they can get to be you know one yard long and you know they come in this light shade which I have here they come also in a darker green you can definitely get these in any supermarket that sells Asian groceries you can definitely get them at any farmers market and they're really fun I just love the shape of them and how they're kind of bouncy like this and what I do with these is that I blanched them so I want to talk about blanching as a way of cooking vegetables to maintain some texture and also their green color blanching just involves boiling a large quantity of water large volume of water and to add salt to it so you get a little bit of salt as it's cooking and then you just cook it for really just a few minutes until it's just a little bit wilted but still has some of its crunch and then you take it out immediately and either run under cold running water until it's completely cool or put it into an ice bath which is basically half water and half ice and that will stop the cooking process and maintain again the cooking texture that you've left it at as well as the color so these are the same beans here they actually look a little bit darker you can see here after I've blanched them we have some cucumbers these are raw cucumbers just kind of a fun fun nutrition fact of cucumbers is that they contain silica which is a mineral that we don't get from many other parts of our diet and that's good for your hair skin and nails so it's actually a common thing that people come in to see me for is about you know not being happy with the texture or health of the hair skin and nails cucumbers would be a good thing for that as well and then the final vegetable ingredient of this recipe is red cabbage so I'm going to show you both the raw form where it looks a little bit more red and what it looks like after steaming where it looks purple which is kind of fun too so the purple or red in any vegetable that you see comes from an antioxidant called anthocyanins um and you know I've been talking a lot about antioxidants what are they for these are all the things that actually as the anti combat oxidation which is basically the stress on our bodies and our on our health that comes from multiple things in our diets it can come from eating fried foods it can come from eating processed foods it can come from eating animal based products it can come from stress in our lives so these are all stresses on our bodies that antioxidants can help combat and over the long term antioxidants can help prevent chronic diseases and so that's why it's important to to have all these things antioxidants are not contained at all in animal products they're only found in plants so um so at any rate anthocyanins are the antioxidants in red and purple colored vegetables and steaming um which you can do very simply with any you know steamer insert and put in any pot that it fits into is a really great way to cook your vegetables people often ask me what is the best way to eat vegetables is it raw is it cooked um and you know the actor is a little bit of both like you know as i mentioned uh cooking can enhance the absorption of some nutrients like a lycopene from tomatoes but it can also kill off some of the nutrition a vitamin c for example is one vitamin that is quickly destroyed by heat and so you want a little bit of both eat your salads eat your cooked vegetables if you cook your vegetables the tips are to cook them for as brief a point uh brief a time as possible and that's why blanching and steaming are two good ways and um with as little of water as possible unless you're having in a soup in which case all of it remains in your soup um so these are the vegetable ingredients that will go into our gatto gatto um and so i'm just going to assemble it now and then um show you how to make the dressing for it so i'm going to move this to the platter excuse me as my head is cut off as i'm trying to move things around here for you um i know what i'll do here let me move the tray instead and i'm going to plate these ingredients on this platter here and show you the two proteins that i'm including on this salad so this is a salad that can be eaten as uh you know simply a starter or you can have it as if you add some protein as a light lunch which is why i chose it for today so um forgive me again i'm going to cut off my head a little bit so you can see the platter more directly and then i'll come back and talk to you so we have our shredded green cabbage we have our blanched long beans here and you can certainly substitute regular string beans too that would be fine um i'm going to add here our julienne raw carrots our bean sprouts cucumbers and our steamed red cabbage and as i was mentioning before this is all very mix and match you can you know add more of what you like take away what you don't like or you don't have just try to make it as colorful as possible um and to talk a little bit about what the original has typically it will have long beans it will have cucumbers it'll probably have some cabbage and it'll have bean sprouts for the vegetables and not these other more colorful ones that i've added in and then i haven't mentioned yet i'm gonna show you my face again um the proteins that are usually with it so usually there is hard boiled egg so i'm going to include that here and i think you can't see that but you will in a second if you do not eat eggs you can omit that and use more of the other protein which we use a lot in this which is tempeh so tempeh i find that people don't know as well as tofu it's also made from soybeans but it's made from whole soybeans which are fermented and formed into these solid blocks or cakes you can um you know it's sold in grocery stores now um you can make your own i haven't made my own yet but i i'm planning to try and you can either eat it as is or you can do what i did which is to toast it in a dry frying pan so no oil and just keep it over heat for a few minutes on each side until it's a little bit browned and crispy i like i like that texture um so tempeh is very traditional it comes from indonesia um and so i'm going to include that here as well and so as i mentioned um tempeh is a great substitution if you're not using i'm just gonna actually hold it up for you if you're not using the eggs and want some more protein tofu would also be great in this if you don't have access to tempeh or or don't like it but i encourage you to try it it has a really nice nutty taste um so that's what the salad looks like and but it's not complete without a few garnishes and without the dressing so that's the next thing that i'm going to show you give me one second to get some of the stuff out of the way so i have room to show you the dressing okay so the dressing as i mentioned or my version of dressing uses natural peanut butter meaning peanut butter that's made only with peanuts maybe a little bit salt but not with other additives like you know sugar and emulsifiers which other brands will have you can either get this in one of those places that grinds your peanut butter right there for you in the machine or just read the labels any supermarket will have the kind that has just peanuts don't necessarily buy one that says natural read the ingredients because some of the brands will say natural but they still have added sugar salt and emulsifiers that you may or may not want so we're going to put about equal amounts of peanut butter you can use crunchy or smooth depending on what you like and what you have right now i'm using smooth and coconut milk so this is you can use light coconut milk or you can use coconut milk regular coconut milk blended with half and half with water so not not too thick and you're going to stir that in and this is going to make a lot of dressing so this is not just for this small salad today all right i'm going to stir those together so that's going to give a nice creamy base for this dressing and i'm going to stir it slowly and talk while i'm doing that so peanuts are also a good source of protein and fiber and healthy fats they're also fats and coconut milk people always ask oh is that bad to be having all that fat and you know the answer is really in you know quantity right how often are you having it how much are you having of it and that makes all the difference and still the fats that are present in these being plant-based are healthier than the fats that you'll have in the saturated fat from animal products so i'm going to be slowly stirring this because i think my bowl is a little bit too small for what i want to do today so peanut and coconut give us the creaminess here i'll be adding a few other ingredients that go into this very simple dressing that really balance each other and add make it really very very delicious so let me speed this up a little bit here in conscious of time okay so that's almost all incorporated let me show you some of the other ingredients that go in this so we have the juice of depending on how bigger lime is half a lime to a lime this will add you know obviously the lime flavor but a little bit of acidity to balance out the creaminess and i'm just going to squeeze that directly into this and stir it in and you can certainly adjust this to your taste so there's some lime juice added to our peanut butter and coconut milk and then i'm adding some low sodium soy sauce so in my classes and in my cooking i use low sodium soy sauce because soy sauce is one of the condiments with very very high sodium content whereas lower sodium versions have you know about half of that amount still very high sodium so the quantity is important and then i'm adding a tiny bit of sugar which is again just to balance out these flavors here it's optional you can use other sweeteners if you want you can leave it out entirely and so you know we're going to adjust that to taste so i'm going to stir that in and then i'm going to show you our final ingredient which i like to put in this dressing which is some freshly grated ginger so i'm looking at the time i'm going to try to do this quickly so i can finish this up but i want to show you a technique in peeling ginger that i first learned when i was like seven watching yan can cook from our local friend chef martin yan which is to peel ginger with a spoon any old spoon will do it what it does and i'm going to show you here is it peels away just the skin and not any of the ginger flesh and it's just kind of fun that you're using a spoon for something like this so this is something that i remembered from being a young child and that i've continued doing and i think it's a fun fun little trick to do and you know it's very safe because there's no blade for a child to do so one of the tips for people who have children in the house about getting them to eat more adventurously is get them involved get their hands involved in the food get them involved in the shopping bring them to the farmer's market so that's it's peeled now i'm going to show you how i'll grate it into the salad dressing um you know get them involved in all of those aspects and they'll eat it it's amazing no amount of telling them what to do is going to accomplish the same as having them actually be a part of the decision making and the making of the food so i'm using this zester so i see that comment there karmine thank you i like it shoe can cook if anyone is a producer out there i'd be happy to have a show just you know um so okay we're going to grate this you can use any kind of grater for this i like this rasp style grater because it makes it really fine and it's just really handy to have and um you can just basically keep grating away and then just kind of wrap it along the side of your bowl and stir it in so just to go over those ingredients again and in real life we will taste this before i dress it but peanut butter light coconut milk um a little bit of low sodium soy sauce um a little bit of lime juice a little bit of sugar optional um and then um some freshly grated ginger and so all of that together um you know really gives you this kind of simple and yet complex tasting dressing and that's kind of the key of all my recipes simple to put together um inexpensive because plants are less expensive than meat and um very easy to put together so i'm going to tilt down a little bit and dress this um so you can either dip or you can drizzle so you're just going to drizzle this over here and then add a few garnishes so there's that garnishes um traditionally um shrimp chips are used as a garnish so one besides eating let me show you my face again eating the rainbow for nutrition um i always say think about presentation which is also very easy to do when you're using colorful foods think about texture um you know a lot of the health food that i saw when i was growing up in the 70s and 80s was kind of land looking and kind of all pureed and mushy and not very appetizing so you want crispness you want crunch you've got all different textures here because some things are cooked and some things are raw and you definitely get that crunch of the shrimp chips and the final garnish i'm going to use is some fried shallots or onions you can get these and showing the package in asian groceries or you can make your own from um shallots that you'll slice and i'm just going to add these they add that nice you know intensely shalloty oniony flavor and a little bit more crunch here um and so for the things which you know this may look different and you're having some fried things here from a lot of people's conceptions of healthy food um but i think you'll notice that it's a very very small proportion of the overall dish and this is really the key it's as long as in my opinion as long as you're eating the right things the healthiest that you can most of the time um you can have those little treats whatever it makes your diet something that you enjoy so that you will eat all these other healthy foods if it takes a little bit of shrimp chips if it takes a little bit and you can substitute rice chips for a vegetarian version rice crackers i should say if it takes a little bit of fried shallots to really enhance it um then i say go for that so here's our gatto gatto back packers gatto gatto um and i think that gives us a few minutes for questions so um anisa and or alan if you want to read out some of the questions in the chat i'm happy to answer them and yes and then this is where you can follow me on social media and um just to let you know locally our beloved culinary bookstore omnivore books in noe valley has signed copies i'm also doing an in-person event my first in-person event for this um august 21st which is another saturday so i'd love to see you there um but you can also get books there it's also available of course at the library and kind of as they say anywhere books are sold um so yes thank you all for coming um okay we have lots of questions okay uh let's start with uh how about what non-animal protein sources would you recommend for older adult nutrition could you suggest some recipes for meals on wheels to adopt more vegetable forward entrez ah interesting ah i love meals on wheels um and um if if someone from meals on wheels wants to talk to me about that i'm happy to share my ideas so um you know in terms of plant-based nutrition first of all plants have a lot of nutrition themselves so you will like broccoli and potatoes there's a two very common um vegetables both have a lot of protein um legumes in all their forms so whether it's beans in their many varieties lentils in their many varieties or things made out of them such as the tempeh and tofu made out of soy beans um these are all really great sources of protein um at any age including for older adults thank you and i'm going to combine two questions um basically so there's seven compartments basically in the spice box what should we be putting in there you should put what you like in there actually um but if you want to know some high yield things um or i guess high yield spices and i didn't mention that i didn't talk about ginger so ginger um either fresh or in its ground dried form um is great for your digestion it's great for nausea and is also very um anti-inflammatory ginger is probably a good one to have you can use it both for savory and sweet things um turmeric is the one that we've studied the most and is available in capsules if you want it that way um turmeric is a you know very uh most studied and very potent anti-inflammatory it works in your body in a very similar way to ibuprofen and other anti-inflammatories that you might take when you're having um achy joints or other other pain so turmeric is another good one it's you know you can use it like in a curry or on its own in other ways um importantly if you want to get the anti-inflammatory benefit of turmeric it's much more bioavailable or much more absorbed in your body if you combine it with uh black pepper so black pepper would be another great one to have um and then i'll just name one more and then you can you know just try different things that you like um one more would be cinnamon so cinnamon is another actually i'll say two more cinnamon is one which um adds a lot of um sweetness and so i'd like it um in for people who are cutting back on added sugar because it's actually very sweet you don't need as much sweet sweetener added but also lowers your blood sugar and can help lower your blood pressure so lots of medical properties there and then the last one i'll mention because i use it a lot and is used a lot in the recipes in this book is cumin so cumin um you know besides having a great earthy flavor um is source of iron and also um aids in digestion and so um i think that would be a good starter for your spice boxes thank you cumin is my favorite a little bit great um let's see so we do have one question about um microwaving your vegetables do you think that's a bad idea okay yeah that that comes up a lot and i think it's it's not it's not a bad idea because they they do sell steamers to use in microwaves or you can just microwave them without any water the benefit of using microwave is that you can cook very quickly so one of the things that i said is the shorter duration of cooking time will preserve more than nutrients and so i think that if that is a convenient way for you to prepare your vegetables go for it perfect um i think we have another question about um substituting uh peanut allergies for having a peanut allergy what can we substitute for the sauce i would use um as long as you can have seeds um which most people who have peanut allergies can have use sun butter for this it'll taste slightly different but um it's pretty much the same idea and consistency so sunflower sunflower seed butter would be great in this perfect um what about the difference in taste between long beans and string beans for the recipe almost the same actually i i really think that you can substitute substitute them equally um but i just think it's fun to introduce people to vegetables they may not be familiar with and i love the way the the long beans look but you could totally use any string beans um and i think there might be one about um plant-based meats or impossible burger maybe using that as a substitute for one of your proteins in the salad um so traditionally the salad actually doesn't has either tempeh tofu or and or hard boiled eggs it doesn't usually have meat um so you you could though if you want to you know have that but i might just have it on the side instead if that's something that you want to eat um but this is actually aside from the colorful vegetables uh pretty faithful to the original salad but yeah i would say eat what you like wonderful and let's see um there's uh you suggested trinidad type of cilantro where did you get that okay um so uh that is called in the in the cookbook it's called Kulantro um and you can get it in um some like Latin American groceries and also in Asian groceries um and at the farmers market it will be sold under different names um Kulantro is the you know Latin American name for it and that's he's also using the Caribbean Caribbean markets also which we don't have too many of here we'll sell it in an Asian grocery um oh now i'm just blanking on the name give me a second to look it up again sorry about that um it is used in Vietnamese cooking a lot um in English it's actually called sawtooth leaf but i rarely see it sold under that name the name that you'll see in that's used um in Vietnam is um is no guy which i may not be pronouncing correctly it's also sometimes called in the Caribbean Shadow Benny or Bandania um so there are many names for it um so i think you will have to probably go to one of these more specialized markets so either um a Latin American market Asian market or Caribbean market or uh to one of the herb vendors in the farmers markets you can get them there if you can't get it you can substitute regular cilantro it it doesn't taste exactly the same but it would be fine wonderful um i think there might be one question also about the sauce um how what about think substituting the fresh ginger for powdered ginger yeah you can do that if um you know fresh ginger is something that you don't normally you know eat enough of to keep around in your refrigerator powder would be fine i would just start with a little you know so when something is uh dried and then powdered it's going to be a little bit more potent um and then add it to taste you know some people love the taste of ginger i do some people don't like it as much i definitely would include some ginger in it but you know adjust it accordingly to how you how ginger you like things but ground would be fine perfect i think we're going to take one last question i see there's one about uh sprouted tofu tempeh and whole edamame beans which one might be nutrient dense for this recipe um all of them would be actually so the sprouting um you know enhances the nutrition and and eases the digestion of any of these um but they would all be great actually yeah so edamame would be a nice addition to this not traditional but again it doesn't have to be really so any of those plant-based proteins would be fine in this but again something from the soybean family is more traditional typically with tempeh as the most common one perfect let me see i'm just looking at the chat really quick um let's see i think that might be the majority of the questions great um and then let's let's hold on one second i'm sorry i did accidentally move on to answer that wasn't which is um do you have any suggestions for those who can't tolerate high fiber foods like beans but want to eat healthy so that that question so with beans there are it may or may not be the five for some people it's the fiber um for others it actually might just be um you know a cooking technique which i i go over in the book about making beans more digestible and breaking down some of the starch is actually a particular starch so taking a note from you know using herbs and spices for that if you cook with a certain herbs and spices that will reduce the gassiness and that might help you digest might digest them examples of those um and i just actually want to open to that section i know we're running out of time from the book where i list those because i think that's going to be helpful to many of you give me one second here okay we're almost there because i think it's going to help a lot of people who think they can't eat beans um being cooking techniques so one that i want to go over um is for spices um anise aniseed coriander cumin um asafoetida ginger and fennel are spices that can reduce the gassiness of beans and help you digest them for herbs epazote which is sold in latin american markets as a fresh or dried herb a little bit of that can help um with digesting beans um and then from japanese cuisine kombu or kelp can also help with digestion so i wanted to share those with you and then there are other techniques that you can read elsewhere about soaking and then discarding the soaking water um boiling with baking soda which might change the texture and taste a little bit um that can help get rid of some of the gassiness of digesting beans um so i think that answers half of that question if it's fiber though um and fiber you know in general that's difficult my general um statement would be you know cooked versus raw might be easier for you to digest and then when you're adding more fiber to your diet um just taking your time with it don't like suddenly go from never eating vegetables to eating all of them every meal your body needs time to actually change its um gut bacteria that will help digest your food so slowly integrating that over time you'll you may or may not be hopefully be able to digest a little bit better thank you all right that was so wonderful thank you linda we totally appreciate you being here today and such a wonderful answering all of the questions and folks i put the um in last in the chat box the link to today's events which has the links to all of the things we hit on links to library news links to linda's books and to our upcoming event at omnivore check out the book buy the book like there's it's on hold right now you have to place it on hold at our library so that's good and bad but we're happy to see that there's over 50 holds on the book so yay um but go check out and i noticed you're going to be in convo with terry brian with brian terry yes awesome he is so amazing too i love him so that is a double win for going to see that live event it might be the best event in san jesco in august i'm thinking i think you might be right i think you might be right all right all so much for hosting me and thank you for everybody for coming i'm really glad that you spent this time with me today thank you so much linda and thank you alan for helping out today too and library community we'll see you soon