to the life you wanna lead?

They sure can.

Food has both a physical and an energetic quality and can enhance or impede your growth as a person.

How?

You'll find out as we go Back to the Cutting Board, today, on Christina Cooks.

(theme music) ♪ (announcer) Underwriting for Christina Cooks is provided by Suzanne's Specialties, offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties.

Sweetness the way Mother Nature intended.

♪ Additional funding is also provided by Old Yankee Cutting Boards, designed for durability and custom crafted by hand with Yankee pride and craftsmanship.

♪ Jonathan's Spoons, individually handcrafted from cherry wood, each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

♪ Additional funding is also provided by: Hi.

I'm Christina Pirello and this is Christina Cooks, where each week, we take fresh, seasonal ingredients and whip them into amazing dishes.

Will it all be plant-based?

Yeah.

Will it all be delicious?

Yeah.

So, did you know that you could cook your way to the life that you want?

"What?"

you say.

Absolutely.

The food you eat determines how you move through the world.

Eat tons of saturated fat and that's how you'll move through the world.

Eat food that's alive and nourishes the body and that's how you'll move through the world.

So, the first recipe we're gonna make has been in my family a long time, except it always had meat and now it doesn't.

My Uncle Ralph, my grandfather's father's brother-- so he's my great-great-uncle?

Anyway, he was an amazing cook and he was, of my grandfather's family, the one who was connected.

Just saying.

So, we're gonna take some garlic and smash it.

The basis of this recipe was his.

He was a wonderful cook, he was a wonderful man.

All I knew of him was that he was a great guy.

Wouldn't wanna get on his wrong side, but I couldn't, I was his niece.

We're gonna finely chop some garlic and set that off to the side and dice an onion.

He always used red onion for this dish, and he said it was because it made it sweeter because it was such a spicy chili.

And he would serve this with homemade bread that my grandmother made, or my Aunt Laura, my grandmother's sister, and they would compete as to who made the best bread, who made the best chili.

But my Uncle Ralph, phew, best chili.

Okay, so it's gonna go into olive oil that has not been placed over heat yet, because I want olive oil flavor.

If you're gonna go through the trouble of getting great olive oil, you kinda don't wanna mess it up by heating it first and compromising the flavor-- although it is a high-heat oil.

Okay.

So we're gonna add a pinch of salt, just a pinch, and we're gonna start to sweat the veggies just a little bit.

And we're gonna add to it some smoked paprika.

See, this was one of his two secrets.

He said you couldn't make chili without smoked paprika.

And since I've always done it this way because of him, I'm thinking you can't make chili without it.

Then some hot peppers.

None of my grandfather's brothers or my grandfather did anything without a jar of hot peppers next to their dish.

They lived on them.

And no matter how spicy we made something, they would say, "We'll be the judge of that."

And then they'd add more.

So.

Now we're gonna dice some celery.

And you just dice celery by cutting it into spears that are still connected at one end, and then run your knife across them.

And then these are gonna go in.

And just get one little stir.

And what's happening now is the chili pepper is starting to crackle a little bit, which is good.

Now we're gonna take some canned chipotles, smoked chipotles.

These lil' puppies are hot, and my grandfather's brother, my Uncle Ralph, used to say there was no way you could make chili without them, so I don't make my chili without them.

They are super hot, so if you're a wuss, maybe don't use them.

But if you're brave and you want to become braver in your life, then use them.

But when you use things like smoked peppers that are in a sauce, you need to clean your cutting board before you do anything else, or otherwise, everything tastes like smoked chilies.

It's really smelling amazing now.

So now we add a little bit of crushed tomatoes so that the peppers don't burn.

(sizzling) Give that a stir.

Smells so good.

Some tomato paste so it thickens, just about a tablespoon.

Then we add some pinto beans, and pinto beans are-- in Italian chili, we usually use borlotti beans, but they're hard to find in America, so we're gonna use pinto beans.

And we're using canned so that the chili cooks in about a half hour.

When I make this at home, I use dried beans, and they take about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes, but what I like about that is that the flavor really develops.

But you can do it the quick way if you like.

I just wanted you to see there is a quick way to get chili.

Bay leaf, so no one becomes musical from the beans, and then, our sort of ground beef texture comes from millet, which is a whole grain that comes to us from Africa.

Doesn't produce any stomach acid, is easy to digest, and is high in protein so it makes us strong.

That goes in.

Little bit of a stir.

Then we add five cups of water, four to five cups, depending on how thick you'd like your chili to be.

I can't count and talk, I must admit.

Okay.

Let's go with four cups, 'cause I'd like it to be a nice, thick chili.

And then, my Uncle Ralph's secret ingredient was dark baking chocolate, which would make the chili taste like it had sort of a mole flavor, and he said that that was the secret to great chili, and I've done it ever since I was a little girl, when he taught me how to cook.

So this'll cook for about... if you use canned beans, about 30 to 35 minutes, until the millet takes on a ground beef kind of texture.

If you use dried beans, it could be an hour to an hour and a half.

And we'll just let that cook.

-Can a vegetable be a fruit?

-A fruit can be a vegetable.

What?

It can be both?

What happens if you swallow the seeds?

(unintelligible) -I don't get it.

-I am so confused.

♪ We get tons and tons of emails and letters and phone calls to the office from people who are trying to get their feet on a path to wellness, they're struggling just a little bit.

So I thought, let's talk to some people who are out there doing this and see what they wanna know.

So, Cary Randolph, I know you're new to cooking in plant-based, so is there anything I can help you with?

(Cary) Well, I just have a few questions.

(Christina) Okay.

-Oh, just a few!

-Just a few.

I'm trying to eat more dried fruit, and I found dried apricots, but they have sulfur dioxide in them.

-Is that okay?

-Well, it's not the best form of apricots you can get.

You wanna find the ones that are sort of a really dingy brown, 'cause they have no chemical additives.

And while these have no added sugar, that little bit of additive can make your liver work just a little bit harder.

But if that's all you can find.

-go for it.

-Okay, great.

Also, I've been reading your cookbooks about making porridge, and it's basically on the stove.

But I have a crockpot and I would really love to make it in that.

Is that something -I could do?

-Absolutely, but there's a little trick.

You bring it to a boil on the stove and then put it into the crockpot and let it cook all night.

Because if you don't bring it to the boil, you'll get up in the morning and say, "Wow, I have soup that has a little bit of uncooked grain in it."

So that's an easy one, and that will ensure that you get porridge every morning.

Okay, great, and also, I've been eating more brown rice, as opposed to white rice, but what is the difference between long grain and short grain?

We don't have enough time in a year to talk about how many rices there are.

But the basic rices you wanna use are short-grain brown rice, medium, long grain, and basmati.

Long grain and basmati we tend to use more in hotter weather 'cause they have more moisture and help to keep us cool, especially the aromatic rices like basmati or red or wild.

Medium-grain rice is kinda like the middle of the road.

You can use it any time of year, it won't bother you.

Short grain is the one that's most alkalizing to the pH of the intestines, and it's kinda like the foundation of the rices that you choose.

Right there is short-grain brown rice, so that's kinda your go-to, and the other ones are supplemental.

-Okay, great.

-That's it?

-That's all you need to know?

-That's it for now.

You are, like, a star!

You're doing it, man.

All right, so don't struggle.

Send us a letter or an email and we'll try to help you get your feet on the path to wellness.

♪ So the chili is done.

I'm gonna give it one last season of salt.

Matt, I need you to come and see this chili texture.

It looks exactly like-- the millet has taken on the exact texture of, let's say ground beef.

Right?

Look at that.

It's creamy and rich, and you have to try to find the bay leaf.

Otherwise, you have to give a prize to whoever gets it.

So you're gonna ladle up the chili while it's hot and then I'm gonna garnish it with nice flatleaf parsley.

-Shouldn't that be cilantro?

-It's my show and I hate cilantro, so no.

Get out!

So we have parsley and that's our chili.

So now the chili's done.

This is a great main course, it's high in protein.

It's everything you could possibly want.

It's spicy, it's all those things.

So now, to continue to cook your way to the life you want, what we're gonna do is make a croquet out of whole grains.

Whole grains are the foundation upon which you build your health.

At the end of the day, there's no other way to explain it.

If you don't eat whole grains, then it's really hard to find a foundation.

We're gonna use two grains that are really, really important to building your health.

One of them is brown rice and the other one is millet.

Brown rice is just organic short-grain brown rice, and brown rice has this incredible ability to help to alkalize the intestines and regulate moisture in the body.

If you're too goopy, it dries you up; if you're too dry, it goops you up?

It helps to keep you moist.

So we're gonna take some millet.

Millet, as I said earlier, is high in protein, it doesn't create stomach acid.

So they're gonna get mixed together and they're gonna make the basis of a croquet.

We have diced carrot and onion to give the croquets texture and a little sweet flavor, and some organic corn, which will add another whole grain element and help you to digest.

Okay.

You're gonna wet your hands and you're gonna go in here and mix these.

You've gotta use your hands for this.

You get to play with your food.

Nobody's gonna yell at you, you get to have some fun for once and not worry so much that you're touching everything.

You wanna get in here and really mix it together, Now, your grains have to be cooked soft but not wet.

If your hands or your grain is too wet, what'll happen is the croquets won't hold together.

So what I wanna do is shape them into croquets.

Now, if I was French, they would have to be shaped a very specific way.

But I'm Italian, so it is what it is.

I'm gonna try to make them look like they're oblong, but who knows.

We're gonna dredge it in cornmeal to give us a nice, crisp outer coating, and also, it helps to hold them together so you don't look like a loser.

Right into the hot oil, and we're gonna do three.

It seems to be, in cooking, three is a lucky number.

Three, five, seven...

I don't know.

But I don't wanna violate every tradition, so we'll just say it's a lucky number.

So, dredge the second one, and then we'll dredge one more.

This is a great way to use up leftover grains, and also a way to eat grains that's a little bit richer, if you're not used to eating them, so that you have a little more fun, right?

Whole grains are high in fiber so they're good for digestion.

They lay a foundation for you.

If your intestines aren't great and working well, you're never gonna really achieve the life you want, 'cause you're kind of a wuss, you gotta be strong.

In the world we live in, you gotta be strong.

So.

Now they're in the oil, and we're gonna take a spatula and kind of just press them down a little bit.

And then, after a minute or so, you're gonna turn them.

You want them to just be a light golden color.

(sizzling) And as soon as the other side browns a little bit, we'll plate them.

Just a really quick way to use up your grains and a really interesting way to cook whole grains.

So.

We're gonna take them out of the oil.

And how you plate things, like, how you make your food look is almost as important as what your food is, right?

Because people eat with their eyes way before they eat-eat.

So you have them in the middle of a plate, and what I did was, I took onions, a little bit of soy sauce.

I cooked them together with some water, and then I added some arrowroot to make a sort of gravy.

And so, what we're gonna do is just take this little bit of gravy and drizzle it right over them to add some richness, as though fried grain is not rich enough.

And then, a little bit of parsley to just freshen the dish up.

We're just gonna take some whole sprigs and set that right on the side here.

And then, this side dish will go with anything you make and lay the foundation that you'll build your health on.

♪ If you really wanna cook your way to the life you want, one thing you can't eat is simple white refined sugar.

It should have a skull and crossbones and never cross your sweet little lips again.

So does that mean you're doomed to a grim life of nothing sweet?

Of course not!

I would never do that to you.

I'm gonna talk about natural sweeteners and kind of go in the order of the one I like the least to the ones I like the best.

I'm not a big fan of agave.

Agave's really high in fructose, which makes your little liver work really, really, really hard, and since there's better options, let's put agave over with the "meh."

Then we have maple syrup.

Loaded with nutrients, completely natural, but also a simple sugar, so it kinda slows your roll.

So, "meh."

Then we have brown rice syrup and coconut sugar.

Both of them low glycemic index, one made from rice, one made from the sap of the coconut tree, and both of them give you a lovely, caramel-y flavor to your sweet treats, and these are the ones I go to all the time.

I love these two sweeteners.

And finally, there's stevia.

This is powdered stevia, which is a really fine white powder, and it's a very intensely sweet taste.

They say about stevia that it's 200 times as sweet as sugar.

So that's a lot of sweetness.

You gotta really play if you want that to be your sweetener.

But if you don't want calories in your sweetener or you cannot have sugar, stevia is a good option to use to be able to have a little bit of sweet in your day.

♪ Who doesn't love dessert?

One of my favorite things growing up was a cannoli.

But nobody wants to make cannolis, roll them around the thing, fry them.

But there's a way to do it that you make a deconstructed cannoli, and there's no compromise to your wellness.

So here we go, and it's easy, aye, yi, yi, easy.

So I make the dough in a food processor.

I don't normally make anything in a food processor, and I can feel my entire crew's shoulders going up around their ears, because equipment and me, not a good mix.

But we're gonna try.

So we're gonna take a cup and a half of flour-- again, whole wheat pastry or sprouted whole wheat.

Into the food processor.

If you pray at home, now's a good time to start, just pray.

Okay?

We're gonna put a teaspoon of baking powder so that the dough puffs, doesn't get heavy and oily when we fry it.

A pinch of salt.

Coconut sugar, so the dough is sweet.

Some vanilla extract, about a teaspoon... like that.

And a little bit of apple cider vinegar, which will make the dough crispy.

I know that sounds weird, but that's what it does.

Then... Now we turn on the food processor.

Uhh... (gentle whirring) Oh, but I want it to pulse.

Okay.

So you pulse it, and then you slowly add red wine.

If you don't wanna use red wine, you can use water or apple juice.

But red wine is the tradition here.

And what you wanna do is add red wine slowly until the dough comes together into a ball and runs around the bowl.

So you do this very slowly, so it's not a lot of wine, when you think about it.

(gentle whirring) Almost.

One little more touch, okay.

So you see how the dough is gathering and it's sorta-- yeah, you see that?

That's what we want, right there, perfection.

And I even made the machine work, yay!

Okay.

So now you're gonna take this dough, it's very soft and a little bit sticky, and you're gonna wrap it in plastic and you're gonna put it in the fridge for about an hour, because we need it to get really, really sort of stiff.

So, I've done that, and here's the dough that's been in the fridge.

So now we're gonna take two pieces of parchment.

I know what you're thinking: Oh, we're rolling dough again.

Yeah, we're rolling dough again.

It's good to roll dough.

Keeps you on your toes.

Okay.

So we take the dough.

You wanna put it in your hands and sort of turn it into a disc so that it's easier to roll.

Not too thick.

You kinda work it a little bit with your hands, and what this does is give it some sort of pliability.

Pliability?

Flexibility?

I don't know--something.

Now you're gonna take your rolling pin and you're going to-- the dough's a little stiff, so you get to work just a little bit.

You gotta work for these; it's fried dough, man.

But you're gonna feel like you're at one of the old Italian festivals that we all went to as kids and ate fried dough.

And the goal, again, is to get your dough to be one uniform thickness, because if it's thick in one part and thin in another part, what will happen is you'll have a very doughy cannoli Napoleon instead of a crispy one, and the thinner, the better, so you kinda work this for a little bit.

And what you'll find with this is a little dough goes a long way.

So now we've got the right thickness, so I'm gonna peel away the parchment, and then you flip it and peel away the other part, and this way, you never have your dough stick.

Now we're gonna cut the dough.

I like to cut into triangles, because then I can build my Napoleon to be like modern art.

So I do a small one, then I do a medium one, like this, and then I do a bigger one for the base.

So there's the three dough.

Take away your excess, and you're gonna rewrap this and roll it again, because you're gonna make-- trust me, you're gonna make way more than one of these.

Then you take a fork and you pierce them, and what this does is prevent the dough from getting a huge bubble in it.

'Cause then you won't be able to build.

Then you're gonna go into hot oil.

I'm using rice bran oil, because it's a very mild flavor, it's not super expensive, and it cooks really well at high heat.

So you're gonna watch these, 'cause they kinda puff up pretty quick and get golden, and then you wanna turn them as soon as you can tell that they're blistering on one side, which is kinda like right away.

So you see how you've got this lovely blistering happening?

This is perfection.

So now--and when your oil's good and hot, right?

They were in the oil no time at all.

So this is not an oily, greasy dessert.

This is a rich dessert, and there's a difference between that and super heavy fried.

So now, we're gonna make our filling.

So this is vegan cream cheese.

We're gonna add to it some vanilla extract, about a teaspoon, and then we're gonna take some whipped brown rice syrup, which is kinda the key, because any other sweetener is gonna change the color to be very dark.

You wanna have about equal parts cream cheese and brown rice syrup, and if you have a double spoon thing going, why not?

Then you're gonna start to mix this together so it gets to be whippy and takes on the texture of, like, a mascarpone.

Then you're gonna add some chocolate chips, some slivered almonds, and mix all that in so you have a cannoli kind of filling, right?

Okay.

Now we build.

Take a tiny, tiny bit of your filling on the bottom of the plate, and this is gonna be the glue.

Put your biggest piece on the bottom.

Take a good dollop of your filling, and then take your medium-sized piece, a good dollop of filling.

This dessert's so much fun, I love making these.

And then, your smallest piece and a tiny, tiny dollop of filling.

Because the garnish is a strawberry.

You take the strawberry, cut through almost to the top, and make a little fan.

And you press it right into the custard at the top.

And then you garnish with chocolate chips and slivered almonds, and you have a decadent and yet not crazy-unhealthy dessert.

You get to have your cake and eat it.

♪ So what are you waiting for?

Let's get Back to the Cutting Board and I'll see you next time on Christina Cooks.

♪ ♪ (announcer) Underwriting for Christina Cooks is provided by Suzanne's Specialties, offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties, sweetness the way Mother Nature intended.

Additional funding is also provided by Old Yankee Cutting Boards, designed for durability and custom crafted by hand with Yankee pride and craftsmanship.

♪ Jonathan's Spoons, individually handcrafted from cherry wood, each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

♪ Additional funding is also provided by: ♪ You can find today's recipes and learn more by visiting our website at: And by following Christina on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

The companion cookbook, Back to the Cutting Board, takes you on a journey to re-engage with the soul of cooking.

With more than 100 plant-based recipes, finding the joy in cooking has never been simpler.

To order your copy for $20 plus handling, call: Add Christina's iconic book, "Cooking the Whole Foods Way," with 500 delicious plant-based recipes.

To order both books for $39.95 plus handling, call: ♪