There are a lot of health benefits of incorporating whole grains into one’s diet. High-fiber foods like whole grains provide a feeling of fullness at fewer calories. And the easiest way to use these grains is by substituting in different traditional recipes 🙂 You can find a lot of recipes with oats, cracked wheat and quinoa on my blog – these are all spin-offs of some Indian dish made using rice.
Saagu is a traditional dish from south India in which vegetables are cooked in a coconut-cilantro gravy. This is a small twist of that recipe. I add moong dal or lentils while making saagu to pack in some protein and make the dish more filling. I don’t like a lot of coconut so I cut down on it. And I add some mint as it gives such a unique flavor to the cooked veggies and lentils. You can add any veggies of your choice – I generally use green beans, chayote squash (chow chow), green peas, carrots and kohlrabi (knolkol) 🙂 This is a one pot meal! I love those! They are easy to cook and also involve very little clean up! This dish works as a great side dish but if you are a veggie lover like me, then you would probably eat it like a main course stew 🙂 The only prep work that this dish requires is vegetable chopping!
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Inspite of this being the most common piece of health advice one would ever receive, a lot of people are are too busy to plan for a good breakfast. There is a lot of research that has even linked having a good breakfast to maintaining a healthy body weight – so there is even more incentive to give this topic some thought now!
