Carrots and cancer prevention

Author: Koike Go Ryo (Japan) / et al.
Translator: Hamano Tadashi
Editor-in-Chief: Ishizaki
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1999-02-01
Features:
Excerpt: Design colorful, nutritionally balanced recipes to create a vibrant table setting. What colors of food do you usually see on your dining table? Perhaps breakfast consists of white bread with a yellow omelette, and the salad is just white lettuce with a few red tomatoes. Lunch is a mixed-noodle soup, paired with white cabbage and some red carrots. Dinner features baked fish, which is brown, and stewed potatoes with meat, also brown. Cucumber salad with wakame seaweed has green skin but white flesh, and only a small amount of black wakame is used to add color. The soup contains white radishes, and the rice is still white. From the colors of vegetables in these three meals, there are 6 white vegetables, 1 yellow, and the rest are green and red, with a hint of black. It can be said that this is a monotonous recipe dominated by white vegetables. With a little adjustment, we can design a more colorful menu. For example, add diced tomatoes to the breakfast omelette, and include some broccoli in the salad. For lunch, add more carrot slices and green vegetables to the soup noodles. For dinner, add green peas to the stewed potatoes, use more wakame in the cucumber salad, sprinkle some green scallions in the soup, and add radish leaves to the white rice to make a mixed-rice dish. As a result, 6 green vegetables are added, along with more red and black colors. This makes the food on the table much more colorful. As mentioned above, the adjusted dishes are not only more colorful but also more nutritious. Foods rich in beta-carotene mainly include dark-colored vegetables, yellow and orange fruits, dark-green seaweed, and other brightly colored foods. When designing recipes, people often focus only on flavor combinations, but the color coordination of vegetables is also very important. When it comes to color, the natural colors of vegetables may not be as vibrant as processed ones, but their inherent colors have a unique charm, giving a soft and soothing feel. The natural colors of food make people feel, and if the dining table is adorned with more brightly colored natural vegetables, more beta-carotene can be absorbed. Foods rich in beta-carotene also contain high levels of vitamin C, iron, and calcium. A colorful and delicious meal on the dining table naturally enhances appetite. Eating a variety of dishes helps maintain nutritional balance without realizing it.
Eat seasonal vegetables according to the season
Experts estimate that each person needs to consume 100 grams of dark-colored vegetables daily. If we pay attention to eating salads, stewed pumpkin, and other stewed dishes, paired with meat dishes, we can meet our daily nutritional needs. With a little effort, it is certainly possible to achieve the required intake. There are many varieties of dark-colored vegetables. For example, in spring, there are water celery and rapeseed; in summer, there are houttuynia and loofah, as well as other seasonal vegetables like chives and green-stemmed vegetables, which are all easy to prepare. If you consume these various vegetables daily, you can easily reach the 100-gram goal.
Put more effort into cooking methods to make dishes more diverse
Use various ingredients flexibly and choose appropriate cooking methods to naturally enrich the variety of dishes. If salads are always the same, or vegetables are always stir-fried with meat, and pumpkin is always sweetly stewed, even the most nutritious dishes can become monotonous and even bore children. This requires cooks to frequently change cooking methods, vary vegetable choices, and think more about combinations and preparations. Break the fixed mindset that vegetables are only for salads or stir-frying. For example, you can mix smoked pork with vegetables to change the original pattern. Similarly, even with stewed pumpkin, different cooking methods will alter the impression, and using broccoli instead of lettuce in salads will create a different experience.
We should eat vegetables with every meal, which requires more careful preparation than meat or fish. With this in mind, this book introduces various dishes by combining different cooking methods. When cooking, break the traditional mindset that vegetables are only for salads and dare to challenge grilling and steaming methods. Vegetables are not limited to being side dishes; they can also be used as main courses or ingredients for desserts.