Join us at our home for a Plant-Based Potluck July 24th @ 6:30 pm to kick off our meal swaps that will be starting August 7th. It’ll give us a chance to talk about our plans and guidelines for the meal swap (see this post), lend out books from our new lending library, and eat healthy, delicious food!
This’ll be a traditional potluck, no meal swapping yet, in which you bring enough food for a small crowd in a single serving dish (a serving utensil is great too). Please bring an ingredient list (better yet, the recipe on an index card) in case anyone has food allergies.
The guidelines for dishes to bring are:
- No meat, fish, eggs, or dairy
- No refined sugar
- No oil
**Why no oil? I know a lot of my old recipes on this blog contain oil (in tiny amounts) but I’ve replaced it with steam frying in water when it’s used to saute, with toasted sesame seeds where sesame oil is used, with applesauce or mashed fruit in baking, and with kalamata or black olives or avocados for richness where it’s needed. We learn more about nutrition every day and, through recent documentaries like Planeat and Forks Over Knives as well as through nutrition journal articles we’ve learned that oil (a processed food, which we avoid in general anyway) damages your cardiovascular system similarly to meat and dairy.
Cutting it out has actually improved the taste of our food…and actually, when we go out to eat now – restaurant food is always cooked with far more oil than you’d use at home – even though we choose options with as little oil as possible it still tastes kind of gross, leaving an unpleasant greasy taste behind. As an added bonus to cutting out oil completely (and replacing firm tofus, which can have as much as 30 grams of fat in a block, with light silken tofu) we’re both looking a lot more cut…but that’s another story!
Don’t be intimidated by the guidelines – I’m more than willing to make suggestions of what to bring! You’ll find that cooking with whole foods is actually a hell of a lot easier – less ingredients and often simpler preparation. Look around the blog for ideas (replacing oil as noted above), see this post with a link to a bunch of cooking videos, or feel free to ask me for a recipe! There are soooo many in our new lending library that look amazing.
Please RSVP with your number of guests and what type of dish you’re going to bring (or with any questions). You can reach us here, through our Facebook page, through Twitter, or let Derek know at your next training session!
