128: How to Play With Your Food

In this episode, I share a few fun things I’ve been doing in the kitchen lately. Whether you’re new to plant-based eating or looking for ways to mix things up, this episode is packed with planty and practical tips. I talk about ingredient swaps, some of my favorite kitchen tools, prep shortcuts, and creative ways to get more veggies in your mouth. Plus, I share my go-to breakfast routine and a ridiculously simple hack for delicious homemade gluten-free garlic bread. NOM!

Helpful links

• Clean Food Dirty Girl Recipe Club
• Drop It Club Plant-Powered Weight Loss
• Buckwheat Bread
• Making My Whole-Food Plant-Based Diet Gluten-Free
• Rainbow Crunch Topping
• Gluten-Free Porridge: Take Your Mornings to the Next Level

00:00 Introduction to Plant-Based Eating
02:23 Creative Cooking with Whole Foods
09:43 Marinades and Smoothies: Enhancing Flavor
12:06 Innovative Breakfast Ideas
21:29 Meal Prep and Time-Saving Tips

Full episode transcript (has not been edited for grammar)

Molly (00:01)
Hello, this is Molly from Clean Food, Dirty Girl. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Clean Food, Dirty Girl podcast. Okay, today I wanna talk with you just about a couple of things that I have been doing recently with food and plants and eating plant-based to give you some ideas. So they’re kind of like, I guess they’re tips, but it’s more like here’s what I’ve been doing lately.

And you could do this too if you want. So these are just some ideas, getting creative with plant-based eating. I think there’s this idea when people have not gone plant-based yet or they’re toying with the idea or they’re just thinking about it and they think, okay, well, if I take meat and dairy and process food out of the diet, then what am going to eat? I’m just going to be bored.

The truth is there’s so many different whole food plant-based ingredients and different whole plant foods that it’s very hard to get bored unless you’re just making the same thing over and over again. But the potential to have very interesting food on your plate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day is there. And if you are a meal plan club member or a Clean Food Dirty Girl member of any kind, you know that we’re all about utilizing different ingredients and having everything taste delicious. So I want to start with just that. If you are plant-based and you are feeling like you’re in a bit of a rut, then you just have to change up what you’re making and change up the recipes, change up the ingredients, and we have you covered. mean, that is what we do.

I’ll link in the show notes to our membership if you want to get re-inspired to eat plant-based. We have thousands of recipes, whole food plant-based recipes, the best recipes out there and hundreds of different meal plans. So there’s that. And I make our recipes all the time. I follow our meal plans all the time. But on top of that, but I’m always thinking about plans, right? I’m always…because it’s my job, it’s what I do, it’s how I eat, it’s a big part of my life. So from time to time, I like to come on here and just tell you what I’m doing lately with plants and with some of my food to give you ideas as well. So the first one is when I follow our recipes, one great thing about the Clean Food Dirty Girl portal is that you can look at the recipes in weight and

You can’t do that for all recipes out there. And when you’re used to measuring out the grams of ingredients or measuring out the weight of ingredients for recipes, you really miss it when it’s not there. And so I always use my kitchen scale when I’m making our recipes, because for me, it’s easier just to put a bowl on my scale and then zero out the scale so that it’s not weighing the bowl and then add the ingredients into the bowl and just measure them out that way instead of using cups. And so that’s the first thing, like I’m always using my scale. And I mean, when you’re baking, it’s a lot more accurate to go with the weight. But even if you’re not baking, for me, it’s just the speed at which I can do it, right? It’s faster for me to weigh things out than to measure things out. And one really good thing about measuring

start measuring by weight is that when you have a recipe that you don’t have all of the ingredients for, then it’s really easy to make swaps when you are measuring the actual weight of something. So here’s an example. I made, it was actually last night, and I made the red lentil soup.

I’m just going to pull it up in the portal right now so I can tell you exactly. So it’s called creamy red lentil soup and it’s one of my go-to recipes. It’s super fast, super easy, super delicious. It’s like it’s one of my favorite recipes and I made it literally when I got home from my workout and I made it for dinner. It’s that fast. And so the recipe calls for three cups of carrots, a cup of yellow onions and a cup of red bell pepper. And those are of the veggies in that. And then it calls for some spices and some red lentils. But I didn’t have that many carrots and I did not have any red bell pepper. And so what I did was I just looked in my fridge and I had some carrots, but I also had some celery and then I had broccoli and then I had an onion. so I was like, great, this will work. So I put the scale on my, or put the bowl

bowl on my scale and then I weighed out. I put as many carrots in there. I chopped them up, put it in there. So three cups of carrots is 390 grams. And I know this because I’m looking at the portal and I’m seeing the weight. So I did not have 390 grams of carrots. I had like 180. So I just chopped up some celery and put enough celery in the bowl until the scale said 390. And that way I know that I’m getting equal weights and so the recipe is really going to work out well because you can have different veggies like way different amounts and so it’s more accurate to get the weight rather than the measurement when you’re swapping out ingredients. So one cup of bell pepper weighs 150 grams so I just zeroed out the bowl on the scale and I added 150 grams of broccoli, right? And then just use that instead. And so I had carrots, celery, onion, and broccoli instead of carrots, onion, and bell pepper. And then I followed the rest of the recipe exactly while it calls for low sodium veggie broth or stock, and I didn’t have any, so I just used water, easy peasy.

And then I followed the rest of the recipe and you know it came out so delicious. It didn’t taste exactly like the original because it had different ingredients but it was so good and it was a very delicious dinner. I was really happy with it and so I oftentimes swap out items because I go to the grocery store. I go to the grocery store once a week.

But I go to the big farmers market, the really good farmers market here on Maui, I go every other week because it’s a bit of a drive for me. And I get enough produce to last like two weeks. And so by the end of that second week or going into that second week, I don’t have as much produce as I do. And so I oftentimes will swap out different ingredients. And the wonderful thing about whole food plant-based recipes

And especially our whole food plant based recipes is that they are very, very flexible and you can really swap out ingredients. And so that’s, I mean, that’s wonderful to use up what you have. And it’s also really good if you’re trying to save money because like, for example, maybe bell pepper is really expensive, but zucchini is really affordable. So you could swap out.

The red bell pepper with zucchini. Now obviously there’s some recipes that are going to you know require a little bit more finesse if it’s like a zucchini patty or something or like stuffed zucchini boats like we have some of those recipes it would be harder to sub but if it’s like a soup or a sauce anything that gets blended or put together with things then swapping out ingredients is super easy and let’s say

recipe calls for quinoa and quinoa is expensive and brown rice is much cheaper than you know sometimes I’ll just get the brown rice and use brown rice instead of quinoa. Not every time because I want to have that nutrient diversity and I want to get eat a wide range of whole plant food so I don’t want to just eat brown rice over and over again so I will swap them out but if you know, if my budget is really tight, then hey, you know, I’m not going to have as much quinoa as I will brown rice because brown rice is typically cheaper. So you can do that. Just swap out and make, you know, use what you can find, use what’s affordable to you, use what you have on hand. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. And if you’re following the weight of the ingredients in recipes, it’s easier to make those swaps.

Now with grains, it’s a little bit different because every grain cooks a little bit differently and needs a little bit different amount of water and stuff. And so like if you were going to have one of our meals with quinoa instead of brown rice, you would just go look up the quinoa recipe, cook that, or if you’re going to make brown rice instead of quinoa, you would just go look up the brown rice recipe in the portal, follow that and then have that cooked and then use that. So

Anyways, that’s kind of my first thing is just that reminder to use the scale and to swap out veggies as you as makes sense to you. OK, so the next one is when you are marinating tofu or tempeh or veggies and you make a really delicious marinade, when if you have leftover marinade, a really easy thing to do is make a simple salad dressing out of it. And I did a live on Instagram.

just a while ago. And I actually kind of showed what I like, how I do this. But typically like if I had, for example, tofu marinating and I marinated it overnight. So the tofu absorbed a lot of the marinade, but it didn’t absorb everything. So I had about a quarter cup leftover of this delicious marinade. And the marinade was like Dijon mustard and soy sauce and some coconut aminos and some rice vinegar, some turmeric, some turmeric powder, ginger powder, a little bit of liquid smoke. And so it was like all these really delicious ingredients and I don’t want to just toss that marinade. So instead I poured the marinade into a little Mason jar, added a bit of blonde or white miso and then a little bit of tahini, put the lid on that Mason jar, gave it a really good shake. And then I used that for salad dressing. I actually had it last night. I’m going to have it again for lunch and it’s delicious.

So don’t throw away marinade, just repurpose it into a dressing by adding a little bit of tahini and maybe a little bit of miso. And generally, like no matter what the marinade is, generally speaking, a little tahini and a little miso with the marinade will be really yummy for a dressing. You may have to add a little bit more water to thin it out, or you may need to add a little bit more tahini to thicken it up.

But that’s super easy because you don’t have to use the blender. You don’t have to measure anything. You just kind of eyeball it and then you taste it. You can add some fresh herbs if you want or some dried herbs. You can get as fancy as you want with it or you can just keep it very basic. I mean, you wouldn’t even have to add the tahini if you didn’t want to. You could just use it like that and it would just be a very thin dressing. But definitely repurpose your marinades. I want to talk about smoothies.

Real quick, so we talked about this in a recent Drop It Club connection call. So Drop It Club is our weight loss club that people are having such amazing results with. It’s so cool to see the transformations happening in there. And every week we have a live connection call where I answer questions, I coach people, people talk to each other. It’s just such a fabulous community. But I was talking to somebody about smoothies and

She was wanting to get more veggies into her diet, but she really loved her smoothies. And I was like, hey, just start adding more veggies to your smoothies. And I do this all the time. I add celery, I’ll add beets, I’ll add carrots, I’ll add… I like to cook extra sweet potatoes when I make them and then chop those up and put them in the freezer and then just add sweet potatoes to my smoothies. So I really add a lot of veggies to my smoothies. So…

I think of smoothies as sort of like a blended salad, but then I make them sweet by adding some bananas. I’ll add lettuce to my smoothies. So don’t be afraid to veggie up your smoothies. It’s still really delicious. You don’t have to add like a ton of veggies, but like yesterday I added one celery stalk and I just cut that in thirds, pop that into my blender.

And then I added like a couple chunks of carrots. And then I did my, I had bok choy and then I did some PB2 peanut butter powder. I did some fresh lily koi or passion fruit. I did bananas and a mix of flax chia and hemp seeds. And so with that, it was, you know, it’s mostly veggies with some banana, some lily. and I also added some frozen berries just because

They’re so healthy. So I added a couple frozen strawberries and a few like a handful of blueberries. And so these smoothies are like packed with antioxidants packed with nutrients and they really are like I go I go big on the veggies in my smoothies. So when you’re making smoothies, don’t be afraid just to add vegetables. It’s a really good way to get those in, especially if you have kids. That’s a good way to kind of trick them into drinking veggies.

You can even add a little cacao powder or cocoa powder if you want to kind of make it chocolatey. So you could add cucumber, you can even add zucchini. Really don’t be afraid to try that out and just see how delicious it can be with the addition of those veggies. You won’t know you’re drinking kale and beets or kale and celery. And I bet your kiddos won’t notice either or won’t know either.

So definitely try that. One thing I’ve been doing lately, so I don’t, I stay away from gluten and we have this great buckwheat bread recipe in the portal. And I spent like a year trying to perfect this recipe. It was one of those Instagram recipes that I kept seeing for this very easy, you know, three ingredient buckwheat bread. And I tried it and every time I tried it, it just would not work. Like it either didn’t rise or it didn’t bake well or it just,

kept failing. And so I messed around with this recipe and it wasn’t so much the ingredients I messed around with. It was more the method of doing it. And I finally nailed it. And now I make it every time. I actually asked Tammy, our recipe developer, to help me with it once I got to a certain stage because I kind of, it was like almost there and I was like, hey, can you help? And then she kind of did some magic on it and we landed on like the perfect method to make this.

and it’s really foolproof. I’ve made it dozens of times and it always works every single time. And it is very easy. It just has buckwheat groats that you soak and then blend with water and a little bit of salt and then you let it ferment overnight and then you bake it. I always add some pumpkin seeds or hemp seeds on top or sesame seeds and it’s so, so good. It’s the best gluten-free bread and it costs about…

just below $5 a loaf. And for me here in Hawaii, that’s really good because I can’t buy a loaf of gluten-free bread for less than $12 here. And even then it has more ingredients that I would like. So a loaf of bread for just under five, I can totally do that. So I have that bread on hand all the time. And one thing that I’ve been doing lately,

And since it’s a very simple trick, I toast it because I think it’s best toasted. And then I have to toast it like a couple of times because I like it nice and toasty and it takes a little while to toast. And then I’ll just take a garlic clove and just take that garlic clove and just like take the outside papery part of the garlic off. So I just have the raw clove and then I’ll just take the clove and like put it on. like literally like it’s

paint or something, you’re putting it on the toast and it’ll like the bread, the toasted bread will kind of shred the garlic a little bit and it’ll leave little traces of garlic on it and it’s delicious garlic bread. Like you don’t need any butter or oil, like you just have that really nice fresh garlic taste on the warm kind of crunchy soft bread and it’s so good. So

Making garlic bread has never been easier. just, you know, literally spread the garlic on. I mean, it’s like, imagine taking like, I don’t, I can’t think of the word, but you want to press the garlic onto the bread pretty firmly and then just rub it. That’s what you’re doing. You’re like rubbing the garlic on the bread. So try that. If you haven’t tried that, it. It’s a delicious, delicious little trick to

level up whatever you’re eating because that on the side with like some soup or a big salad or some pasta so good. Okay and then when I get home from the grocery store so I’ve talked about this before but when I get home from the grocery store I always wash and dry my veggies before I put them into the sink and I also chop some veggies up to kind of prep them for salads and so

I’ve done this for a long time, but what I used to do was like, okay, whatever I’m, wash and dry everything. Then I leave it out to dry or I use my salad spinner for the lettuce and the greens or anything that can go in the salad spinner. And then I put those in containers. And then with things like celery and carrots and cabbage and broccoli, what I’ll do is I’ll just chop up a bunch of those ingredients, put them into a jar or a

bowl or container and just put those in the fridge so that when I’m making a salad, I can just grab that and pour on, you know, put the lettuce in a bowl and then add some of that, those crunchy veggies and then addressing and maybe some beans. Canned beans are always great for this. and then you have like a beautiful big salad, but chopping up some of those veggies is a good time saver. So doing it all at once.

saves time and it makes you eat more veggies. We do have a recipe on our blog and in the Clean Food Dirty Girl portal for something called Rainbow Crunch Topping. So this kind of takes that idea to the next level and you actually do this in a food processor and you can process a bunch of stuff like fennel and

Brussels sprouts and cabbage and beet and carrot and even sweet potato, raw sweet potato and radishes. And you put all of this in the food processor so it gets nice and fine and small. And then you can add that to anything, salads or stir fries or potatoes. It’s just a really nice nutrient packed punch and addition to your stuff. And you could do that after you wash

and dry your produce and before you put it away in the fridge while it’s already out and everything is laying out. So you can just grab whatever you want for that, chop it up and then put it in the food processor and then store it in a glass jar in your fridge. And then you have a very easy way to add a bunch of nutrients to whatever you’re eating.

Okay, and lastly for this one, just, want to talk with you briefly about this breakfast kick that I’ve been on. And I may have mentioned this before, but I’m still on it. And what I’m doing, it’s a weird hodgepodge of things. So I used to make every day the breakfast porridge and that has like three different types of grains and lentils and kale. And I still love that, but I’ve been doing less of that because I’ve been on this other kick. I mean, I ate that breakfast for years.

and then I put different toppings on it. We have that one on the blog as well and in the portal you can check out. But for this one, there is no recipe for it. You can’t find it anywhere. It’s just a strange thing that I’ve come up with. And basically I have my organic rolled oats and I put those in a big container and then I add some blended chia flax and hemp seeds that I will, I take my chia seeds and my flax seeds

and put like a cup of each in my blender, blend those until it’s into a powder, add that to a bowl, add one cup of hemp seeds, mix those up and then keep that in the fridge. And then I have that mixture for a while so I can add that and I add that mix to smoothies and anytime something calls for flax seeds, I just add the mix like if I’m baking and it works well. So I will.

have that big bowl of oats for the or not a bowl of oats but it’s like a big glass container and I’ll put a bunch of oats in there then I’ll sprinkle some of that seed mixture in there and then I will add sometimes some like dried cranberries or raisins or pumpkin seeds to that mix and then I’ll just have that I set that out and then that I make enough so that it lasts me like a couple of weeks and then I make in the instant pot some amaranth

but to the amaranth, I will add either some millet or some steel cut oats or some quinoa. And I’ll do like maybe a cup of millet and then a quarter cup of another grain and add a bunch of water. And I don’t even measure it because amaranth really soaks up a lot of water. So usually you have to like end up adding some water to get it a good consistency at the end. But I’ll just add a bunch of water.

And then when it’s done, I’ll let the pressure naturally release, open the lid, stir it up, add a little bit of water if I need to, and I’ll add a little bit of molasses. And then I will store that in a container. So I have this oatmeal mix and I have this amaranth grain mix in the fridge. And so what I’ll do usually is overnight oats and I will put…

like a scoop of the oat mixture into a bowl and a couple scoops of the amaranth mixture into the bowl and then add some soy milk, stir it up and then pop it in the fridge. And then in the morning I will add a bunch of berries and whatever else I want to add to it. Maybe a little drizzle of maple syrup or maybe some chopped walnuts. I love blueberries or raspberries sometimes.

pears or kiwis, banana, whatever fruit I want to add. And that’s my breakfast. And sometimes I will have it warm. So, and if I do that, that I don’t do the overnight oats, I would just put the oats in a little pan with, and then put in some of the amaranth mixture, add in a little water, cook that not very long, maybe five minutes, then add a little bit of the soy milk to make it a little creamy. And then

add that to my bowl and then put the toppings on top of that. So it works well cold, it works well warm. It’s a weird little combination that tastes really good. I’m all about textures. And so the oats with the seeds and then the amaranth with the other kind of millet or seal cut oats or quinoa, like there’s a lot of textures going on there and there’s a lot of different nutrients because it’s a lot of different.

plant foods happening there. So I love that combination. And then when you top it, also really love to top it with a little mix that I have that’s toasted buckwheat, raw cacao nibs, and some toasted sesame seeds. And I have, I put kind of equal amounts of those into a container, shake it, and then I’ll just add some of that on top for extra crunch. And it is such a good breakfast and it really leaves me full and satisfied until lunch. So

It’s a great way to start your day. So those are some of the things that I have been eating lately and playing with lately. And I wanted to share those with you in case you wanted to just try it and experiment and play around. Don’t be afraid to get in your kitchen and just try, play with your food a little bit, try new stuff, see what works. I think it’s really fun to do that no matter what stage you’re at in your plant-based journey.

Sometimes in the beginning you want to stick to recipes fairly closely and I get that and if that’s you definitely follow our recipes because we will not lead you astray. We will, we got you. You just follow the recipes. Our recipes come out amazing every time. But then once you’re ready to kind of improvise a little bit and play around, doing some things like this is a great way to kind of make your plant-based journey your own.

So enjoy, have a wonderful day and I will talk to you next time. Bye.