The Kick Diabetes Cookbook 1.mp3

Transcript

Vesanto Melina

Oh, Brenda Davis. It's such a pleasure to be connecting after the wonderful launching of these books on type 2 diabetes.

Brenda Davis

You too, Vesanto. It's always, we've been working on these books for 25 years and somehow we just keep doing it. I know. It's very exciting and I'm really happy to be here with you.

Vesanto Melina

I am. Face to face. Yeah. I love these recipes in this book, the Kick Diabetes Cookbook.

Brenda Davis

Yeah, we really made an effort to find, develop recipes that would work for people that also tasted absolutely delicious. I can remember at Living Light, one of our chefs, he was so sure the recipe wouldn't taste that good because there was no oil, there was no sugar, there was none of that. And he was actually quite shocked at how delicious it was without those things. That's right. So I think what really sets this book apart is it's truly whole food plant-based. And so we don't use any concentrated fats or oils. We don't use any concentrated sweeteners. The only sweetener we use is actually dried fruit, so a little bit of dates in some of the dessert recipes, otherwise there's none. So it's very whole foods and even to the extent that we don't use flour, so we do have a couple of recipes where we actually blend some rolled oats to make a muffin or a pancake, but generally our emphasis is on what we call intact whole grains. Because when you eat grains in this form, when they're intact, they are digested into the bloodstream so much more slowly. They have a very low glycemic index. And so our focus in the book is really on eating your grains in this form.

Vesanto Melina

So we developed these recipes. with a whole team of expert testers. And it was so good because I always love it when recipes can be tested by people who are really good gourmet chefs and people who barely have put a pot on the stove and don't have that much equipment. And we just have made them simple but really, really tasty. So that was a wonderful accomplishment. One thing I find really important is I have blood sugar, blood glucose levels that don't stay stable very well. And when they drop, I can really feel like I'm in distress. And I find the very best thing that I can do is to include legumes. That means beans, peas, lentils, soy foods. which have this slow release of glucose into the bloodstream, and it can level me out for hours and hours. So one of the things we really emphasized in this Kick Diabetes Cookbook was to include different legumes.

Brenda Davis

Yes, and at every meal. And a lot of people would say, well, how on earth do you use legumes? at breakfast. But if you look in other cultures, many people eat legumes at breakfast on a daily basis. And so even when you're cooking a whole grain, you can mix in some lentils, for example, and that will really impact the rate of absorption of the sugars from those foods. So it's a wonderful, every single meal you can be eating some sort of legume.

Vesanto Melina

Well, that's a good point. And you can put soy milk onto your grain at breakfast, even if you have a straight whole grain. One of the things people don't realize sometimes is that there are about 20 kinds of legumes. There are red ones, brown ones, little ones, big ones. There are just all sorts of little French lentils or red lentils that you can cook quickly. We can make curry in a hurry that only has three ingredients just red lentils and onion and eventually you add some curry paste. You do have some water too, so 4 ingredients, I guess. But it's so easy. And if you want to use an instant pot, you can have it done while you're off doing something else and it doesn't burn. I love that.

Brenda Davis

And it is really one of the best recipes because everybody loves it. Curry and grease is such a great recipe because every time I make it, whoever's over whether or not they're a meat eater or a vegan, they love the recipe and it's so simple. And one of the other things I love about it is that it's also adaptable. So if you feel like adding in some cauliflower or some kale or something like that and putting it over rice instead of serving it as a soup, you can do that as well. So it's just a great staple recipe.

Vesanto Melina

Yeah, I love curry in a hurry with a great big salad. That's my favorite. Maybe a lemon tahini dressing. So instead of the oil in the dressing, we have things like tahini or avocado, like whole foods that contain a bit of fat. So some of the other recipes that we really like, because people have kale and they go, yeah, what do I do with this? And one of the best recipes I've ever found, probably the best, is kale salad with orange ginger dressing. And it is delicious.

Brenda Davis

It's so yummy.

Vesanto Melina

Yeah, so anyway, that's a fun one. And then we have heartwarming hummus with eight variations.

Brenda Davis

And it's kind of fun when you start doing variations of hummus because you can do black bean hummus. You can do a hummus that is the most gorgeous pink color you've ever seen by using beets. There are so many different things or ways that you can make hummus more beautiful. And so we've got eight different options in the book.

Vesanto Melina

So one of the things I find is this is called a kick diabetes cookbook. But it is also very valuable for people who want to maintain a healthy weight and maybe lose a few pounds or to just get to their ideal body weight because it doesn't have the added sugars, it doesn't have the added fats. So we could have called it kick diabetes or kick off a few pounds.

Brenda Davis

And you know, the thing that people need to understand is that it doesn't matter whether it's diabetes or heart disease or whatever chronic disease, overweight or obesity, it's the same diet that works for all of those things. And so while we focused on diabetes in this cookbook, it is very appropriate for anyone that wants to reduce the risk of any chronic disease or anyone who just wants long-term health. But if you have heart disease, if you have another chronic disease, this book will be absolutely appropriate for you as well.

Vesanto Melina

Another one that I found kind of interesting was how to make cheesiness. Because people, when they want to go more plant-based, they go, but I don't think I could give up cheese. So what's the solution here?

Brenda Davis

And a long time ago, vegan cheese was like plastic. It was not very edible and not very appetizing. Today, people have developed cheeses that are so similar to cow's milk cheese by using different nuts, and particularly cashews and almonds and macadamia nuts. And they're fermented, they're cultured, they use the same process, and so they're delicious. But at home, if you want to do something like a cheddar cheese sauce that you would put on broccoli, you can actually achieve that. And I think it's even tastier using cashews and red peppers, either roasted red peppers or raw red peppers and some nutritional yeast. So we've got an excellent recipe in the book that helps people to create a sauce that is really very similar to cheese sauce. And it can be used in a variety of applications. We have a recipe for southwestern sweet potatoes, and it's great on those. It's great just on steamed vegetables as well.

Vesanto Melina

One other recipe that we have, which is kind of interesting, is Three Sisters Go Green. And people might know about the Three Sisters, which were a planting method used by Pima Indians and Indians in the middle southern United States. And what they had was corn stalks that would be growing higher. So that was the grain, the whole grain. And then what were the other things with it?

Brenda Davis

Well, they had squash. Yeah. And they had beans.

Vesanto Melina

So they had the source of blood to maintain your blood glucose levels. And they had squash that would give vitamin A and the other vitamins that are so essential and nourishing. It was just a wonderful combination.

Brenda Davis

Very high in fiber, just so good for people with diabetes. And of course, back in those days, when people were living on the land the way that they did. Type 2 diabetes was pretty much non-existent. And so when we go back to that way of eating where we're not processing foods, we're not removing the foods that are the components of foods that are of value before we eat the foods, miracles start to happen in the body. And so, we took the three sisters up a notch.

Vesanto Melina

We did. We added greens. And if you get kale, for example, what you do is take out the stem and then chop it matchstick thin. Or you can use other greens as well.

Brenda Davis

So our recipe was called The Three Sisters Go Green. And so that's the one thing that was kind of missing to me in a lot of these old recipes, were just getting that source of greens in and adding all of those powerful antioxidants and phytochemicals. So it's a fun recipe too.

Vesanto Melina

So this is the KICK Diabetes Cookbook and it's on Amazon. It's published by the Book Publishing Company and it's by authors Brenda Davis and myself, both registered dietitians. So I hope you have fun with it.