Vegetable Curry

If you want to feel warm, loved, and have the smell of heaven in your house, this is your recipe. This recipe is chock full of vegetables and one of the most tasty ways to eat the rainbow that I know of.

It can be converted easily for vegetarian, omnivores, or straight up carnivores – depending on which protein makes you feel best. And there are short-cuts noted throughout the video if you’re in a time or energy crunch.

This is “the Cadillac version” of this recipe. But it works with any combination of vegetables. The trick is to cut the veggies according to hardness/softness so they all cook at about the same amount of time. Sometimes, I’ll add greens later to make sure they don’t get too soggy.

I hope you enjoy one of my family’s favorites!

TRANSCRIPT

Hello, Dr. Jill here. Showing you how I make vegetable curry.

Just want to note I’m wearing an apron because anytime you are working with anything with turmeric, which stains really badly, you’re going to want to use something to cover your clothes. So that’s step #1 is put on your apron or put on your junk shirt, or whatever.

Now we’re going to go through each of the ingredients that I want to show you.

Okay, so here’s what you need to gather in order to make this recipe. This is probably one of my more complex recipes but I love that it stores really well in the fridge. So you can make a bunch of it and eat off it for the next three or four days. So you only have to put effort in once for three or four days of eating. So don’t be too intimidated by this pile of stuff you have to gather.

All right, so let’s go through some of the things.

-You have a Dutch oven. And that with the lid on. That’s what I use. It just cooks everything so evenly and nicely.

-My protein of choice for this one – I’m making this organically or um vegetarian – so I’m using organic sesame seeds, sprouted almonds, and organic pumpkin seeds.

-Also using organic coconut milk.

-And my little spice here from Penzeys Spice. This is a curry mix that I use.

-And then as far as mixing, if that’s, you know, if you’re in a time period where that’s just too much, here’s a little cheat, is you can buy a curry already made and mixed and just skip the first step and mix all of your protein and vegetables in a jar of curry sauce. And in a pinch I will definitely do that but it’s harder to find organic already mixed things.

-So also you see our antifungal fighters. We see garlic and onion. And I’m adding nettles to this because right now it’s allergy season. So nettles are a food that really help with histamine problems.

-You can also, you can adjust this recipe if you’re having oxalate issues. Swiss chard is one of the highest oxalate greens. So you can swap that out for something green that doesn’t have as high of oxalates or just add more of the snap peas.

-So you see every color of the rainbow here.
-We have a little bit of garnish getting ready to go on top of this dish.

-But everything else we are going to chop up and add to our recipe. So let’s get these babies chopped up.

Okay, so I have everything chopped up and staged here so we can just get into the cooking. I wanted to mention on the vegetables that you’ll notice that the kale or the chard is very big compared to like the celery, and the red pepper’s a little bigger than the celery. That’s so that everything is cooking evenly.

I have my protein source here. And like I said, we’ll dump in the nettles at the end because it’s allergy season.

So for starters, I’m going to add, I have the coconut milk heating, warming here, and I’m going to turn the heat up a little bit so we can get this to boiling. I’m adding all the curry and you’re probably thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot of spices.” But with the vegetables and coconut milk, (see this is where it’s nice to use the back side of a spoon), those are all very mellow and mild. Between cauliflower which is a classic curry vegetable, between that and the coconut milk, things are going to get really dispersed. So you want a lot of spice to make this a flavorful dish.

All right, so we’re going to get this baby boiling. And I’m going to just mix in those curry spices. The reason for this step is that turmeric is notoriously bad at being absorbed unless it is heated and cooked through with some sort of fat. That’s how it’s traditionally done in cultures where turmeric is grown. So we want to maximize as much of the benefits of turmeric. And I mean moldies, you know, our guts are a mess so we have to increase the absorptive ability.

Now we’re going to add in our garlic and onion. And we’ll bring this to a boil. Again, so that we can activate all of those spices and all of that antifungal properties. So when this comes to a boil, we’re going to just bring it to a boil and then take it off the heat add the vegetables and our protein of choice. If you’re using chicken, you can just add the precooked chicken or at least par baked chicken because you don’t want to put raw chicken in this. I don’t think it’s going to be in the oven long enough to cook the chicken all the way through. So we’ll take a break and get this up to boiling.

All right so I’ve started adding the protein that I’m doing vegetarian so I have those almonds, pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds you can see in there. Some cauliflower. We’re just dumping all of this into our kettle. I typically kind of wait for the greens til the end. I don’t want to lose them. As you can see, I’m pretty generous with my vegetable portion. I’m going to stir this in. Make sure everything is coated with that curry spice and coconut milk. Halfway through cooking you’ll take it out and stir it again. And if you’re, you know, really nervous you can stir it more than that. But in a Dutch oven, the Dutch oven holds the flavors in so well. I can see that I. So typically I do kind of stir while I’m adding but because I’m trying to do a video here I didn’t do that. So you want to make sure everything’s coated and you may be wondering when do the nettles come into this? Once I have everything stirred in, or while I’m stirring it in, I’m just going to shake over about a 1/4 cup of nettles into this mix as our allergy prevention. I’m going to stir all these things up.

All right, so we have everything mixed into the sauce. The sauce is covering every bit of this dish. Now we put the lid on. We’re going to cook it with the lid on the whole time in a 350° oven about 45 minutes depending on how crunchy you like your veggies. While this is cooking, you can get your rice going. I like to use a rice cooker because I’m lazy. And you can cut up a little fresh mango. That matches so well with this dish. You can have it for dessert or along side.

Okay. Let’s take a look. This is out of the oven after 45 minutes. We have been anxiously awaiting this. It smells so amazing. Oh look at that. The steam coming off. All the vegetables, I’m probably going to steam up the phone, all the veggies are still holding their color, they’re still fresh. I redistribute the juices a couple of times during cooking because I I kind of over filled this pot. So you’re seeing, wow this is really hard to do to video and stir. You’re seeing this right out of the oven. If you don’t like your veggies a little crunchy, then you can go a little longer.

So I have my steamed rice here and my toppers. None of this is necessary. This is the Cadillac version of this dish. So if you’re intimidated by “Oh, I don’t have energy. There’s no way I’m going to be able to get all those veggies cut.” Just start with the classics – cauliflower, peas and carrots. That’s the classic curry veggies. So this is how I like to make it with all of them so I can feed my family the whole rainbow. If you do like a little more crunch and you like bean sprouts, you can add those in. I usually top them on here. A big dollop of organic, plain whole-milk yogurt if you can do dairy is just gorgeous on this. And if you’re not a spice person and your curry was really spicy, this kind of mellows that out. And then if you’re one of those people where you like cilantro and it doesn’t taste like soap to you, you can top it on top there. And that is your amazing vegetable curry that’s going to wow them all.

Here we go. Veggie curry. It’s nourishing. So satisfying. And it gets better the more days that it’s in the fridge. Up to four days. It really does. All the flavors mix in and things just taste better so people don’t even complain about eating leftovers. So that’s how you can economize your efforts, eat healthy and break the mold so you can take back your health.


This content is health information and not intended as personal medical advice. Viewing will not establish a doctor-patient relationship. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or medical condition. The information discussed is not intended to replace the advice of your healthcare provider. Reliance on information provided by Dr. Jill Crista, employees, or others appearing at the invitation of Dr. Crista is solely at your own risk.