These 3 best kitchen tools are ones that will add a huge amount of flavor to your cooking. They make healthy vegan recipes more delicious, so you’ll want to eat more and more of those healthy foods.
They also make your meals even healthier, since the flavorings add more nutrients and health benefits.
Because they’re small tools, they don’t cost very much – less than $10 each. I highly recommend picking these ones up, if you haven’t already.
Garlic Press
Using a garlic press, your clove will be pulverized. That means that it melds the garlic flavor more smoothly into your dishes.
This is the only way I can handle raw garlic in salad dressings, salsa or dips. Otherwise, I get a chunk of garlic in a bite and it just explodes with garlic-ness in my mouth. Some people might like that, but I’m not one of them.
I recently read (in Superfoods: The Healthiest Foods on the Planet, by Tonia Reinhard) that when you crush a clove of garlic, it causes an enzyme reaction that makes the phytonutrients more stable when they enter your system. That means they’re more helpful in their role of helping prevent disease.
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Garlic is known for being anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory. It’s also associated with a reduced risk of cancer and the markers of heart disease.
Citrus Zester
A zester takes the very outside of a citrus peel, which is where there’s a huge amount of flavor. Once you start adding orange, lemon and lime zest to your cooking, you won’t be able to look at a citrus fruit without thinking of what you can put that zest into.
It adds amazing flavor to salad dressings, dips, soups and roasted vegetables. Not only that, but citrus zest is full of healthy bioflavonoids, which help protect you from cancer and heart disease.
Ginger Grater
My favorite way to add ginger to a dish is to grate a piece, and squeeze the juice from it. It gives whatever meal I’m making a really nice ginger kick, but in a smooth and even way.
If I mince ginger, the flavor doesn’t always carry through the whole dish, and every so often I get a little bit of ginger that explodes just like garlic.
Now, you can do this with a normal grater, but a ginger grater does a better job of ripping the ginger into pulp, and keeping it all together, so that you get more of the juice from your piece.
Ginger is anti-inflammatory, helps soothe indigestion and motion sickness, can help with a sore throat and headaches, and has been shown to help protect against cancer (especially lung and colon) and heart disease.
I love adding ginger juice with lemon and a touch of maple syrup to some hot water in the morning to boost my digestive system, or if I feel a sore throat.
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