Spring Roll Sauces

Spring rolls are enhanced by a variety of different dipping sauces. I can never decide which I like the best, so I use them all and let them blend together on my plate for even greater variety of tastes. I prefer using peanut butter that contains nothing but freshly ground roasted peanuts. Many Publix stores make this type of peanut butter and keep it near the Deli Department.

These recipes are adapted from the same article by Robin Asbell in Veggie Life, Spring 2005, as the Spring Rolls below.

Peanut Sauce

1/4 cup fresh ground peanut butter
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
3 tablespoons water
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper

Place all ingredients in a container you can use with a hand held blender and buzz all together until smooth.

Serve at once or cover and refrigerate until serving time. Let the sauce return to room temperature before using it if you have kept it refrigerated. The sauce will keep several days in a glass jar with a tight cover in the refrigerator.

Jerry's Favorite

This is Jerry's own sauce that he created at Chinese restaurants that serve those fried noodles while you wait for your meal to arrive.

1/4 cup Plum Sauce
3 tablespoons Chinese mustard

Combine the Plum Sauce and mustard in a small bowl and serve.

Spicy Sauce

1/4 cup Tamari
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1 teaspoon chili paste
1/2 teaspoon Asian sesame oil
2 garlic cloves, pressed

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl and let stand for an hour before serving. This sauce will also keep for a few days in the refrigerator in a covered container.

Baked Beans

One of the most difficult aspects of a fat-free vegan diet has been finding healthy convenience foods. Some people may see that phrase as an oxymoron, but I keep searching for prepared foods that I can eat. Let's face it, our lives are busy and full. We are either working many hours and cramming in a few hours of leisure or we are at leisure and cramming in the work of meal preparation. Either way, needing to prepare meals every day means that even those of us who enjoy cooking prefer spending fewer hours in the kitchen.

I know that on a regular basis after a full day of play, I don't want to stop playing early enough to prepare a meal from scratch in the healthiest manner. A couple of days a week I do cook using the healthiest, freshest whole foods. Those days I am happy to spend many hours in the kitchen. I try to make enough to have leftovers, so four days a week we are eating really good food.

The other days I try to cook meals that take advantage of convenience foods and still follow these basic guidelines:

no added fats or oils
no added salt
no unnecessary sugar
nearly vegan ( I use fat-free yogurt and honey)

And that brings me to the recipe for Baked Beans. This recipe uses canned baked beans, yet manages to reduce the overwhelming sweetness of those commercially available. The sugar is all still there, of course, but it is spread over more servings.

Baked Beans

1 16-ounce can Bush's vegetarian baked beans
2 15-ounce cans navy beans, drained and rinsed
1/2 can water
2 teaspoons grainy mustard (Batampte is good if you can find it)
1 tablespoon ketchup

Empty the baked beans and the drained navy beans into a medium size saucepan. Fill one of the empty cans halfway with water and stir in the mustard and the ketchup. Stir the water mixture into the beans in the saucepan. Heat over medium-low heat for 20-30 minutes or until the beans are as thick as you like them.

Makes 6 or more servings.

Spring rolls

The other night we each had 3 of these delicious soba noodle Spring rolls for dinner. The Spring rolls and an orange completely satisfied us. The recipe is vegan and very, very low fat depending on which dipping sauce you select. The most fat is in the one with the peanut butter, of course, but if you just dip and not slather, the fat content of even that one is low enough. (Dipping sauce recipes will be on the blog tomorrow.)

This is really easy to prepare, so if you are not familiar with the Spring roll skins, don't let that deter you. The package below is the brand that I easily find at several Asian markets in our area. The Spring Roll Skins are a dry product on grocery shelves along with the dried noodles where I shop. They should contain only rice flour, water, and salt.




The photo below is of a single disk. The disk is hard until soaked in water. I have found that a shallow and wide pasta bowl holds just the right amount of water to easily cover the disk for soaking. You must soak each disk separately until it has softened. If you soak it too long, it will get holes in it and fall apart. About one minute usually does it. If you are quick enough at filling the roll and wrapping it, you can have one soaking while you are filling and wrapping one. After you have filled them, don't let them touch each other as they will stick together.


My recipe is based on a recipe from Veggie Life magazine. You may have to register for Veggie Life's free recipe search service to view the recipe there. This is my adapted version.

Spring Rolls

6 ounces soba noodles, broken in half
1 cup shelled frozen edamame
2 tablespoons seasoned rice vinegar
1 tablespoon Tamari
2 teaspoons Asian sesame oil
1 cup mung bean sprouts
1/2 cup sugar snap peas, julienned
1/4 cup pickled ginger slices, coarsely chopped
12 8-inch Spring roll skins

In a pasta pot half full of water, cook the soba noodles about 4 minutes until just tender. Drain and rinse with cool water to stop the cooking. Set aside.

At the same time the soba is cooking, add the edamame to boiling water in a small saucepan and cook about 4 minutes. Drain the edamame.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the rice vinegar, tamari and sesame oil. Add the soba to the sauce in the bowl and toss to coat the noodles with the liquid. Set aside.

Create an assembly line to put together the Spring rolls. Line up the noodles in the bowl, the edamame in a separate bowl, the bean sprouts, the sugar snap peas, the ginger pieces and the dried Spring roll skins. You also will need a lint-free towel and the bowl full of water for soaking the disks.

One at a time, soak a disk for about a minute and remove it very carefully, letting it drain over the bowl until the water stops running. Carefully lay the disk on the towel. About a third of the way up the disk, arrange some noodles, about 8 edamame in a line, a few strips of sugar snaps, bean sprouts, and ginger slices. Leave enough room at each side for folding over about an inch and a half of the disk. Form a tight roll by bringing up and over the filling the edge of the disk nearest to you. Fold in the sides of the disk and roll it up and away from you in a tight little log. Set the completed roll on a tray or serving platter, not letting them touch each other. Cover loosely with a damp towel until serving time. Serve with one or more dipping sauces.

Beans and Greens

So many fresh tomatoes in my recipes have been making me feel guilty about all of you struggling with ice, snow and below zero windchills. This pasta with beans and greens should warm you up and give you energy to head back out into the cold. The recipe is easy to make and good for lunch if you are lucky enough to have leftovers.

Pasta with Greens and Beans

1 medium onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, pressed
1 1/2 cups water
1 15-ounce can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
2 teaspoons fresh squeezed lemon juice
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
1 small head escarole, well-washed and chopped
1 cup cooked ditalini pasta
¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper
ground black pepper


Note that the ditalini can be cooked as usual in a large pot of boiling water and drained and set aside while you follow the rest of the steps.

In a medium bowl using a potato masher, mash about half of the beans with the lemon juice and vinegar and set aside.

In a medium non-stick saucepan, cook the onion and garlic in 1/2 cup of water over medium heat for about 5 minutes. Add the escarole and 1 cup of water, cover and cook for 5 minutes. Add both the mashed and whole beans and more water if the sauce is too thick. Stir in the ditalini and crushed red pepper and briefly heat through over medium-low heat, watching to avoid having the beans stick.

California Style sandwich

In the 1980’s my colleague, A. talked me into trying a goat cheese sandwich at St. Basil’s Restaurant in Syracuse, New York, back when the Armory Square area was a very new destination for dining. A. was right about the sandwich - and so many other things. The sandwich, a spread and veggies on pumpernickel bread, was a delicious one in the California style of the restaurant. I discovered why the sandwich tasted so good when one of the restaurant’s owners, Rosemary Furfaro, published a cookbook, ”Saint Basil’s: Celebration of California’s Cuisines.” The spread for 8 servings contains 1 pound of cream cheese, 1 pound of French feta goat cheese, and a quarter cup plus 2 tablespoons of heavy cream! With that much fat, I think anything might taste good.

Remembering the taste, I decided to try a lower fat substitute. Of course, you could use fat-free or dairy-free substitutes, but I try to keep chemicals in my food to a minimum. That led me to tofu and a suitably tasty spread reminiscent of St. Basil’s Goat Cheese Sandwich (with roasted sweet peppers).

The book, by the way, is still in the catalog of The Onondaga County Public Library and is listed at Amazon.com where it is no longer available.

St. Basil’s Sandwich

4 ounces firm tofu, drained and crumbled
1/4 cup fat-free yogurt
1/2 tablespoon dried basil
3 scallions, chopped
1 roasted red pepper (jarred is just fine), cut into strips
Alfalfa sprouts, washed and drained
Other toppings such as jalapeno slices, spinach leaves, lettuce
4 pumpernickel bagels or 8 slices of excellent pumpernickel bread


Mix the tofu and the yogurt together until well-blended and as smooth as you like it. Stir in the basil and the scallions.

Slice the bagels and toast lightly. (I prefer untoasted bread.) Cover one half of each sandwich with the spread and the pepper, sprouts and other toppings.

Serves 4

Gazpacho

Imagine my surprise to check Wikipedia and discover that the soup I have been calling Gazpacho, technically is not! According to that article, the traditional ingredients for gazpacho are stale bread, garlic, olive oil, salt, and vinegar. And my version has only garlic and vinegar from that list. As you can see, I persist in calling my version gazpacho anyway. Besides which, my Spanish-born son-in-law gave my recipe a stamp of approval years ago and that is enough for me.

My first gazpacho was created when we had a summer house on Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes in New York state. I began with a recipe from a Junior League cookbook published by the Finger Lakes chapter. Like many people on the lake we had a garden that thrived, giving us tomatoes and tomatoes and tomatoes, along with other vegetables that we chose to plant. Even better than our own garden, was Frank's garden next door to us. He grew everything from garlic and onions to peppers and corn in a plot about 10 feet by 10 feet. Such abundance came from his green thumb that we were the recipients of a summer's worth of vegetables.

There is nothing like a fresh ripe and sun-warmed tomato from a home garden. But no longer having a home garden, I do the next best thing and shop at The Boys in Delray Beach. And I am sorry for those of you who are still struggling with ice and snow, but we have fresh local tomatoes right now in enough abundance for this soup. Canned tomatoes are an adequate replacement for Northerners who can't wait until June.

Gazpacho soup with jalapeno slices and scallions

2 1/2 pounds tomatoes, cut into chunks
1 medium green bell pepper, chunked
1 medium red bell pepper, chunked
2 stalks celery, chunked
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and chopped
1 small onion, chunked
1 medium cucumber, peeled, seeded and chunked
2 large cloves of garlic, minced or pressed
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 cups tomato juice
ground black pepper to taste


Assemble all of the ingredients so you can easily put them into a food processor in batches. Set aside a couple of strips of peppers and cucumber to dice for garnishing each bowl when served.

In a food processor one batch at a time, buzz all ingredients until small chunks remain. Some people like their soup nearly liquefied; some like identifiable size pieces of vegetables. Stir together together all of the batches and pour into a large bowl with a cover (or plastic wrap).

Chill the soup for several hours and serve cold garnished with a few pieces of diced peppers and cucumber. If you really like hot foods, you can also add jalapeno slices and scallions as additional garnish as Jerry did.

Eating Wisely

Everything important you learned at home or in kindergarten. In "Six Rules for Eating Wisely", an article by Michael Pollan in Time Magazine, he says

Once upon a time Americans had a culture of food to guide us through the increasingly treacherous landscape of food choices: fat vs. carbs, organic vs.conventional, vegetarian vs. carnivorous. Culture in this case is just a fancy way of saying 'your mom.' She taught us what to eat, when to eat it, how much of it to eat, even the order in which to eat it.

Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, says that even Mom was no match for the $36 billion dollars spent on food-marketing. To overcome this influence, he offers 6 great rules for healthier eating. I recommend reading the article and following his rules. I would also add, however, get the fat out!

One of the things that the food industry has taught us is to like high fat foods. Now that I have been eating so long without the taste of fat, I wondered what a simple Waldorf salad would taste like without all of the mayonnaise I used to put into it. I was pleased with the result which was a quick, easy, and healthy lunch that tasted fresh and light.

No one really needs a recipe for this meal! Chop apples, celery, walnuts and mix it all together with raisins or grapes and enjoy the taste of fresh whole food. Or as Pollan ends his article, "So, relax. Eat Food. And savor it."

Why The Quilted Cook

When I was 10 years old, my grandmother gave me a Singer Featherweight sewing machine and I learned to sew. The same summer I also started writing my first cookbook in a yellow-covered spiral notebook. As soon as the yellow one was filled up, I used a red-covered one – both properly indexed, of course. The covers are now worn by use and pages are stained from kitchen splatters. Many pages have scribbles of pencil and crayon thanks to my children who kept busy while I was totally absorbed in cooking. The scribbles, which bothered me when they happened, have become a cherished memory of raising my children and always bring a smile to my face. Since then, I have cooked my way through several decades. I sent my son and daughter off to their own kitchens with a personalized “Mom’s Good Cooking", a hard-covered journal, each version containing their favorite recipes.

Then I had time to get back to that sewing machine and became a quiltmaker, spending my free time piecing together fabrics that became bedcovers and wallhangings. With such a focus on food and a sedentary lifestyle, it is not surprising that I put on weight. I was successful with the Atkins diet until I was diagnosed with colon cancer. You can read about the Atkins diet and cancer and make up your own mind about that.

I didn’t know what to eat and I am not alone. Nutritionist and author Marion Nestle wrote the 600 page book What To Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating after she realized making food choices has become a minefield for many people.

The biggest factor in choosing a fat-free (actually a no-added-fat) vegan diet wasn’t my being a cancer survivor, although I am convinced my health is improved by this way of eating. The precipitating factor was a telephone call from my husband’s internist telling him the results of recent bloodwork. Dr. K said Jerry's health was precarious and that he had to eat as little fat as possible and lose a significant amount of weight. I did the research and discovered the health benefits of the Ornish, McDougall, and other very low fat plant-based diets. We changed the way we eat, the pounds came off and our health improved. Dr. K called us his poster children, the only ones who ever really followed his advice.

Now we look different from most of the people we see around us. What is more important is how well we feel and the numbers we see in the results of medical tests. Our numbers that are supposed to be low are very, very low and the numbers that are supposed to be high are just where they should be as a measure of optimum health.

I wish I could tell you it was an easy thing to accomplish, but that would not be the truth. It is simple, but it is a major life change. It is as simple as avoiding animal products and added fats whenever possible and eating a whole foods, plant based diet emphasizing grains, vegetables, and fruits. The recipes I have developed and collected are easy to prepare and taste so good that many omnivores decide to cook them too.

Right now you are probably thinking about the hole in your plate where the meat used to be. People usually say to me, “But what do you eat if you don’t eat meat? You must eat chicken. Or fish?” No, we don’t eat chicken or fish or eggs or most dairy products, including cheese. We eat everything else. We eat any vegetable, any legume, any grain and any fruit. That is an enormous variety of food.

Just like making a quilt, I pieced together parts of many diets and created one that focuses on familiar foods and easy preparation. We follow a vegan diet, except that we limit fat and we occasionally use non-fat yogurt.Our successful weight loss and obvious good health brought requests for recipes. And that is what I share with you - recipes for simple meals that will help your body return to the excellent health we all should enjoy.

I am not a nutritionist and I am not giving you advice about nutrition. (You should talk to your own physician or a nutritionist before you make a major change in your diet.) My professional training as a librarian gave me the tools to do the research and draw my own conclusions about eating a fat-free nearly vegan diet. I am sharing with you my experiences and recipes that I believe will help you to not only live longer but also to enjoy better health for as long as you live.