Living Vegan For Dummies - Alexandra Jamieson [49]
Digesting beans and legumes more easily
Some people have difficulty digesting beans and other legumes, and in turn develop gas, bloating, and other intestinal problems. If you have these issues, here are a few tips for alleviating them when cooking and eating legumes:
Chew beans thoroughly and eat smaller amounts.
Choose smaller beans, such as adzuki, lentils, mung beans, and peas, because they’re usually easier to digest. Larger beans like pinto, kidney, navy, black-eyed peas, soybeans, garbanzo, lima, and black beans are harder to digest and should be eaten in smaller amounts and less often. Luckily, soy products such as tofu, soymilk, tempeh, and miso are easier for most people to digest.
Season beans with vinegar, salt, miso, or soy sauce near the end of cooking. If these seasonings are added at the beginning, the salt interferes with the cooking process and the bean won’t cook completely. Plus, adding vinegar toward the end of cooking helps break down the indigestible sugars in beans, making them easier to digest.
Cooking with herbs and spices such as fennel, epazote, or cumin helps your body digest beans more easily.
Place 1 to 2 inches of kombu or kelp seaweed in your pot of beans to aid in digestion, add nutrients, and soften the beans.
Soak your beans for eight hours in clean, cold water. Drain the soaking water and rinse the soaked beans to remove any released oligosaccharides, or sugars, released by the soaking process. Cook the soaked, drained beans in fresh water as directed.
Combined with whole grains, vegetables, or mock meats, beans are a fabulous savior to the harried, healthy home chef. Stock up on some of the following products:
Dried, bulk, fresh, canned, or frozen beans and peas
Brown, green, red, black, white, or yellow lentils
Several of these types of beans: lima, pinto, navy, mung, soy, great northern, cranberry, chickpeas, white cannellini, black-eyed peas, adzuki, anasazi, black, or kidney
Babies under 18 months shouldn’t eat beans because they can’t digest them properly. However, maturing digestive tracts can usually tolerate lightly processed soy-based foods like tofu and soymilk, steamed green beans, and peas. Head to Chapter 21 for more on baby vegan diets.
Fruits and veggies
Buying and eating more produce is on everyone’s New Year’s resolution list, but it can be tough to decide which items you should buy fresh, frozen, or canned. All three are valid choices, but certain methods are better for certain types of produce. Use the general guidelines in this section when making your produce purchases.
Foods to buy fresh
Most fruits and vegetables taste better when purchased fresh rather than frozen or canned. I find that salad greens, especially leafy greens like kale, collard, and bok choy, should always be purchased fresh.
Don’t rely on the implied cleanliness and safety of produce that has been prewrapped or precut. It isn’t as fresh as the real thing and may not have been washed properly. Even those convenient organic baby-sized carrots should be given a proper rinse before eating, because they may have been dipped in a bleaching agent to prevent discoloration.
Frozen for convenience
While fresh is generally considered the healthiest form of fruits and vegetables, you may not have access to quality items year-round. So you may need to purchase frozen veggies from time to time.
Flash-freezing technology has come a long way: Fresh produce is often frozen within a few hours of harvest these days. You can now find apples, beans, berries, broccoli, collards, corn, okra, peaches,