8 tips for the most delicious vegetables of your life

Besides the hardcore snack recipes, news and nonsense we share here (hello sausage-roll pizza), we can also tell you that we are absolutely crazy about vegetables. Grilled, roasted, blanched and in a (not-boring) salad; we can’t go a day without them. And with these tips, neither will you!

Because we all know that it’s extremely sensible to make the largest part of your meal consist of vegetables (or at least try to sneak them in at as many moments as possible), but quite apart from that, you can also make vegetables incredibly delicious! For example, in these ways:

Cook twice

Make a large quantity of steamed vegetables. Eat some of them just like that, well seasoned with a spicy vinaigrette, for example, or tossed with one of the dozens of ready-made sauces you can find at an Asian toko (XO sauce and sacha sauce are fantastic). Save the rest, and the next day you can fry them in a very hot skillet or wok with different flavorings: garlic and ginger and a little soy sauce or tamari, or salt, pepper and smoked paprika, or another delicious spice blend. You can take it in any direction!

Crispy mushrooms

We’ve told you before, but it remains a golden tip: don’t cut your mushrooms or button mushrooms into neat slices; after wiping them clean, simply tear them into rough pieces. That gives you more ‘rough’ surface area where crispy edges can form when frying over high heat—and yes, you want that!

Dipping can be healthy too

Forget the little packets of pesto-mix powder from the past, which you simply stirred into a bowl of mayo and called it done. You can make it much healthier and waste-free by making a dip from vegetables themselves! With a food processor or immersion blender, blitz all your leftovers and odds and ends, either raw or steamed, into delicious dips and sauces. Beet dip with chickpeas and tahini, thawed frozen peas with spinach and a spoonful of pesto, artichoke hearts with feta and lemon—the possibilities are virtually endless…

Advanced salad skills

It’s often perfectly fine to simply open a bag of arugula, toss it with some oil, vinegar and Parmesan shavings, and give yourself a pat on the back. But if you’re looking for what makes the salads prepared by professionals so irresistible, it’s probably the ‘construction’ of them.

Start with a base vegetable and build from there. Radicchio? Great! Then you’ll probably want something sweet to balance the bitterness, such as a honey vinaigrette. Maybe something creamy too, like a dollop of ricotta, followed by something crunchy, such as toasted nuts or pine nuts. See? With a few basic principles, you’ll have an incredibly beautiful, layered salad and a remarkable combination of flavors and textures in no time.

Go big with toum

With toum, the Lebanese garlic sauce we have a great recipe for here, you can give any dish a huge kick. Obviously it works as a dip, but it’s also delicious spread on flatbread and topped with vegetables, and it’s fantastic on a sandwich at the office for lunch when you simply want everyone to keep their distance 😉

Spicy seeds

Do you often remove the seeds and membranes from red chilies because not everyone likes spicy food? You don’t have to throw those seeds away (if you do enjoy spicy food, that is)! Put them in a jar and pour in some vinegar or honey, and before long you’ll have an incredibly tasty condiment as the basis for a vinaigrette—or simply drizzled over your steamed vegetables.

Ice challenge

An ice challenge for your vegetables, that is—and they can handle it perfectly well. They even benefit from it! Extra-crunchy white cabbage for your homemade fried chicken sandwich? Place finely sliced cabbage in an ice bath for fifteen minutes, then dry it thoroughly. You can also revive wilted lettuce with an ice bath, as long as you dry it well afterward in a salad spinner and then dry it once more in a clean tea towel.

Dry before stir-frying

If you want to stir-fry vegetables in a blazing hot wok, make sure to dry them thoroughly after washing them (if necessary) before they go into the pan. You don’t want them to steam-cook in the water clinging to them, and for truly delicious seared edges and to bring out the vegetables’ own ‘sweetness’, you want to avoid moisture.

There you have it: eight tips for incredibly delicious vegetables. Make the most of them, and stay healthy!

Also read:

• 6 common mistakes when roasting vegetables
• Did you know these vegetables grow like this?
• Great initiative! Dirk van den Broek wants VAT cuts on fruit and vegetables