Kale Chips: A Super Nutritional Low Calorie Snack

Here's a fast and easy recipe for a really tasty and super nutritious snack. These kale chips are made with just three ingredients (kale, olive oil and nutritional yeast). (PS I know the picture I took looks awful, and you can't see that they are crunchy and dry..)

My nephew told me about this recipe. He's a vegetarian and it's hard for him to get enough B vitamins. One super food that contains tons of these vitamins is nutritional yeast.

Nutritional yeast (amazon link)
contains 18 amino acids (forming the complete protein) and 15 minerals. Being rich in the B-complex vitamins, it is vital in many ways and particularly good for stress reduction. The B-complex vitamins help make nutritional yeast such a valuable supplement, especially to the vegetarian. One element of yeast is the trace mineral chromium, also known as the Glucose Tolerance Factor (GTF). This is necessary to regulate blood sugar and is important for diabetics and people with a tendency toward low blood sugar.

Kale is one of the world's healthiest vegetables. (The other two hugely nutritious greens are swiss chard and collard greens.)

So this recipe combines two of the world's healthiest foods and it's really yummy. It does taste a bit like thin crisp chips. The nutritional yeast has a nice nutty flavor. Hope you will give it a try.

Kale Chips Recipe:

Ingredients:

- a bunch of raw kale (tear into bite size pieces)
- nutritional yeast
- olive oil

Place the kale on a cookie sheet, drizzle with olive oil and then sprinkle a good amount of nutritional yeast over it. Bake it in the oven for about 15 minutes at 375 degrees. And voila!
You have kale chips.

If anyone would like to figure out the calorie count, please let me know! I figure it is about 200 calories at most for a heaping bowl full.

Mushrooms have Amazing Healing Benefits

Mushrooms are often overlooked in today's daily diet but they are loaded with nutrition and amazing health benefits.

One of the most nutritious mushrooms is the shiitake. (They are on the top left in the photo above). These mushrooms make great meat substitutes. You can eat them on their own sauteed with butter and garlic as a side dish or put them in stir fries and soups.

Shiitake mushrooms have been used medicinally by the Chinese for over 6,000 years. An eight ounce serving (at only 87 calories) will provide you with twenty percent of your daily recommended iron intake, and about ten percent each of Vitamin C, protein and fiber.

Shiitake mushrooms contain lentinan. Lentinan has amazing healing benefits. It boosts the immune system to fight infection or disease. It has been shown to be more effective than prescription drugs in fighting influenza and other viruses. It's also been shown to be effective at destroying cancer cells. And it lowers cholesterol levels in lab animals no matter what kinds of fats they are fed.

Nutrition is still a very young science and it was only just over a year ago that L-ergothioneine, an extremely powerful antioxidant, was discovered in mushrooms:

In research presented at the 2005 American Chemical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., an American research team revealed that mushrooms contain higher concentrations L-ergothioneine than either of the two dietary sources previously believed to contain the most: chicken liver and wheat germ.

Testing mushrooms consumed in the U.S., the team found that shiitake, oyster, king oyster and maitake mushrooms contain the highest amounts of ergothioneine, with up to 13 mg in a 3-ounce serving. This equals forty times as much as is found in wheat germ.

Of the most commonly consumed mushrooms, portabellas and criminis have the most L-ergothioneine, followed by white buttons. White buttons, the most popular of all mushrooms consumed in the U.S., contain up to 5 mg per three ounce serving-12 times as much as wheat germ and 4 times more than chicken liver. And more good news, L-ergothioneine is not destroyed when mushrooms are cooked.

So where to get them and how to cook them? You can find dried shiitake in most supermarkets these days. Before cooking, soak them for about half an hour. Then chop them and discard the stem as well as the tough middle part above the stem. I like to sautee them in butter and garlic and then add them to a steamed vegetable such as kale or swiss chard. They are also really good in miso soup.

Check out the just hungry blog for more info about dried mushrooms. The above photo is by Chika.