Plant-based dishes can be delicious and cooking them can be fun!

3 Delicious Dishes to Cook with Spring Veggies

Welcome to spring, when grocery stores and farmers’ markets are full of new, fresh vegetables to chase the winter blahs away. To take advantage of the bounty, here are three of my recipes that use veggies in creative new ways while using up ingredients still hanging around the refrigerator.

1. Roasted Carrot and Fennel Soup with Miso-Glazed Mushrooms and Cashew Cream

This recipe for Epicurious features fresh spring root vegetables like tender young carrots in a flavorful nut-based sauce that adds creaminess without dairy.

2. Kachoombar Salad

This Indian chopped salad features pineapple and mint in a cumin-spiced dressing.

3. Charred Cabbage with Chipotle Lime Creme

This recipe for Food for Health, Kaiser Permanente’s cooking blog, features fresh spring cabbage chopped in wedges.

Learn to cook recipes like these in my Thrive Kitchen classes, which started up again last month in a new virtual format, Thrive Kitchen at Home!

Our goal at Thrive Kitchen is to teach you how to cook deliciously to improve your health and boost your energy. !ecause the best medicine is prevention. We are a teaching kitchen for patients and the community, offering monthly classes that showcase seasonal produce, lavishly flavored with spices and fresh herbs.

Next month’s class, in honor of Earth Day, is Cooking to Reduce Food Waste. We’ll learn how to cook creatively and make amazing meals using leftovers and ingredients you have around the house.

Here’s the menu:

  • Spicy Green Herb Soup
  • Roasted Tomato Panzanella with Chickpeas and Pickled Red Onions

You can register for this fee-based class by calling 415-833-3450 or by e-mailing SFhealthed@kp.org.

You can also find an entire cookbook full of delicious, healthy plant-based dishes from cuisines around the world in my new cookbook, Spicebox Kitchen: Eat Well and Be Healthy with Globally Inspired, Vegetable-Forward Recipes, published this month by Hachette Go.

Linda Shiue, MD, is a primary care doctor and professionally trained chef who believes that the best medicine is prevention, based upon a healthy lifestyle. As Director of Culinary Medicine at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco, she is developing a teaching kitchen to empower patients with a new set of skills and knowledge to improve their health and wellness--nutrition applied through cooking skills. Classes are offered through the Health Education Department at (415) 833-3450. In addition to seeing patients, Dr. Shiue offers cooking demonstrations and hands-on workshops in which students learn to prepare seasonal produce lavishly flavored with spices and fresh herbs. Her food writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Remedy Quarterly, Salon, Culinate, and online editions of The New York Times and Smithsonian Magazine. She also has her own website, Spiceboxtravels.com.

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