The tomato or love apple, pomme d'amour, pomodoro.

No matter how you slice it this fruit is one hot babe.

A great source of nutrients like vitamin C and Lycopene.

The lycopersicon esculentum is as sexy as it is delicious.

Giving love to love apples today on Christina Cooks.

(lively music) ♪ (announcer) Underwriting for Christina Cooks is provided by Suzanne's Specialties.

Offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties.

Sweetness the way mother nature intended.

♪ Jonathan's Spoons.

Individually handcrafted from cherry wood each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

♪ Additional funding is also provided by... ♪ Hi I'm Christina Pirello and this is Christina Cooks where each week we take fresh, seasonal ingredients and whip the into amazing dishes.

Will they all be plant-based?

Yeah.

Will they all be delicious?

Yes because that's the macroterranean way.

You know, when I was a kid I never ate like big tomatoes because when you cut them I always thought they didn't look like they were done inside.

Which was just the seeds but I outgrew that, thank goodness, very quickly.

Tomatoes, while a fruit as we all know, I think we all know, are high in lycopene.

Which is a compound that's very, very good for reproductive health.

They're also loaded with vitamin C and fiber.

So there's nothing bad for you about a tomato.

Now they also contain an alkaloid called solanine which can affect some peoples arthritic joints which is why most often you eat tomatoes either marinated or cooked instead of just raw, like an apple, right.

So you want to make sure you do something to them.

So we're going to make a really easy summer soup and while you can make this soup any time of the year, when you see it you're going to go, "Yeah, that's for summer."

So we're going to start by dicing an onion.

I'm going to use a red onion because I think they're sweeter.

You can use whatever color onion you'd like.

I like red, they're higher in magnesium and potassium.

So they help to make your nerves feel more even and they're sweeter and soup's job, remember, is to aid in digestion so you really want to do the best you can to make a soup sweet.

So we're just going to use about a quarter of this onion because it's ginormous and then we're going to cut across it to create a dice.

Now when I was a kid my mother and grandmother would never use the root of the red onion because they thought that it was a little too bitter.

So we're going to take some extra virgin olive oil into our soup pot.

Maybe about a tablespoon because you don't want the soup to be oily but you want it to be rich.

Then the onion go in and as you all know, if you've known me for more than three seconds, if you want to preserve the flavor of your olive oil even though it's a high heat oil, you add your first ingredient like onion or garlic or leek or whatever and then you turn on the heat and you let the sizzle build.

And we'll add a tiny pinch of salt.

While we get the rest of the ingredients ready and the onions start to sweat and sizzle.

So we're going to take celery and dice it.

When you're making soup you want to make sure that your vegetables are cut very small so that their juices bleed into the pan and the broth becomes sweet.

Another way that soup will benefit digestion.

So you cut your celery into spheres and then you just cut across that sphere, go all the way up even into the little leaves because they have lots of chlorophyll which is good for red blood quality.

And that's going to go right in on top of our onion.

A tiny pinch of salt again.

And what that does is allow the onion to taste like onion, the celery like celery.

It's called building depth of flavor.

It's one of the reasons I never make a stock.

You can make a stock if you want to but I'm lazy.

I want the easiest way possible.

The next thing we're going to do is dice the tomato.

These are gigantic tomatoes.

What you want to do is take your tomato and using your knife you want to cut a little V at the top and remove this hard core without losing half your tomato.

You just want to take that away without losing the flesh.

It's okay if you want to leave it.

It's just not a great mouth feel.

Then we're going to cut the tomato into big chunks.

Now a sign that your knife is sharp is that you can cut a tomato without creating tomato puree.

So you can test your knife on tomatoes.

They go right in on top of our other veggies.

They're also going to put a lot of liquid into the soup.

So your onion and your celery won't burn as you're preparing your veg.

I mean, for me, I like to prep and go right into the pan.

Again, I'm lazy, I don't want to dirty a million dishes.

So I kind of prep on a cutting board and go right to the pan.

They go in.

And now we're going to add a little bit of hot spice.

You don't have to but it's really good to stimulate circulation which is good for blood quality.

So I like to do that.

We're going to give it a stir.

(sizzling) And now the second summer ingredient besides tomatoes that goes in here is corn.

Fresh in the summer, frozen any other time of year.

Please try to use organic, non-GMO corn.

Just because, I don't know, we don't really know what GMOs do, so.

Let's not use them until we know.

Then we're going to add water to create a nice texture of soup.

I would add less water at the beginning and see how much liquid the tomatoes put in the soup so that you end up with a nice sweet broth and it's not too watery.

Give it one last stir.

And you're going to cover it so that everything stays in the pan including the flavor.

Bring it to a boil.

This is going to cook for about 15 minutes and then we'll come back and season it.

♪ So we're going to make a Sicilian pasta dish called penne alla Norma.

It's very, very Sicilian.

The joke in our house is that they have three things to cook with in Sicily, zucchini, eggplant and tomatoes and they make amazing dishes out of all of them all the time.

This is a classic Italian dish.

We're going to start by dropping the pasta.

What we're going to do is cook about a pound of pasta and you're thinking, wait a minute, that's a pretty small pot of water to cook all that pasta.

No.

When you cook pasta you want to make sure that you don't have a ton of water.

You want to be able to see the pasta, like that.

The reason I say that is, pasta doesn't take like anything unless it's cooked in well seasoned water.

So you saw that I put salt and if the pasta is in this huge pot and there's all this water, it tastes watery.

Instead, we want it to taste pasta-y.

Pasta-y?

Pasta-ish?

Something.

Anyway.

So we're going to raise the heat and let the pasta cook and we'll come down occasionally and stir it.

So now we're going to make the gravy.

Now some people call things sauces and some people call it gravy.

If you're southern Italian it's always gravy but the difference is sauce has meat, gravy doesn't.

Or is it sauce doesn't have meat and gravy has meat?

I'm not sure but if you're southern Italian it's always gravy, always.

Don't ever say the word sauce around a southern Italian Nona or there'll be consequences.

So now we're going to take an eggplant.

I like small eggplant but you can use the big globe ones if you want, we're going to take the top off.

Then, we're going to cut it in half length-wise and then cut it in half again.

This is the basis of the creaminess of this gravy.

Then we're going to cut it into chunks.

If you can cut them into nice bite-sized pieces then your gravy will become creamier faster.

Right, if you don't, if you cut big giant pieces then your gravy's going to have to cook a lot longer and this is a very sort of, very warm weather this is served, even in Sicily.

So you don't want to cook this forever.

You want to cook it for about 20 minutes.

So now we're going to take this and put it into a glass bowl and the reason we're going to do that is because the actual eggplant that I'm going to cook had to soak.

Eggplant is a nightshade that has an alkaloid called solanine and if you don't soak it in salted water, now here's where Robert's family and mine diverge.

I am from Naples.

We say soak it.

In Sicily they rub the little pieces with salt and put it in a colander with a weight.

Ma, please it takes forever.

So we put this in salted water and you can see the salted water turns brownish.

What that tastes like is vinegar.

That's the acid being pulled out of the eggplant.

So it has no bitter aftertaste.

So that has to be rinsed very, very, very well before you cook it so your dish doesn't alter by saltiness, right.

So now we're going to--oops, hello pasta.

Hello pasta.

Hello pasta.

So when your pasta starts to go crazy you just go down and stir it.

Now... All right, so now that that's settled down now we can start the actual gravy.

So we're going to be frying eggplant so it needs a lot of oil because it likes to soak up the oil.

So what we're going to do is just... really coat the bottom of the pan with oil and if you're thinking this is a lot it is but eggplant are like little sponges.

So don't panic.

So the rinsed eggplant goes right in and we're going to turn on the heat so we don't lose our olive oil flavor.

We're going to add a little pinch of salt.

We're going to stir this.

We can use the same pasta spoon, doesn't matter.

And just until it's shiny with oil.

Okay and while that happens, while the sizzle builds, we're going to take our tomatoes.

I'm using canned cherry tomatoes from Sardinia.

These are really beautiful, brilliant color and cherry tomatoes contain less solanine and are less acidic by nature so they're sweeter and they're actually a little bit healthier for you.

But they're whole so we're going to go in here with our hands and break these apart.

You can certainly take them out and chop them if you want to do that but any Italian cook, chef will tell you that this is how you break up tomatoes.

This is not a smooth gravy anyway.

It's not like they have to be all broken up and I like the skins because they're sweet and this is all going to be part of our gravy.

That's going to go right on top of our eggplant.

(sizzling) Get all the goodness in there.

Now we're going to take a little bit of water into our can to kind of rinse out any remnants of that great tomato flavor and that goes in.

Then we're going to stir this around.

Add a little bit of hot spice.

Penne ala Norma usually has a little bit of hot flavor.

If you don't like it leave it out but it's good for circulation and it really lifts the flavor of the dish.

And then this is going to cook covered for about 25 minutes until the eggplant melts and then we'll finish it off and let that be a perfect gravy.

♪ So while the gravy's cooking because this gravy doesn't have a really heavy garlic taste you want to put your garlic cloves in whole and then you can either take them out or you can leave them in.

We're going to let that cook for a few more minutes and while that's simmering we're going to go back and season our soup.

The way we're going to do that is we're going to take a little bit of our hot broth.

You want to bring this soup down to a simmer so it's not boiling.

This is where east meets west, right.

So we have Japanese miso going into an Italian style summer soup but that's okay.

This is going to give the soup the flavor of like a parmigiano cheese without the saturated fat of parmigiano cheese.

So you want to dissolve this in the hot broth just so that nobody bites down on a big salty lump of miso.

Because talk about a not good mouth feel, wow.

Goes in, it's going to melt.

That's going to simmer for about a minute or two to activate the enzymes and then that's done.

Okay, in the meantime the gravy's ready.

So what we do now is my favorite part.

Look how it's bubbling and it thickened because of the eggplant, it's perfection.

But you're thinking, wait that might be a little too thick.

Ha-ha, that's where the pasta comes in.

Now you take your pasta right from the pan.

No draining, no rinsing.

Right with a slotted spoon or a spider, whatever you want to use and remember to cook your pasta al dente.

Maybe six or seven minutes.

Although packages call for like nine, ten minutes.

They also say a pound of pasta is supposed to serve six people.

No, not in any Italian household I know.

Maybe four on a good day.

So all your pasta goes right on top of the gravy and the starch from the pasta water is going to thin the gravy and smooth it out just a little bit which is what you want.

And be very careful when you're salting the eggplant and the tomato gravy because what you don't want is the salty pasta to make your gravy too salty.

Then you're just going to give this a stir.

This is beyond magnificent.

This is my favorite pasta dish on the planet next to genovese pesto.

Next to--yeah, there's a lot of my favorite pastas.

I'm going to take the garlic cloves out because I really want a mild flavor.

There we go.

So they come out.

Going to let that go for one second while I cut some basil.

So this is fresh basil and I'm going to use it to garnish both my soup and my pasta dish.

Take away the hard stems.

Now you can chiffonade this or you can do it Italian style which is just of course, shred chop.

Which isn't very fancy but it is the way we do it.

And it can be big or small.

This is your choice.

So most of this is going to go into the gravy which will get stirred in a second.

Then... we're going to ladle some soup into our bowl.

Be careful when you add the miso that you don't boil the soup because then you destroy all the enzymes and so much for good digestion.

Garnish it with a little fresh basil.

♪ So excited about this pasta dish.

I love this dish so much.

I love that it's healthy for me.

I love that it's yummy.

I love everything about it.

So I'm going to use the same ladle from the soup.

I'm telling you, when I say lazy, lazy.

Ladle up a nice hearty serving of penne alla Norma.

♪ And uh, I'll be back in a little while but I'm going off to feast on this.

♪ -Can't a vegetable be a fruit?

-A fruit can be a vegetable.

(boy) What?

It can be both?

(girl) What happens if you swallow the seeds?

(unintelligible) -I don't get it.

-I am so confused.

So people are often confused about living a healthy life, what that means, what they should do, should they do this?

Should they do that?

So I've decided in these segments to invite a series of experts to help to clear things up.

So today, I'm joined by Dr. Rakesh Shah, local cardiologist in Bucks County.

You may know him on Instagram as the Cooking Cardiologist.

It's well worth following.

Today, Rakesh, first of all thank you for being with me.

I wanted to talk to you about sleep and sleep dysfunction.

We hear a lot about it now but I'm not sure people really understand the importance of sleep and you know, not a bad night's sleep now and then, but the importance of sleep and its implications.

Before we go on can I go take a nap and come back?

-After.

-All right, fine.

Sleep is a vital component.

Many people take it for granted.

There is sleep hygiene, there are good sleep habits or sleeping habits but also there are people who snore and snoring is a major... red flag for me when I see patients in the office for sleep apnea.

Okay, so the questions I ask patients are, "Hey, do you feel tired during the day?

Do you feel rested when you wake up?

Do you wind up having to take naps in the middle of the day or feel tired enough on a weekend, let's say you're not doing anything."

And those are red flags for me.

If the majority of those answers are yes I typically ask them to get a sleep study done.

The reason being is sleep disorder and sleep apnea in particular increases one's risk of developing high blood pressure, -diabetes, heart disease.

-Really?

(Rakesh) Absolutely, increases your risk of developing abnormal heart rhythm such as AFib.

Increases the risk of having a stroke.

(Christina) Well, what about just, like a lot of people don't sleep well and a lot of it is attributed of course to blue screens, using your phone up until the moment you go to sleep.

Like so if sleep apnea is over here which is like serious, what about just regular, this is what you need to do to get a good night's sleep so you remain healthy.

(Rakesh) Absolutely and I think those are two different components.

-So sleep hygiene is one piece.

-What do you mean by that?

(Rakesh) So like you said, avoiding the blue screen or avoiding your cellphone or iPad, maybe an hour, hour and a half prior to going to bed.

Avoiding alcohol maybe about two to three hours -prior to going to bed.

-I was going to ask you to go out for a drink after this.

-Let's go.

-I'm kidding.

(laughing) (Rakesh) Yeah but those are really, really important.

Minimize eating 90 minutes before you go to bed.

-Right, right.

-Because you will see spikes in your blood sugar also if you eat too close to the bed time.

(Christina) Cause then you spend all night digesting instead of resting and that very often results in you waking up tired.

So no blue screens, no news before bed.

Try not to drink before sleeping and if you snore get yourself checked.

(Rakesh) Get yourself checked out, absolutely.

-Thanks, Rakesh.

-Thank you.

(Christina) So check on your sleep habits and make sure you're getting a good night's rest.

♪ So this last tomato feature is a summer dish and I say that because you're going to use a whole tomato hallowed out and you really can't do this unless it's summer when tomatoes taste like tomatoes and they're ripe and juicy and sweet.

So we hallowed them out with a spoon, cut the tops off and now we're going to add some salt.

What this is going to do is pull any moisture out of the inside sort of walls of the tomato.

So we're going to set these upside down to let any liquid drain out onto a paper towel and that's so it doesn't become mushy.

Because this is it, this is raw.

This tomato is not going to be cooked.

It's going to have a filling.

While that's happening we're going to take some water that's come to a boil, add a pinch of salt.

This is a half cup of water and a half cup of couscous and that's how you cook couscous.

What you don't want to do is like two to one or-- cause then it's too mushy.

You give it a quick stir.

You turn it off and you cover it.

That's how you cook couscous to perfection.

Takes anywhere from three to four to five minutes.

You'll know when it's nice and fluffy.

So now we're going to take some extra virgin olive oil into a skillet and make the filling for these tomatoes.

About a tablespoon of oil, not too much.

Garlic and onion.

We're going to let the sizzle build so that we keep our olive oil flavor.

Put everything in there, tiny pinch of salt and then we're going to take and sort of start to sweat the onion and the garlic so they become sweet.

And you want a nice fine dice on this so that you have a nice sweet flavor to your onion and your garlic.

Now we're going to add some diced celery.

(sizzling) Another pinch of salt.

Right, you want to build depth of flavor.

Onion tastes like onion.

Celery tastes like celery.

Garlic got garlic.

Then we add some diced carrots.

Another pinch of salt.

(sizzling) And then the last thing to go in are chickpeas and chickpeas are the source of protein in the dish of course but chickpeas are also a very interesting bean in that they taste mild mannered but they contain compounds that help the body to balance blood sugar so in Chinese medicine we say they are very good for the middle organs.

The spleen, pancreas and stomach and making you feel centered and grounded.

So this is not only a summer dish that makes you happy but it's a summer dish that makes you happy because you feel grounded.

And this is just a quick, light sauté.

You don't want the vegetables to be mushy, think summer.

Once your veggies are where you want them, takes maybe I don't know, a minute.

You're going to go back over here to your couscous and you can see all the water has been absorbed and it's going to go right on top of our... sautéed veg.

In the summer, when you're cooking in the summer, or actually anytime you're cooking, keep it simple.

You don't want your dishes to be complicated and be a total drag.

You want your dishes to stay simple.

So we're going to turn that off and come over here and plate up these lovely stuffed tomatoes and I usually like to put them onto a bed of arugula for a bunch of reasons.

Not the least of which is it's a bitter green which is very good at helping the liver to do its job of metabolizing and detoxing better and in Chinese medicine we say that when your liver is happy you're a happier camper which means everyone around you is happier too.

So now we take our drained tomatoes.

And make it kind of nestled in your arugula.

Then we're going to take our filling.

And just fill each tomato.

I like to be pretty abundant with the filling and I really don't care if it spills off onto the arugula.

It's kind of like this sort of very rustic salad-y kind of dish that's just really-- can be a little messy, it's very friendly and um, casual.

This is not a fancy dish.

It's typically Mediterranean in that it's very easy to make, it's very fresh and it's very friendly.

I like to finish this with a touch of really good, creamy, rich balsamic vinegar which makes for the perfect sweet finish on this dish.

♪ So what are you waiting for?

Let's get back to the cutting board and I'll see you next time on Christina Cooks.

♪ ♪ (announcer) Underwriting for Christina Cooks is provided by Suzanne's Specialties.

Offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties.

Sweetness the way mother nature intended.

♪ Jonathan's Spoons.

Individually handcrafted from cherry wood.

Each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

♪ Additional funding is also provided by... ♪ You can find today's recipes and learn more by visiting our website at ChristinaCooks.com and by following Christina on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

The companion cookbook, The Macroterranean Way combines the Mediterranean diet with the ancient wisdom of Chinese medicine.

Allowing us to understand how food affects us so we can cook deliciously while creating the wellness we want.

To order your copy for 14.95 plus handling call 800-266-5815.

Add Back to the Cutting Board and Christina's iconic Cooking the Whole Foods Way.

Get all three books for 49.95 plus handling.

Call 800-266-5815.

♪