Anyone who knows me knows I am obsessed with lentils.

Some say it's being Italian, but I say it's also about the benefits these yummy, humble beans bring to my wellness.

So let's fall in love with lentils and go back to the cutting board, today, on Christina Cooks.

(theme music) ♪ (female 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.

Additional funding is also provided by Old Yankee Cutting Boards.

Designed for durability and custom crafted by hand with Yankee pride and craftsmanship.

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 them into amazing dishes.

Will it all be plant-based?

Yep.

Will it all be delicious?

I hope so, but absolutely.

So, let's talk about Italians, shall we?

Italians live long, happy lives.

In fact, Sardinia is one of what's known as a blue zone which are people who live the longest and best.

Not just longest but best, like surgeons operating up until their nineties.

People farming as they would when they were 20 when they're 97.

So a blue zone means people who live well for a long period of time, not on a million drugs or any kind of oxygen tanks or life support.

So, one of the things that allows Italians to live so well are simple, humble lentils, which Italians revere like almost no one else I've ever met.

Yes, other cultures use them, but Italians and lentils, we even eat lentils on New Year's Eve because they resemble coins and they're said to bring you prosperity and health.

I don't know about the prosperity, although they're cheap, so maybe that's why, but the health part is absolutely definite.

They're high in folic acid, magnesium, potassium, fiber, they have polyphenols, they're anti-inflammatory, they have no fat, and they help with digestion.

You kind of can't lose with lentils.

And they're easy to cook and versatile.

We're gonna make, uh, how do I say this?

My husband is from Boston, so it's really bad if I say the proper word which is "chowder" with an "R." We're gonna make a red lentil-corn chowdah.

And if you're from Boston, don't yell at me.

I live with this all the time.

Okay, so we're gonna take avocado oil, and instead of extra-virgin olive oil, we're using avocado oil because of a spice that's gonna be added, and we'll talk about that in a minute.

Since it's avocado oil, I'm gonna turn on the heat.

Since this is a very mild flavor, a high-heat oil, then it doesn't matter if you cook it before you add your ingredients.

So, we're gonna heat the oil, add some garlic and immediately some red onion.

What you don't want to do is burn garlic.

If you burn the garlic, best to clean the pot and start over because the dish will be, um, what's the word?

Terrible.

So, we're gonna add a tiny pinch of salt to start the process.

And just begin to move the onions and garlic around in the slightly warm avocado oil and let the sizzle build.

We'll also add to it some curry powder.

Now curry powder is rich in a spice called turmeric which is anti-inflammatory.

People with arthritis use turmeric, people take turmeric tablets.

They--there's turmeric creams to get rid of inflammation, but if you cook with curry powder or turmeric on a regular basis, you get the benefit internally as well.

So we're gonna take a good, generous amount, maybe a teaspoon for this soup.

You want your red onions to turn a beautiful golden color.

Now when you use spices like curry or cayenne or anything like that, you have to use a little bit of oil in your cooking or they don't-- the heat doesn't develop, the flavor doesn't develop.

A water sauté just won't do the job, so you have to use a little bit of oil.

Next, we're gonna add some celery that's been diced.

Remember, when you make soup to dice your veggies so that you have more surface area of the veggies to bleed into the broth so the broth becomes sweet, because the job of soup is to help digestion begin.

And, so, a sweet taste helps to relax the middle area and the intestines so that you digest the rest of your meal well.

Next goes in diced carrots.

Another tiny pinch of salt.

Why do I do this?

I do this because every time you add a vegetable to a sauté, you want to add a tiny pinch of salt so the onions taste like onion, the celery like celery, the carrot like carrot.

That's why you do it.

A little bit of frozen organic corn, or you may use fresh if it's in season.

It's a whole grain, which will really add fiber to the soup and aid in digestion.

Now the vegetables are all ready.

So now we add some canned diced tomatoes.

Couple of scoops.

And because we're cooking with oil, the lycopene and vitamin C in the tomatoes will be more readily absorbed by the body.

So, reproductive health is boosted.

Stir that in.

And, finally, go our red lentils.

Red lentils are like split lentils.

They're very tiny and delicate.

You can see this, like, they're almost like little pieces of confetti.

This soup will cook in 15 or 20 minutes.

It's nothing, there's no effort involved in making a soup like this, and the benefits are, as you saw, a millionfold.

So, if you tell me you don't have time to cook a soup like this, I'm gonna ask you to do me a favor, and that favor is, bring me your calendars.

Send them to me on e-mail.

I'll find you the time to cook.

In 25 years of asking, no one has ever brought me their calendar.

Just a thought.

Finally, bay leaf so the lentils don't make you musical.

Tried to fly away.

Cover, and in 20 minutes we'll have a delicious, creamy chowdah.

-Can a vegetable be a fruit?

-A fruit can be a vegetable.

What?

It can be both?

What happens if you swallow the seeds?

(unintelligible).

-I don't get it.

-I am so confused.

♪ (Christina) So, every day, not a day goes by in my office that we don't get an e-mail or a phone call about some confusing thing in healthy living that people are struggling with.

Either it's conflicting information from experts or whatever.

So I thought I would talk to people who are struggling with various things and see if I can't help smooth the path to a healthier life.

So today I'm with Denise Moser, who is a singer/songwriter and a custom songwriter, and she loves to cook, but every now and then, you know, everybody hits that in the road that needs a little clarification.

So, how can I help you?

So I cook with a lot of olive oil and sometimes avocado oil, and I have been hearing from people that you should never cook with oil.

And I just am wondering if you can just shed some light on what the spirit of that is, and how much oil you should have, and what it does for you.

So the spirit of that is not coming from malintent.

The spirit of that is coming from doctors discovering people who were quite sick with heart disease and diabetes, in particular, that them forgoing oil for a while helps to kind of cleanse and reboot their system, okay?

But anything past a couple of months, to me, then compromises your ability to absorb fat-soluble nutrients like vitamin D, calcium, you know, K2, you know, all of those things that we need to maintain a healthy body.

It also causes your food to lack satiety, like you don't love your food so much.

You end up eating more because there's no oil.

Right, so I think using between one and three tablespoons a day in your various dishes is a healthy amount of oil that keeps your skin healthy, your skin, you know, supple and lush.

And it also helps your hair to stay soft, your nails to stay strong, and it also helps your body to absorb nutrients as it's meant to absorb them.

-So I hope that helps a little.

-Yeah, it does.

It does.

It's reminding me of another question -that I have.

-Okay.

So, sometimes I-- Sometimes, especially with baking, with sweet stuff, but sometimes with other things, too, I just have to work on portion control.

And I've been more aware of that now as I've been losing some weight.

And I don't know if there's something besides just, like, putting on my big girl pants and having some willpower that would help me to-- Oh, there goes my answer.

(Denise) I know, but just something that would help to just, you know, make me feel a little more satisfied and not, like, deprived if I'm not eating as much.

First of all, if you're eating mostly plant-based food that's lowish in oil, as long as you chew very well, you're gonna realize that you're full, right?

It takes the body 20 minutes to know that we're full.

If you eat quickly, you're on your third portion before you realize that you're full.

So, it's the old trick of, you know, eat, put your fork down, chew it till it's liquid, and kind of take your time eating and you'll eat much less, and that should help.

-Sounds good.

-Great.

-Thanks for coming.

-Thanks for having me.

♪ So, when it comes to lentils, they're not only high in fiber and loaded with minerals, they also have been shown to protect the heart, the bones, and the digestive system.

As you can see, dish by dish, as we move on, lentils are looking better and better and better, don't you think?

So, now we're gonna take lentils and turn them into sort of a salad.

You can also whip this into a pâté and we're gonna spread it over whole-grain bread.

Very sort of Italian style.

It's called a "crostini."

And "crostini" means "hard and crusty," so the bread is gonna be hard and crusty.

So I'm gonna take a whole-grain loaf of bread, and for some reason in cooking, you do things in threes.

So I'm gonna cut three pieces of bread.

You may cut more if you have a bigger crowd, but three is the lucky number in cooking.

So we're gonna take these three slices of bread... ...and then get some extra-virgin olive oil and drizzle it over each piece of bread on the first side, right?

And then just take a brush and make sure that the oil is kind of evenly spread on the bread.

And what this is gonna help the bread to do is get crunchy and golden brown, but also retain like a richness.

You could just toast it, but then the bread is just dry.

This way, it'll retain a little bit of its moisture so that the flavor is a bit richer.

Some people also rub garlic on the bread at this point, but I'm gonna be using garlic in the sauté, so I didn't want to garlic us out.

Now we'll take a little bit of extra-virgin olive oil in our griddle pan, and using a brush, just brush it along the surface so that the surface of the pan is covered, just a little bit shiny with oil.

You don't want a pile of oil here.

The bread will just get oily.

Then you turn on the flame pretty high.

We're just gonna lay our three pieces of bread in the pan, okay?

Then we'll come back here and get our veggies ready.

Remember, as I always tell you, clean your work area in between because if you leave it all sort of chaotic, you get really overwhelmed with your cooking and, suddenly, you just don't want to play anymore.

So we'll take a little bit of extra-virgin olive oil into a skillet for our sauté.

Then we'll take some red onion.

You may use shallots, yellow onion, it doesn't matter, you can use leeks.

I really like red onion because it's high in magnesium which helps to settle your nerves and some garlic.

And then we turn on the heat.

This serves two purposes: One, I get the flavor of my extra-virgin olive oil at the final bite of my dish, but the other thing that it does is it helps to prevent you from burning the garlic, and that's a terrible flavor, so let's try not to do that, shall we?

A little bit of salt to let the sizzle build.

And, then, as this is starting to sweat, you can hear the bread sort of crackling around on the griddle pan.

You can check it, but don't get carried away turning it too quickly.

Let it brown.

You want to get nice, golden edges, so be patient with your bread.

And so now that this has begun to build and you get a nice sizzle happening, then we add carrots.

And this is sort of like a basic-- In French cooking it's called a "mirepoix."

In Italian or Latin cooking, it's called a "sofrito," and it's onions, garlic, celery, carrot.

And then you may add whatever you want to it.

But now I have a nice sizzle, and you just want to sauté until the carrots are shining with oil.

You want a nice texture here.

The lentils are soft, so you want your veggies to be a little bit crunchy.

If you're gonna puree this into a smooth pâté, I puree the lentils and, then, I still put the veggies in crunchy so that it'll always have a little bit of texture.

Now we'll take some celery, maybe half a stalk.

We don't need much.

Cut it into spears.

Dice it and pop it into the pan... ...with a final seasoning of salt.

Now, you'll kind of freak out when you see me add the salt, but I'm salting this sauté to also be the seasoning in the lentils.

So I'm gonna add a good amount of salt.

Settle down, I can hear you breathing heavily at home when you see me using salt.

It's good for you, it keeps your muscles tight, vessels strong.

Use good quality sea salt only in cooking, never at the table.

The most important thing in cooking is to learn how to season.

Right, if you get your food to the table and it's flat, tough, learn how to season.

You don't get to do this at the table.

That's when you get into trouble with hypertension and all the things that we associate with salt.

See how the bread got golden?

Try not to burn it.

You just want the edges golden like this, really pretty.

So now we'll take our veg... ...and add them into our bowl of lentils.

These are called "le puy" if you're French, "Umbrian" if you're Italian, and "beluga" if you're, I guess, Russian.

Anyway, they're little tiny lentils and they don't get really, really mushy.

Even if you cook them a long time, they'll always retain a little bit of their shape.

If you want this to become a pâté without a food processor, then use bigger lentils and they'll get creamy on their own.

But since I want texture here, we're gonna go with it this way.

So we're gonna take our veg, stir it in.

I wish you guys could smell this.

I think there's nothing quite as heavenly as garlic and onion.

And then we're gonna stir into this some whole, fresh basil leaves just until they wilt.

And it'll give it just that little aromatic summer flavor.

And they'll wilt down and be perfection.

Then, we'll take our bread... ...onto a finished plate.

This is such a nice dish, and it's such a great way to get people to eat beans if they're not so inclined.

Then you take some of your lentil salad, warm lentil salad.

Let it fall off the bread, just kind of pile it high on here.

This is a very sort of homey, rustic sort of dish.

And then we're gonna garnish each one with red bell pepper, roasted pepper, of course, so that we balance it for digestion.

And a final drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil.

And a few basil leaves for a little bit of green color.

And there you have a perfect starter course or light side dish that's high in protein, rich in complex carbohydrates, and loaded with nutrients.

♪ So when you need a finer cut for something like a soup or a really delicate dish, you want to be able to dice, and this is how you would do it with any long vegetable.

You're gonna take your veggie and you're gonna cut the vegetable into spears.

The thickness of your spears determines the size of your dice.

So you'll hold it down, run your knife along it so that you have equal thickness spears.

Then you'll hold the spears down, keep your fingers out of the way.

And you just run your knife up along whatever vegetable it is, celery, carrot, parsnip, doesn't matter.

And you create a nice, fine dice that will make any soup just a little sweeter.

♪ So, before we make our last dish, let's revisit our chowdah.

I'm gonna chop the garnish which is just a scallion.

I like to chop the scallions on a diagonal for the garnish.

You don't have to if you don't want to, but I just like the way it looks.

It's really, really pretty.

So, since I get to choose, since it's my kitchen, that's what we're doing.

Okay, now, so look how beautiful the soup has turned out.

Tiny bit of salt.

We're gonna lift out our bay leaf so I don't have to give anybody a prize for eating the soup.

And, then, it's... Like, it's become so creamy.

Red lentils break down and become this creamy, yellow, golden color.

The first time I cooked red lentils, I bought them because I thought, "Wow, these are so beautiful.

I could make a beautiful red lentil salad."

Not knowing that they turned yellow and mushy when you cooked 'em.

I was not a genius at cooking beans.

So, they, of course, turned out yellow and mushy, as they do, so I immediately took them back to the store and said, "There's something wrong with these lentils.

They don't stay red."

And they rolled their eyes and said, "Wow.

We didn't know you were a genius.

They turn yellow and mushy."

So, I said, instead of saying, "I'm sorry," I'm like, "Well, you should call them 'yellow, mushy lentils.'"

But now I realize they make a beautiful, creamy soup, and I love them.

So I'll just garnish them with some scallion.

And that'll be mine to dig into later.

♪ All right, so now we're gonna start a lentil Waldorf salad.

Now Waldorf salads are very high in fat.

They have mayonnaise and usually chicken and, of course, there's walnuts, and then they throw in some apples for whatever reason.

We're gonna make ours out of lentils so it's heart-healthy, because we're using walnuts which are heart-healthy, we're using lentils, heart-healthy, and we're using a vegan mayo which is basically just whipped oil.

They have olive oil-based ones they have a mixture of oil-based ones.

You decide which one you like better and you'll be able to use that instead.

So, this is a pretty easy dish.

We have cooked, again, beluga lentils.

They're the little tiny baby lentils.

You can see how small they are, and they get about twice their size.

All right, so those are our lentils, part of-- That's our high protein part.

So we're gonna take an apple.

You can use a Fuji, a Mac, a Red Delicious, a Yellow Delicious, or a Granny Smith.

What's nice about them is they add a little bit of tartness as well as valuable pectin to our dish.

And we're just gonna dice these into bite-size pieces.

You can make it really big and chunky.

You can make it small and delicate.

It's all about your cutting skills, which I highly recommend that you develop.

In order to make cooking easy, this is sort of the part that takes the most time.

Once you put a dish up to cook, it sort of just soups, right, it does its thing.

This is the part that intimidates people and slows them down.

So, if you practice, you know, practice by cooking, then your prep becomes really quick and, suddenly, prep work becomes like this Zen, gorgeous thing that you do that somehow leads you to the meal.

Chopping is my favorite part of meal prep.

I wake up in the morning, look at my gorgeous knives and go, "What can I chop today?"

So, you can roll your eyes.

I understand.

So now we have our apples in.

Now I don't want the apples to turn brown, even in the quick time that we're gonna take to assemble this, so I'll take an organic lemon and zest the skin off.

Please use organic citrus if you're gonna use the zest so that you're not zesting pesticides into your dish.

'Cause they spray them, and this is where all the vitamin C is, is actually in the rind.

This is where the sun actually hit the lemon on the tree.

And then we'll add a little bit of lemon juice so that the apples stay their beautiful color and don't turn brown.

You only need the juice of about half a lemon.

Now we'll add some celery, diced celery.

Some diced red onion.

Again, you can use shallots, you can use scallions, you can use white onions.

Red onions are really, really, really sweet.

Raw, they can be a tiny bit sharp.

So if you don't like them, you could quickly blanch them in hot water to gentle their flavor.

Some pan-toasted walnuts.

A quarter teaspoon of nutmeg, and the nutmeg is just gonna give us a little bit of a lift on the apple flavor.

And then, of course, lentils.

Season with salt.

Not too much, just a little bit of salt.

And, then, sort of the star of this dish along with the lentils is the vegan mayo.

And you can see, it looks, smells, and acts just like mayonnaise without the saturated fat.

It's certainly fat, but it's a mono and polyunsaturated fat.

And you can decide how much mayonnaise you want to put in or how much you don't want to put in.

I tend to go lighter because my mother's family was from outside Naples, Castellammare di Stabia, and they didn't cook with mayonnaise.

They used olive oil because it's hot in Naples, so mayonnaise would go bad.

When my grandfather moved to the United States, he was amazed that you could buy things in cases at the supermarket.

So he would show up after a supermarket trip with all this stuff that we never ate, but he bought it 'cause he was amazed at the price.

Cases of peanut butter.

One day, he showed up with a case of mayonnaise, and my grandmother said to him, "Gerardo, what is this?"

And he said, "I don't know, they call it 'mayonnaise,' but the price was great, so I bought it."

Years later, when they both passed away, we cleaned out their pantry, and there was this case of outcoded mayonnaise that they never used 'cause they didn't know what to do with it, but it was a great price, so...

This is our lentil salad, our lentil Waldorf salad.

And so you have all the satisfaction of a Waldorf salad with none of the ill side effects like saturated fat.

♪ But you still have a nice, rich, creamy salad.

♪ So what are you waiting for?

It's time to get back to the cutting board.

I'll see you next time on Christina Cooks.

♪ ♪ (female 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.

Additional funding is also provided by Old Yankee Cutting Boards.

Designed for durability and custom crafted by hand with Yankee pride and craftsmanship.

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, Back to the Cutting Board, takes you on a journey to reengage with the soul of cooking.

With more than 100 plant-based recipes, finding the joy in cooking has never been simpler.

To order your copy for $20 plus handling, call 800-266-5815.

Add Christina's iconic book, Cooking the Whole Foods Way, with 500 delicious plant-based recipes.

To order both books for $39.95 plus handling, call 800-266-5815.

♪ (bright music)