Plant-Based Kitchen Essentials: Top Healthy Foods to Stock In Your Healthy Pantry and Fridge (Your New Weekly Grocery List!)

In this episode, let's upgrade your plant-based kitchen with essential items for a healthy pantry and fridge. Explore the ultimate grocery list for transformative weekly meals, discover top plant-based protein sources, and get hot tips for seamless meal planning. I'll share my approach to grains, superfood condiment recipes, and surprising vegan items I avoid and why. Join me for a flavorful journey into a nourishing, plant-based kitchen!

In this episode you'll learn:

• The ultimate healthy eating, plant-based grocery shopping list
• Best plant-based protein sources you need
• Nutrient and protein-packed vegan recipe ideas
• Hot tips for healthy meal planning each week
• Why I don't eat many grains as a vegan
• Superfood, nutrient-packed condiment recipes
• Common vegan food items I DON'T buy and why (these may surprise you!)

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Transcript

Bindi: 0:04

Welcome to the Vibrant you podcast. I'm your host, bindi Stables, and here we talk all things wellness and vibrant living. You'll learn about integrative health, functional medicine, holistic biohacking and enjoy raw and real conversations on personal growth, mindset and motivation. Optimize your body and mind and become the happiest, the healthiest, most vibrant. You Enjoy the show Well.

Bindi: 0:35

Hello and welcome back to another episode on Vibrant you. We are getting into plant-based kitchen essentials. I'm going to share with you my healthy cooking, pantry and fridge essentials, and I'm going to share with you my exact weekly grocery list. It's Monday, the day that I'm recording this, and this is my flow for today. I'm doing my grocery shopping, I'm placing my vegetables and produce order for the week, and so I'm so excited to share this with you. Food is literally one of my favorite things, and it's something that I haven't talked enough about on this podcast yet. We get into so much on integrative health and functional medicine, mindset and motivation, healthy living, and I haven't shared enough yet about what I cook, how I cook, how I prepare my food, because food truly is medicine. So that's what we're getting into today, and my hope is that by the end of this episode, you will have an entire super healthy, anti-inflammatory, plant-centered grocery list that you can literally bring with you to the grocery store and stock up your fridge and your pantry and start to cook the most amazing and nutritious meals for yourself, so that you can use food as medicine and really start to move the needle towards your optimal health goals. So let's get right into it. So how I always plan my meals is I always plan first around my protein. So, being a primarily plant-based plant-based it's hard to say, for some reason, plant-based person there we go. I focus everything, all of my meals. It dances around my protein option for the day. So, of course, for protein, you're welcome to choose as you wish, whether that's an animal-based source, whether you're eating meat or chicken or fish, but I'm going to be sharing my plant-based essentials. That I stock my pantry with Proteins. For me as a more plant-based person is I'm eating things like beans and lentils and legumes and seeds, so this is what I stock up on.

Bindi: 2:24

So lentils, my favorite lentil and probably what my partner and I eat the most of on a regular basis is something called yellow split mung dal. So it's typically used in Indian cooking. We make a lot of dolls and a lot of kitscheries and those types of things just because they're super easy to digest, they're yummy, they freeze easily, so we can kind of make a big pot and stock up for a couple days. You can get it at most Indian grocery stores or more like international grocery stores, asian markets, those types of things, although I'm pretty sure like Whole Foods would have those types of places as well. So lentils is yellow, split, mung dal, that's number one. Love me my brown lentils, red lentils, green lentils, all of the lentils Beans.

Bindi: 3:03

I am obsessed with chickpeas. I love kidney beans, butter beans, black beans, adzuki beans. I love to make all different types of curries as well, as I actually use beans in any baking that I do. So any sort of like desserts or treats that I make, I try to make them really high protein, high in fiber. So I haven't purchased you know whole wheat flour or any gluten flour in years, I'd say like a decade probably, maybe more. But what I'll use is I'll use beans as a base for some of my sweets and treats that I'll make really healthy, blood sugar friendly, plant based treats.

Bindi: 3:35

Now, with beans, I have to admit you guys, I don't always cook them myself, simply because it takes so much time admitting here because it's real life and sometimes we don't have the time or energy to cook our beans from scratch and it's better than eating out still, and you know, home cooking is always better. So sometimes I will get the cans and I try to get BPA free organic beans in cans. But we do the best that we can. And the concern with canned beans is the aluminum content right, and aluminum is a healthy metal, but my aluminum is something that I track really regularly and really keep in check. So for me, I'm happy to eat the odd can of beans versus, you know, eating out, where, of course, they're using canned beans anyway if you're eating at a vegan place. So just something to keep in mind.

Bindi: 4:17

I don't really buy dried beans because they just take so long. You've got to soak them overnight and you've got to cook them and, yeah, kudos to you if you do cook your beans from scratch, but I'll admit that it's rare when I do so. All of the bean varieties what I don't get is refried beans or beans and cans that are like flavored and whatnot. I just get the whole natural beans and canned chickpea, kidney bean, butter beans, adzuki beans, black beans, all of those things, and I'll use them in my cooking, make lots of curries and those kinds of things with beans and dips and whatnot.

Bindi: 4:47

Okay, another protein that I use is seeds. So I every week will buy pumpkin seeds, hemp hearts, chia seeds. These are all excellent sources of plant-based protein and they're less in fat than nuts are, which is why what makes them a more qualified protein source. So pumpkin seeds, especially hemp hearts, they're really high in protein and I use them in my cooking regularly. Sometimes I'll even combine sources of protein to kind of protein stack to get my protein reserves up as a vegan, and so I'll make like lentils and then I'll top it with toasted pumpkin seeds, for example, and make like a lentil soup or a dollar something, and then I'll add a few teaspoons of hemp hearts, for example, to build it up.

Bindi: 5:24

Then the last category of protein that I work with is soy-based products. Now, soy is controversial. There's a way of doing it right. There's a time and place for it. The fact is is that it's very high in protein. It's one of the highest plant-based sources of protein. The other fact of it is that a lot of soy is genetically modified. It's highly sprayed in pesticide, which is not great. So here's my advice for soy If you do want to incorporate tofu tempeh, those types of things is number one get it from an organic, non-gmo source.

Bindi: 5:53

Number two don't eat too much soy if you're working with any estrogen-based issues or any hormone-based issues. Soy is naturally a little bit estrogenic, meaning it has phytoestrogens which mimic estrogen in the body can actually build up too much estrogen in your system, which is not great if you're already estrogen dominant. I eat it, you know, a couple times a week, keeping my estrogen levels in check, but there has been moments where I'll eliminate soy just to get my hormones back in check, to, yeah, rebalance the body. The cool thing is is that you can also get nowadays you can make different types of tofu, different types of tempeh, so it doesn't always have to come from soy, which is also really cool if you have a food sensitivity or you are estrogen dominant or you're a man and you're concerned about, you know, eating higher levels of soy and the influence it might have on your hormones. So you can actually get pumpkin seed tempeh. Nowadays you can get chickpea tempeh.

Bindi: 6:40

I've actually doubled and made my own homemade red lentil tofu, which has been really, really excellent, super high in protein as well. So all of this is available to us. So that's how I start my meal. As I meal prep around, my protein that's what I'm stocking my pantry with is again those beans, lentils, legumes and seeds as my primary protein sources. Then what I get into is my vegetables. So about a quarter of my plate is going to be protein and then half of my plate so even more than I'm having protein is I'm having my vegetables. So vegetables I like to purchase organic as much as possible.

Bindi: 7:13

I try to eat the rainbow. So I eat all different colors. I try with every grocery shop or every grocery order. We have a really good organic farm that we order from here and they just deliver our gorgeous organic fruits and vegetables. It's plastic free, it's zero waste. They literally deliver our leafy greens wrapped in banana leaf. Gotta love Bali for that. So yeah, try to get organic, get the rainbow, so you're getting greens and orange and red and purple and blue, ideally fresh. There's the odd case that I don't mind to have frozen, like frozen peas. I'll do that, or frozen beans, or if I have too much and I want to be a little bit more zero waste, then I will just freeze my organic vegetables until the next week, if I bought a little bit too much or I ate out a little bit more that week or I was traveling, so I don't mind doing that at all, but ideally organic, even with our frozen vegetables. So the ideal world is that on any given day, we are eating seven to nine servings of fruit and vegetables per day. So this is predominantly my plate is vegetables.

Bindi: 8:08

So let's go through some of the main vegetables that I'm buying at the supermarket or this organic online delivery or your farmers market, and we'll go through the rainbow in different colors Because, again, different colors of fruits and vegetables have different antioxidant profiles, different phytochemicals and polyphenols these forms of antioxidants that are really beneficial for different parts of our health. So the green vegetables that I get pretty consistently every single week is I'm obsessed with broccoli, love asparagus, I love kale and spinach and whatever leafy greens are in season. So that can be collard greens, that can be beet greens, that can be leafy greens that I'll keep fresh and not cook like lettuce or rucola, or I think those are the main ones that I don't normally buy. I love cabbage cabbage is super healthy zucchini, green beans, peas To keep fresh. I'll get some celery and cucumber. I love to munch on those throughout the week. So those are my main greens that I'll buy on a week to week basis.

Bindi: 9:04

Then we want to make sure that we always have some oranges and some reds in there because, again, we're getting different phytochemicals, different nutrients and as long as we're eating the full rainbow, we're guaranteed to get a wide variety of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants, which is so health and life giving. So orange and red colors I'm going for things like tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, bell peppers of all the colors I love radishes, red onions I'm getting in there, which is really great. And then more on, like the cool color spectrum of, like blues and purples, is purple kale or purple cabbage we get really consistently. I'm not such a fan of eggplant, but we do get that once in a while as a treat that grows really readily, available here in Bali. And then your white colors, right? So cauliflower, white onion, garlic, Dicon, radish, those types of things. So eat the rainbow. Those are the vegetables that I normally get.

Bindi: 9:54

Then I match my meal up with a carb or a starch. So, again, if I'm looking, if I'm visualizing my plate here, I'm going to have about half of my plate with vegetables, so that's cooked vegetables, raw vegetables, etc. A quarter of my plate is going to be my protein and then another quarter of my plate, to complete my plate, is going to be a carb or a starch. Now, I don't love a lot of really high glycemic greens, so I'm not super intense about it. But I'm primarily gluten free. 90 to 95% gluten free Really is just like the odd sourdough when I go out and that's the only thing on the menu for breakfast is an avocado toast with some, you know, add my own protein, bring my own pumpkin seeds or hemp hearts as a little protein on top. But yeah, I'm not not a big fan of a lot of grains. Actually, which might surprise you.

Bindi: 10:41

As a plant based, you know, person, it's very rare that I'll eat out or rice or wheat or gluten. It's very rare that I'll eat breads or pastas of any sort and any of those things. Like you know, if I am eating a pasta it's a treat. It's not a regular thing on my on my menu. It's maybe a couple times a month, which I don't mind. I love me a good, you know, buckwheat pasta or chickpea pasta, which I usually go for over corn or rice pasta or any other gluten free pasta out there, simply because it's higher in protein and higher in micronutrients. So buckwheat or chickpea, chickpea pastel use once in a while. Or I have some very specific sources of like breads that I'll buy here on the island that's actually grain free, so it's a more paleo style of bread, but it's also plant based and it's made from like pumpkin or sweet potato. Or I just make my own flat breads out of potatoes and cassava flour, for example, and vegetables inside, which is great.

Bindi: 11:32

But this carbs are the searches that I do often eat is one of three categories. So either high protein, ancient grains so again it is high in carbohydrates, but we're also protein stacking and we're getting extra grams of protein by adding in certain ancient grains. The second category is root vegetables and then the third is squash. So I'm mostly getting my carbs and starch again from vegetable based sources and only ancient grains. So the ancient grains that I love is I love quinoa, I love amaranth, I love millet. I think those are the main. Oh, and buckwheat. I love buckwheat so much so I will often I'll get those all and just cook them down either into some kind of porridge or I actually prefer the more like fluffy in nature, so it's like you know a nice quinoa that'll add to a quinoa salad or amaranth and they're just really nutty and delicious and earthy and you can really flavor them up, which is great. So that's the ancient grains.

Bindi: 12:24

The root vegetables that I love and consistently get at each week is I get carrots, I get potatoes, I get all the varieties of sweet potatoes, and we usually switch it up each week. So each week we'll kind of rotate so we get again a wide variety of colors for a wider nutritional profile. So we can get purple sweet potato, the honey sweet potato, orange, like yams, or sweet potatoes that are more familiar, I know in in Canada. Beets are another root vegetable that I really like and the reason why I consider this a carbor starch versus a vegetable right, it is still a vegetable, of course, but is that? Of course? It's so much higher in starch and therefore higher in sugar. So what we don't want is, you know, half of our plate of just pure starch and then know that green, leafy, high fiber vegetables, that's what we want predominantly our plate to be built up for most people.

Bindi: 13:11

And then the third category is squash. So that is your pumpkin, your butternut squash, your spaghetti squash, acorn squash I know in Canada you get a lot of that in autumn and the fall season and in the winter. So those are really excellent forms of starch and carbs, which is going to give you, obviously, glucose and breaks down into glucose, which is the main fuel source that your brain needs for energy. So we love our healthy carbs and starches. But again, yeah, it's.

Bindi: 13:36

I'm not against breads or grains by any means, but I just find, with with my body type, I don't do so well. Like I'm a more kaffa body type in my metabolism, I don't thrive when I'm eating too many carbs and too many starches. So it's very rare that I'll eat wheat or gluten, rare that'll eat oats, rare that'll eat corn or really rice, which is funny because here in Bali, indonesia, rice is like the primary food group and everything revolves around rice. They literally eat rice three times a day here. So it's kind of going against the local culture. But I love my vegetables that's what my plate revolves around and my healthy protein. Okay, so that's my carbs and starch.

Bindi: 14:11

Then let's get into fats. So fats I'm either using from an avocado based source, from different plant based oils, or from nuts and seeds. Those are my main sources of fat. So either I'm, you know, stocking up on a couple avocados for the week and adding a few slices of that to my meal or adding it into a salad dressing, making a guacamole, something like that, or I'm stocking up on a variety of nuts and seeds. So, as I mentioned before in the protein sources, love my pumpkin seeds, chia seed, hemp seed, but as a source of fat, which we're also again protein stacking, we're getting a few extra grams of protein when we add nuts as our primary fat source. I like almonds, I like Brazil nuts. Those are my main ones.

Bindi: 14:52

What I actually don't eat too much of is I rarely eat peanuts. The odd time if I eat out, I'll have, you know, peanut butter in a salad dressing or, you know, asian stir fries and stuff sometimes have peanuts, chopped peanuts, on top. I rarely eat pistachio and I rarely eat cashew, which is interesting because I feel like so many vegans just consume cashews in by the kilo and all of the dressings and so much you know is high in cashew. But the fact is that, like cashews are not. They don't have so much nutrition. They're really high in fat. They can be a little hard to digest. They're not very eco friendly. They're really require a lot of energy and a lot of water to harvest. And peanuts, pistachios and cashews they're actually quite high in mold. So unless you're getting it from a really clean, certified source and that has tested for mold, most peanuts and pistachios are actually moldy, which is not so great, and I've had mold toxicity before. I just don't want to deal with that again. So I'm not against them by any means. But I know for my body type I don't thrive with too many carbs and too much fat. That's not to say that anybody should be low carb or low fat, and I'm certainly not. I'm just saying that a lot of like vegan nutrition plans are really high in fat and really high in carbs, which isn't actually so balanced and then leads to blood sugar dysregulation issues and metabolic issues, gut issues, those types of things. So yeah, a little fun fact Then then kind of the third category is fats is, of course, the oils.

Bindi: 16:07

So plant based oils. I like coconut oil. I mostly use olive oil to cook with or just to drizzle olive oil, you know, in my salad dressing or on top of my meal for a little bit of healthy fat. And then if I'm not cooking and I'm just using it as a dressing source, I love flax oil and flax oil is so high and Omega threes, it's really anti inflammatory. It's like the fish oil of plant based foods, right, it's really excellent. So that's the fat sources that I use predominantly. Is that avocado, nuts or seeds or those plant based oils? What I don't use is other seed oil, so canola oils off limits for me. Unfortunately, when we eat out, that's mostly what you know you get, unless you're asking for olive oil or coconut oil or it's advertised as it. If it's not advertised that they're using healthy oils or they're seed oil free, you can almost guarantee that they're using the crappy canola oil, vegetable oil, avocado oil, grape seed oil, which are really inflammatory and the smoke point is much lower, meaning that these oils go rancid and because they become carcinogenic or cancer causing when they are cooked and they're often genetically modified. So I'll try my best to stay away from those and certainly never gonna have a bottle of canola oil or peanut oil or anything like that in my house.

Bindi: 17:15

Okay, let's get into fruits. So either fresh fruits or the odd time I'll have frozen fruits, depending on what's in season, what's not. I have a couple of dried fruits, but not too many. It's mostly like as a garnish, or I'll use dates in baking if I want to sweeten something. But I don't really eat dried fruits too often either, just because they're so high glycemic. If you were to eat, you know, a cup of grapes, there's a certain amount of sugar. But if you were to eat a cup of dehydrated grapes as raisins, obviously you're getting so much more grapes and so much more sugar for the same cup of grapes. So sugar wise is just so much higher in sugar To eat dried fruits than whole fruits. So I do. You know, I have some dried goji berries in the fridge that I'll like top on a salad, or some dates that I'll add to salad dressings to make it a little bit, you know, give it some sweetness to it and make it a little bit more creamy. I'll add it into baked sweets and treats that I'll make so as treats.

Bindi: 18:06

More the dried fruits, but yeah, the fruits that I normally go for is all the categories. So citrus fruits and berries, stone fruits, tropical fruits, apples, all the things. So the main citrus that I buy each week lemon and limes always, cause lemon and limes are my garnish for everything. I use them in my dressings, my sauces, to give flavor to everything, give it a really nice fresh flavor like cooking Oranges, tangerines we have the odd time. Berries are the bomb.

Bindi: 18:32

I love berries. It's honestly, you guys, one of the things that I miss the most about living in Canada. If anyone's from Canada or you've been to Canada, I hope you've been in the summer, but truly are British. One of the main provinces in Canada on the West coast, british Columbia, they have the best organic fresh berries and stone fruit from blueberries and strawberries and blackberries, mulberries, the cherries, like all the stone fruit, like nectarines and plums and peaches. My mouth is watering. They are just so good and we don't have them here cause it's too hot in Bali. So we get all of our amazing tropical fruits, like we buy mango regularly and dragon fruit, bananas, pineapple, which for Canadians and North Americans is such a treat. But here what I really miss is those like domestic, you know, cooler climate fruits like berries and stone fruit, which is so yummy. The odd time we'll buy melons of some sort, like watermelon or cantaloupe honey, do those types of things? We like to buy apples and pears, those types of things as well. So that's fruit.

Bindi: 19:29

Fruit for me is more of a snack or I have it as part of my smoothie in the morning. So I'll make a really high protein smoothie in the morning. I'll put like not too much of a banana, either a third or a half of a banana. I'll add some blueberries, add some greens or greens powder, my protein powder, some chia seeds or hemp seeds or MCT oil, which is the medium chain triglyceride part of coconut oil, and blend that all up into a really delicious smoothie. But other than that, it's not very often that I eat too much fruit, like the odd time I'll add some fruit into a salad, like pomegranate on a really yummy like kale, sesame, asian salad, warm salad recipe. Or, you know, add blueberries into a salad or strawberries on a salad, something like that. But otherwise, yeah, fruits mostly as an afternoon snack or it is in my smoothie for breakfast.

Bindi: 20:17

Okay, so let's get into herbs and spices. So we're kind of getting to the end and herbs and spices are so great because they add flavor and they add so much nutritional value. You'd be amazed. Just the OREC content, or what's known as like the antioxidant content of herbs and spices. So all of your fresh, organic culinary herbs. Your roots, your dried spices are all really high in antioxidants and micronutrients, which is so great, and they add all of your flavor to your meals, which is delicious. So fresh roots I'll buy. Mostly I buy these things fresh. But in different countries what's available, what's in season, what's available in your climate's different. So often I'll buy ginger fresh, of course, garlic and onion is fresh, green onions, chives, you know, leeks, those types of things, and then fresh herbs. We're really lucky we actually have just like some potted herbs in our garden here and what we don't have, or when our plants die off and before we can buy new plants, we'll just go get them fresh at the organic market.

Bindi: 21:14

But I love fresh dill on demand. I love a bulk supply of fresh cilantro and parsley and mint and basil. And one of the little like vegan or plant-based food hacks or cooking hacks for you is like all of my dressings and salads and condiments that are normally so empty and not nutritious in conventional cooking, like think of ketchup, think of like some of these unhealthier condiments, ketchup and mustard and relish that are just like food dyes and sugar and white distilled vinegar. A little vegan super food hack for you is like all of my salad dressings are packed with protein and antioxidants and nutrition and so much flavor and, yeah, like they're truly super food dressings. So, for example, I'll take a herb of any sort, either dill, and I'll make a really super food dill fresh ranch dressing that's loaded with protein. I'll take basil, for example, and make a really nutritious pesto that's packed with protein and micronutrients and iron and healthy fats.

Bindi: 22:12

I will top all of my salads with fresh herbs. I love to make like a tabouleh, a quinoa tabouleh with quinoa instead of bulgur, and then I'll add mint and fresh parsley in there and all of my organic tomatoes and cucumbers and oh, it's just so, so good. So fresh herbs are the bomb. If you can't get it fresh, a lot of those you can get dried. So of course, all your Italian spices, all the ones I just mentioned, you can get dried. I use dried oregano, thyme sage.

Bindi: 22:38

I also do a lot of like Indian cooking. That's just like one of my favorite cuisines and Asian cooking. So of course, I've got always a stock of just dried turmeric and curry powder and cinnamon and clove and cardamom. I cook with black mustard seed and some Indian dishes, cumin seed, coriander seed and yeah, it just makes everything so delicious and so nutritious and really is the cherry on top of a healthy meal, as all of your herbs and spices. So those are my usuals.

Bindi: 23:04

Those are my weekly grocery shop items. Okay, what I keep in my fridge, what I keep in my pantry, I'll just briefly share with you as well some of the other ingredients or condiments or pantry or fridge options or items that I keep on stock. So I don't necessarily buy them every week, but they are things that I have and that I'll use regularly to cook with. So some of the condiments that I do have or ingredients is I always have apple cider vinegar. Apple cider vinegar is amazing. It supports our digestion. It is excellent for balancing our blood sugar when taking with meals, so I'll make salad dressings with apple cider vinegar.

Bindi: 23:37

I always have on stock coconut aminos. Have you heard of that before? It's like the healthier, soy-free, gluten-free, healthy, fermented version of soy sauce. Okay, it's called coconut aminos. The brand I get is Braggs and it's really excellent. It tastes like soy sauce, a little bit sweeter because it's got. It's from fermented coconuts and, yeah, it's great for Asian cooking and, yeah, you'll love it. I always have maple syrup. The Canadian me just cannot give it up Love maple syrup it's not vegan, of course, but honey. I do eat honey actually, for it's like medicinal properties. I've got a really good, clean source of honey here that I get in Bali, which I love and I will use that often and just like to add, like a little bit of sweetness lower glycemic sweetness into salad dressings and sauces and condiments and those types of things.

Bindi: 24:22

I will have fresh homemade nut or seed milk. Okay, so I'm not on the oat milk train, you guys, I'm not into it. I you read the supplement label. You think you're doing something good for your health. Oat milk is not a health food. It's just not. If you're to make it yourself, we could debate it, you know, we could maybe make it a little healthier, but the fact is that oat milk is not a healthy alternative. You'd be better in most cases to be drinking regular dairy. To be fair, just all of the seed oils in there and sugar and genetically modified ingredients, and oats are one of the highest sprayed pesticide crops that there are out there. So you're just basically drinking nasty, pesticide, gmo water, you know, and being charged $7 a bottle when you have, you know, a teaspoon of cheap, cheap oats in there, blended with water and then preserved.

Bindi: 25:07

So what I do do is I make my own fresh nut or seed milks, which I love. So here in Bali we can get coconut milk like on tap. You just coconuts grow everywhere. You can buy coconut milk everywhere. Here in Bali we can buy almond milk everywhere. So if you can purchase fresh almond milk, maybe from, like, your local health food store and it's literally just freshly made, they make it daily. That's an option, or it's actually really easy to make it yourself as well. So you can make fresh almond milk. You can make basically any nut. You can make hazelnut milk. You can make cashew milk, if you wanted my favorite milk that I'm making these days for so many reasons. I love the taste. It's so packed with nutrition. It's cheaper and more affordable than a lot of the nut milks that we can do, like almond or cashew, and it's far more eco-friendly. It's pumpkin seed milk.

Bindi: 25:54

I'm obsessed with pumpkin seed milk and I make my matcha latte with it. It's really really yummy and really easy to make. You literally just soak or lightly toast organic pumpkin seeds and you rinse them, you throw them in a blender with some water, I add a little pinch of sea salt, the tiniest splash of vanilla. If you wanted a little bit of sweetness to it, you could blend in a date. And then you just buy some cheesecloths like a mesh cheesecloth and you run that blended mixture. It's kind of like a thick smoothie. At that point you run that blended mixture through a cheesecloth bag and you kind of milk it and you extract the liquid and you have the most amazing pumpkin seed milk that you could add on cereals. You can bake with it, I add it into my smoothie, I make my matcha with it and I'm just literally in love.

Bindi: 26:36

So that's what I do for milks, plant-based milks. I don't buy almond milk from the store, almond breeze or so delicious, yeah, just like not into it. And I do understand, not everyone has the luxury or the interest of making your own homemade plant-based milk. But just try it. You know it's faster, it's cheaper than maybe you think that it is and it's not as big of a hassle and it lasts, you know, four or five days in the fridge. So easy peasy.

Bindi: 26:59

Okay, I also have miso paste in the fridge. Miso paste, I'll make miso soups, I'll add it into my dressings and sauces. You know miso paste is in what you make miso soup with. It's really high in B12. It's got lots of healthy bacteria in it, which is great.

Bindi: 27:12

I always have tahini on hand because I'm obsessed with hummus, and I love adding tahini or sesame seed paste into some of my salad dressings into my cooking. It's a good source of healthy fat and protein, as well as calcium, which is great. I will sometimes have almond butter or pumpkin seed butter on hand, although I usually just blend up my own almonds or pumpkin seed butter. And then, yeah, most of my condiments and dressings I make on my own. So I never buy salsa or guacamole or hummus or salad dressings or curry paste or teriyaki sauce.

Bindi: 27:42

They're just way too easy to make ourselves and to have full control over what's going in them, where that food is full of life force and not full of preservatives right, the teriyaki sauce that you get at the store is full of preservatives and sugar and genetically modified ingredients and MSG, inflammatory stuff. You can make a really epic teriyaki sauce literally with coconut aminos that I mentioned, with apple cider vinegar and a little bit of maple syrup and maybe a little bit of like smoked paprika, so it has like a little bit more smoky flavor to it. That's my teriyaki sauce. You guys, it's so yummy, you can cook with it. I make the most amazing like smoked tempeh with it. I will add it as a dressing onto my vegetables so good.

Bindi: 28:20

So I make my own salsas and I make my own guacamole and I make my own hummus with chickpeas and lemon juice and tahini and garlic and you can just pack so much nutrition into your condiments instead of it being a source of you know, unhealth for you, where we're just filling our body with inflammatory oils and high-glacemic sugars and preservatives but we're actually packing our condiments and dressings with nutrition. This is such a cooking hack. So, yeah, I make my own salad dressings too, which I love. I make so many different types. I make a really good pesto with you soak pumpkin seeds. You rinse them off, you throw them in the blender with garlic and like a huge handful of basil, a little bit of olive oil, some salt, some pepper. You could put a little bit of nutritionally yeast in there and just make the yummiest pesto. Caesar salad dressing I do a similar one. Ranch dressing. Yeah, it's just so, so good.

Bindi: 29:09

If anyone's interested in any of these recipes, do let me know. Happy to share them with you. Just text me on Instagram and I'll make sure that I share my recipe with you. And then, finally, in the fridge I do have some things to make sweets and treats, because, if you know me, you know that I love chocolate. It's my favorite food in the whole world, and so I make it myself and I make it a superfood, and I actually have a whole hormone balancing superfood chocolate recipe for you. So text me on Instagram, send me a DM. My handle is at bindi stables B-I-N-D-I and I'm going to share with you my hormone balancing chocolate recipe. It'll take you five to 10 minutes to make. It's so worth it. It's low glycemic, it's delicious and you're going to love it. Or you can just visit my website. It's bindistablescom forward slash chocolate and you can download the recipe there.

Bindi: 29:55

So I have cacao powder, cacao butter, I've got vanilla extract. These are the main things that I'll have on hand to make that, and then I'll add my own, like nuts or seeds or other flavorings, those types of things, to the cacao or the chocolate, and then, very lastly, some last little extra things that I have in my pantry. I don't always have it, but you could have nutritional yeast If you don't have any gut based or digestive issues. Nutritional yeast can be good for extra flavor, extra B vitamins. It's got B12 in it, which is great. For the most part, nutritional yeast is not such a super food that we'd want to be eating it every day, and some people don't digest it very well. So if it causes you bloating, if it causes you brain fog, you can skip the nutritional yeast. If it doesn't, you can continue.

Bindi: 30:35

I like having like a good bouillon cube in my pantry, so one that's yeast free, gmo free, msg free, okay. So a really healthy, clean version of vegetable broth or bouillon cubes. You can also make your own, but I mean sometimes just it's too much. Sometimes we just need simple and we need easy, so you can buy that.

Bindi: 30:56

I always have on stock nori or sushi papers. I love making my own homemade sushi. I make it with quinoa and chickpeas and vegetables and it's so yummy. So it's even rice free, which I love. I always have rice paper on hand. I like to make my own like salad rolls and spring rolls. I'll like fill it up with tofu and make like a little gluten free burrito vibe with it, which is super yummy, and then I do have some flowers on hand. I mostly make my own flowers because you just buy the whole grains, blend it up in your blender and you've got fresh flour that is much less likely to have mold in it when you're blending it up yourself, right? So I always have buckwheat flour on hand.

Bindi: 31:30

I've got quinoa flour, cassava flour, chickpea flour those are the main ones. And again, those all have a bit of protein in them, except for the cassava, but the other ones do, and it adds again protein stacking. We're getting a little bit more protein so you can make them yourself or purchase those. And then very, very last is I always have a few varieties of protein powder and greens powder to add in just a little bit of extra nutrition into my smoothies, into my baking. I'll even add greens powder, just like into a soup. If it's you know I'm low on greens or all my greens are wilted and they're not going to work that day, I'll just add greens powder and that seems to work super well. So that is my plant-based kitchen essentials. Those are my healthy cooking, pantry and fridge essentials that this can become your new healthy grocery weekly shopping list.

Bindi: 32:17

So I'm so curious to hear what foods did I miss? What foods. Are you surprised that I have on my list? What foods are you like? Hey, why didn't you say this particular food? Or what's wrong with rice? Or you know, why don't you eat cashews? Yeah, I'd be so curious to hear your questions.

Bindi: 32:32

Would love your insights and feedback. What other plant-based foods do you love to have? And would love to just inspire each other in the comments on Instagram or send me DM. Would love to connect with you. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you back for another episode real soon. Take care, love. Thanks so much for listening. If you loved today's episode, please spread the love by subscribing and leaving a review, or if there's someone in your life that you think could benefit from this conversation, please share this episode with them. I would love to hear from you over on Instagram, at bindi-stables, or visit my website, bindi-stablescom, to connect and work with me. Thank you so much again for being here and I'm celebrating you in this journey of becoming the happiest, the healthiest, most vibrant you.