How Dr. Alan Goldhamer Cooks a Healthy SOS-free Sunday Night Family Dinner Quickly and Easily

hi Dr goldhammer thanks so much for being here hi AJ it's glad to be here I can't wait to see what you're going to do for us because you've been on the show many times you're a very popular guest and people always ask you what you eat in a day and they were surprised to learn that aside from eating at the wonderful True North Health Center where the food is Chef prepared do you actually cook dinner for your family well we have a tradition on Sunday nights to have the family get together to have dinner and uh share the week's events and so uh it's our tradition to have me prepare uh something for that meal where did you get your culinary skill if I may ask are watching my wife cook because she's really good if a busy day healthy meal anybody can right well you know I have to say I have a very limited repertoire so there's only a few things that I I make but I can show you tonight what I make um most traditionally on Sunday nights great I can't wait so what I'm going to make tonight is salad uh steamed vegetables and then a fresh tomato sauce with um uh some uh rice um pasta sounds good and of course it's not only vegan it's SOS free it is actually SOS free I'm taking a little bit of a shortcut tonight because rather than make an entirely uh from scratch tomato sauce I'm making uh because it's the end of the season in our garden and so we didn't have enough tomatoes to make a full sauce so I'm supplementing the sauce with a marinara magnificent from well you well your world which is also an SOS free uh product so that's a really good one I like that sauce very much yeah I'm going to use that sauce along with uh stuff we've got from the garden including um some leek uh eggplant and then uh the tomatoes that we did have uh here at the end of the season and so to make that um sauce is actually really simple which is what I like quick fast easy and simple so we take this happens to be an All-Clad pad and it has we I put a little bit of um uh unsalted um soup stock in it and then I'll just add the marinara sauce from well you world and then I'll add the um stuff from the garden and I don't get to uh complicated I just take the link which I've already washed and stuff and I chop it up into small enough bites do you ever cook for company um we we don't do a lot of companies like interact with people so much at the center I find that when I'm home I really like to um keep it simple and uh basically spend time with the family because you know I'm at work a lot so I got my leaks done and I like to do things uh two pieces at a time because I'm basically lazy and the nice thing about this dinner is it not only makes food for all of us tonight but it also makes additional food for example when I make the salad you'll see that I have a four quart Pyrex glass bowl with a tight fitting lid and that so that allows me to make salad for the evening but also make a big salad base that'll last for several days and then that's I always make the salad base out of stuff that tends to hold up well so let us celery uh cucumbers and red peppers and then uh well at the very last minute when we go to dress the salad we'll put on fresh tomatoes and we'll put in um avocado and pumpkin seeds or anything else we might be wanting to incorporate what do you use for salad dressing so um we both Jennifer and I both like uh just plain balsamic uh vinegar and we get the kind that has you know 10 calories of um 10 calories per serving so there's not much great mist or um essentially sugar added to it uh gar likes to have just like just have it plain so because you know the way I do the tomatoes I Like to Lay Them flat because then I don't slip and chop my finger off not being very Adept at handling uh these tools and I don't have to get it chopped down too much because it's gonna cook slowly in this pan normally I just use the aroma but now it's the end of the season and so we're don't have as much stuff in the garden as we get it before so you're basically taking a sauce and just making it even healthier by adding so many vegetables well I'm going to make a big batch of pasta because my son gar really likes to eat and so we have to we're going to take um 24 ounces of pasta which is going to make what would normally be about six servings and uh but with gar you know he he can really go through it so in order to have enough sauce for that much pasta we're going to chop up a few tomatoes in addition to using that jar of marinara sauce and the nice thing about the salt that using the sauce from the jars and it's already spiced and whatnot and since I don't like things overly spicy there's enough Spice in there without me having to get too fancy beyond the leek that I chopped up already so once we get this uh this stuff done how many different vegetables do you grow in your garden well we have a whole variety of stuff we we have zucchini we have uh kale and you'll see that going into our steamed vegetables tonight and chard we also grow um eggplants which we put in here and we have strawberries and tomatoes we have really good we're out of seasoning right now we have really good Roma green beans this year and in fact we grew them from season and we saved some for next year's so I'm going to put that in here I'm also going to take uh we'll do a little tofu tonight so I'll take uh this will end up being about eight ounces of tofu will the tofu go in the sauce yeah I'm gonna put that right in the sauce again I like to do it so it's real simple it all goes together I don't have to actually think about it once it gets in there I love that you're not using a recipe well don't need a recipe it's just a fresh sauce but so many people Dr goldhammer get tripped up because they don't have you know recipes yeah I'm gonna go I've got some organic pre-washed spinach and I'm going to carefully measure it and put it in there in addition to my uh and the way I know I'm really precise about that is as I'm going to fill up this pan I know this panel is completely full is enough to cover the 12 ounces of sauce so that's all my prep for the sauce and I just turned that thing on and try not to burn it that's incredible so you're adding the spinach at the beginning of the cooking yeah like that's about three quarters of a pound of spinach a half a pound of uh of tofu along with a leek some eggplant fresh tomatoes and then one jar of the um well your world sauce last bit out of it yeah and we throw this into the recycling bin and then that's ready to go so that's going to cook down so we're all that's cooking down I'm also going to turn this water on because we're going to be using that for um spaghetti or pasta I also like to kind of when I'm doing this I like to clean up as I go because I really hate cleaning up and so if I clean up as I go there's not as much to do at the end I would think it's only fair that somebody else cleans up since you're the one making dinner yeah well I there's not much to clean up so the next thing we're going to do is I've just taken a bunch of lettuce and I've rinsed that I'm going to put that over here we're gonna I'm gonna work on that next because we're going to make the salad but what I like to do let's make the salad for tonight but also fill up this really nice glass Pirate's hole and so this this this is really cool because the salad base will last in there and uh and I won't have to be making salad for a couple days now your salad is wet are you going to either dry it or spin it um well yeah I washed it in there and I just let it dry in the it's not super dry but let it drain the snake so what I'll do is I'll come in here and I just do this real quickly it's taking a lot of lettuce and I'll chop it up trying to keep it vegan by not chopping bits of my thumb into that and if you grow that as well as that Romaine um this particular lettuce came from the farmer's market this morning because again we're kind of end of season and didn't have um garden lettuce to to use today so I'm going to put my three base for my three uh salads that we're going to use tonight for Jennifer Garner and I and then we're gonna put the other part into this uh and this also has um one head of butter and lettuce too so we have a couple varieties of lettuce uh just to give it a little make it fancy does Gara ever make dinner uh car yeah makes when he's uh he's he's perfectly capable of making dinner but on Sunday nights the tradition is for me to do it now the other part of the base so I've got rinsed here is some fresh red pepper a cucumber and some celery and again all I do is just keep it real simple chop it into bite size pieces why do you think people say this is so hard I don't think it really has to be that hard and it doesn't have to take that long and if you have really good ingredients to start with you don't have to be getting too fancy with too much um dressings in different things also the more the longer you eat this kind of food the simpler it can be and the more you'll enjoy it because your palate actually changes and so you get to where you don't need as much of the stimulation that the salt and sugar oil and all the other stuff would come from that's true well normally when I do this I'm not also talking and you know what they say about trying to do two things at the same time so let me just put a little bit of celery red pepper and then I put the rest of it in here I'll take my cucumber and I'll put that down bite-sized pieces and so you eat the seeds of the Cucumber so we put some cucumber on the salads okay and the rest of it in here and I like that there's an economy of scale because we can and to make one meal make some extra and then why give you a lot he's quicker and faster and this is nice because it holds nice and tidy and It just fits right into the refrigerator oh anything non-compliant in that refrigerator say again anything non-compliant in that refrigerator well I don't think so there's uh nuts there's some product from True North Health Deli things that we that are pretty done that we bring home there's some uh Kai Hill unsweetened almond yogurt uh some cat and dog food there's some mushrooms blueberries raspberries salads vegetables a little apple juice uh avocado unsalted mustard some B12 supplements and a broken uh okay so now that we have that part of the salad then what we want to do is take um the stuff that you don't want to put on the salads that just don't hold up as well so in this case we've got cherry tomatoes they're beautiful which I like the little ones because you don't have to chop them you just put them rinse them and put them on here and then we've got some avocado which I wish we could grow but our climate doesn't like straw avocado you don't eat a lot of avocado but I just take that and chop that up looks like maybe everybody's getting about a third of an avocado third of an avocado a person is is enough it's a nice Haas avocado okay and then um we're all done with sounds except for we're going to put a few raw pumpkin seeds on there the other thing I sometimes do although I didn't have any today is I'll make a little bit of seaweed salad just to get a little bit of seaweed um that's really rich in iodine and uh we might put a little bit of seaweed salad on the top but tonight I didn't have anything I'll put some raw pumpkin seeds if you're really rich and iron and Vegas free fatty acids and all that good stuff I don't need much it's probably a third of an ounce so once we get the salad done I can actually put those on the table get them out of the way and then I'm going to do the same vegetables and today we've got a lot of stuff on the garden and a little bit a little bit the farmer's market and I've already kind of pre-rinsed these but I use again I use this all clad stuff it's a stainless steel and I have a steamer basket and so I want to try to get everything at the size that will all cook at the same time so I don't have to be fancy and put things in a different would you mind moving that bowl because it's obstructing your my vision of your cutting board thanks yeah so I'm going to just cut stuff down to the size that I know will all cook in the eight minutes that you know it's going to be in the steamer oven have you started your water boiling already I've got to put the water on to boil which I will there we go and then so we have we have broccoli which I can put in here and then we've got kale from the garden which is really good I just washed that and put that in there and we've got some zucchini from the garden uh bok choy and also Jennifer likes these um uh grains these bitter greens what are they called uh mustard greens yeah a little powerful for me but she likes those so we always try to have those in there and this will be just enough screw up this all cloud and they'll all cooked at about the same temperature I mean all at the same time so now we've got our um starting to Bubble here our pasta sauce we have our salad made on the table we've got a neat little thing here right where we tend to do a lot of chocolate we have this drawer that pulls out and it's got a little stainless steel enclosure and it just has a bucket that we use for compost we take that compost bath so I like that and then we have the the trash and the recycling and another thing I'll just share with you we had this gentleman figure this out these are drawers that we use for produce ripening so we can put it's out of sight and out of mind but you can see you just lay the produce out it ripens up nicely and you can put lots of produce in there it does really well these are uh we pulled these from the garden these are kombucha squash we grow those we make soup out of them and we make big batches and we'll freeze some of it so we can make soup when it's out of season but I love these drawers because the pets can't get to it it still have clean uh counters but you can have lots of place to ripen up um ripen up fruits and vegetables I had no idea you could grow cabocha squash like that it's incredible you know everything's done and essentially cleaned up at least cleaned up as much as I clean up um then the only other thing we need to do and it'll take this uh this happens to be uh Penny Regatta corn and rice flour so this is 12 ounces this takes um about 10 minutes uh to cook let me see what it says here eight to ten minutes so I've got a boil this it's not quite boiling yet but will when I I know that I when I put the pasta on it takes about the same amount of time for the steamed vegetables to get done as it does the pasta to cook so once I got both of these things boiling then I know that'll all come out together and the other foreign make sure this stuff gets a chance to put you know without burning it's kind of a no stick stainless steel pot but do you ever add mushrooms to your marinara yeah but one thing I didn't put in the uh in the process so glad you reminded me was um organic type of mushrooms I just forgot so we're going to add those announces they'll cook quickly and so all I do on those is I just take the stem out and then just try to put them cut them down to uh an appropriate size yeah it's important the mushrooms are a really nice addition to that sauce and and they should always be eaten cooked is that correct yeah we always use mushrooms cooked there's some products on mushrooms raw that probably are not so desirable but that when they're cooked yet um it breaks those those products down and I love mushrooms they're just a fabulous food especially I like these shiitake mushrooms and uh we have we're able to bike shiitake mushrooms at Costco really quite affordably and they have organic shiitake mushrooms okay do you do you buy exclusively organic or do you go by the dirty yeah I like to get organic uh for two reasons AJ one I prefer not to be exposed to chemicals and pesticides and other things that may have problems and also I think it's also you're making a little bit of a political State you're saying that you prefer things be grown organically so you're supporting people that are doing that whether it's throwing it in your garden or whether it's growing and buying from the farmer's market or going to the stores the largest producer or the largest seller of organic produce in the country right now is costco foods do you know who number two is uh it's actually Walmart that's incredible yeah it's not because necessarily the board of directors sat down and decided that organic was the way to go it was because people demanded it and you know what they want is your money and so if you spend your money in the way that you want to be uh consistent with your beliefs then that can have a lot of influence and so because people were willing to pay a premium to buy organic produce Costco decided to become a significant seller of organic produce which they have and uh Walmart's the same so I think that's one of the reasons I think it's important put your money where you're beliefs are because that's a place you can have a positive influence okay so once I get these mushrooms done that's already cooking down I can get this in here mix those into the bottom so they'll end up being fully cooked by the time we get done have you ever eaten that over something other than pasta like maybe rice um I I we usually do a different saute over rice we do that or regular we have kind of a regular rotating meal plan and this is one of the meals that we do and we have another one that we do over over rice although I we tend to like it not so much tomato based as um let me just get rid of this tomato based fish which I just will take it can depending on what there is in the garden it might be eggplant and uh again mushrooms because we really like uh mushrooms and oh you know the uh the idea is the same though you put a bunch of stuff in the pot it all puts together right anything that's really simple it's fast so easy simply not in your life that means in 10 minutes we will have seed vegetables ready to go we will have pasta sauce ready to go and uh that's basically all there is to it so how long did that take us not very long I noticed you didn't use the stems of the mushrooms is there a particular reason you did not use the mushroom stems no I don't I don't like the mushroom stems I mean I guess they're perfectly fine for my house standpoint but they tend to be a little bit uh dried out a little bit more chewy so I just cut the stems out you could use that for stock um but I wouldn't put them in the in the fresh stuff so the pressure now before you got the Jarred pasta sauce that's SOS free how would you have seasoned it by yourself if I didn't have the SOS free pasta sauce then I would have just had to find a lot more tomatoes or you could use an unsalted tomato paste or you know but you wouldn't have added maybe basil or garlic or any seasonings on your own well I wouldn't if I would have had Jen for make that meal because uh she knows how to do though I'm not that sophisticated but I like to keep it super fast simple and easy okay um but you know basically all that's going to happen now is we're gonna the the possible cook will use a colander to uh drain it and we'll throw the sauce on it and it'll be time for dinner that's amazing thank you will you take a picture of it after you know when it's all played we will and send it to me yeah we'll take a picture of the table for you okay you know I noticed there were four chairs so I only live about two hours from you now anytime you want to come you're welcome oh that would be incredible thank you I'm just curious um this it looks like a very filling and satisfying meal will you guys have dessert with that I know not even fruit if we do if we do have if we want to have something additional we'll be pretty full after this but we do have things like melon and stuff that we could use that's Observer generally we're not we're going to be full after we eat this and I think that'll that'll be that great well thank you Dr goldhammer for showing us how easy it is to prepare healthy food that's my pleasure

Channel: CHEF AJ

Views: 11,829

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Id: oF_4SiGyCoU

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022