Healthy Ideas for Cooking with a Vegetable Steamer

There’s no doubt about it, cooking with a vegetable steamer is undoubtedly healthier. But what can you make with it that’s going to taste any good? This article is full of healthy ideas and tips for great meals you can easily prepare yourself.

First of all, what makes this such a healthy way to prepare your food? Well, first of all, this method doesn’t leech all of the nutrients out of your food, as many other preparation methods do. The steam from the boiling water cooks through your food and leaves it’s nutrients in tact for you to enjoy. Another great benefit is that you won’t be adding any oils to your cooking. While oils are essential to your diet, only in very small amounts. When you cook with oils you are adding a lot of unnecessary calories to your food. So, to cut calories and maximize nutrition, cooking with a vegetable steamer is the healthy way to go.

But without any oils are steamed vegetables going to be any good? There are lots of ways to add flavor and excitement to your steamed food! The first tip here is to cook different flavored vegetables to mix things up. For instance, adding bok choy, onions, or red pepper strips can add a good dose of flavor. Adding cloves of garlic is another great way to add punches of flavor, and garlic has a lot of health benefits all of it’s own. A lot of today’s electric vegetable steamers have flavor screens built into them. You can put herbs into these to more evenly steam flavor into your food. Good ones to try are rosemary, thyme, Italian seasoning mixes, and smoked paprika.

What do you do with this food once you’ve steamed it? Well, you can just eat it right there and call it done! Another great thing to do is layer them into wraps. You just pull out a wrap, put a spread on it, and layer in some of your favorite foods. For a spread you can use mayonnaise, but that’s not going to be healthy as something like hummus. There are a lot of flavored hummus options out there, like red pepper or olive, to take your flavor up a notch, too. If you don’t like this you can also try pesto. Then you can add in some lettuce, tomatoes, and anything else you might want! Great ideas for steaming are asparagus, carrots, eggplant, zucchini, and red pepper strips.

As you can see there are a lot of healthy ideas for cooking with a vegetable steamer and getting a lot of flavor in your food. You need to make eating healthy fun and easy so that you can stick with it on a daily basis, and using modern electric appliances can really make that possible.