Healthy Cooking Challenge: Family Favorites

For the first Healthy Cooking Challenge I thought we start by taking a family favorite recipe and making it healthy and vegan. This can be a recipe you grew up eating, or something you make for your family now.


Here are the rules:
1) No animal flesh or animal products (aka vegan)
2) Emphasis should be on whole foods, such as veggies, fruits, nuts, legumes and unrefined grains...keep any commercial products with added fat sugar or salt to a minimum when possible
3) No sugar (although stevia, agave, brown rice syrup, barley malt syrup, and maple syrup are okay)
4) As low fat as possible
5) The more veggies and fruits you use the higher the nutrition will be
6) Enter as many times as you like (any type of dish and cuisine is appropriate for this challenge)


Judging Criteria:
1) 50% of the score: Healthfulness of the recipe as determined by overall nutrition. I will be compiling the nutrition for each recipe per calorie and looking at the overall vitamin and mineral profile compared to the RDA. Raw dishes will tend to score higher, as will things that are heavy on the veggies and fruit. Seeds tend to be more healthy than nuts, beans would be next with grains being the least nutritious. You may want to keep this in mind when working on your recipes.
2) 30% of the score: Creative use of ingredients. This can be either how your use them (example cabbage as noodles), or the specific ingredients you are using.
3) 20% of the score: Presentation. We will be looking at your presentation not your photography skills.

Rose set up a Flickr Group for people to upload their photos and describe their recipe (specific ingredients with measurements and instructions) and provide a link to their blog (if they have one). Flicker accounts are free, so participants just set up an account and join the challenge group. If anyone doesn’t want to bother with a Flicker account, they can send their entries directly to me (use the email on my profile page) and I will post them on the Flicker group page for you. Participants should upload their entries to the Flicker group page at their leisure, anytime before the deadline (January 31, midnight your time).

If anyone needs help with Flickr feel free to ask. I hadn’t used it until yesterday. It is free and easy to use. Trust me on the ease of use. If this old dinosaur could do it without any problems it must be intuitive. All you need is a yahoo email account and then you can log into the group (link above) and post your recipe and photo.

Depending on the timing of all the recipe submissions I may need a couple of days to calculate the nutritional information for each recipe and set up the spreadsheet to compare them all. Please be certain that I have a way to contact you (email or blog) in case I have any questions about ingredient quantities or serving sizes.

For judging, Rose and I will be standing judges, and there will be a guest judge that may change monthly, for a total of 3 judges. The judges may participate in the challenge by submitting recipes but are not eligible to win. We are targeting February 7 as the date to announce the winner.

The winner or winners will be announced in a blog post along with a link to the all the submissions. I was thinking it would be nice to compile all the entries into an e-book and email it to each participant. This would require each of you to consent to having your recipe “published”. I need to check with “the powers to be” on this but will probably be emailing each participant a quick note to get their approval to include their recipe in the e-book.

The prize for winning this challenge is a blog badge that you can put on the sidebar of your blog, similar to a blog award. Additionally each challenge winner will automatically receive an e-book of recipes for each subsequent challenge this calendar year whether they participate in future challenges or not. Although of course I hope the winners will continue to participate.

As each of you submit a recipe I will be updating this post with a running list at the bottom of the post including the blog address (if available otherwise the name of the participant) and the specific recipe. That will allow you to double check that I have seen your recipe and begun calculating the nutritional information. I will check the Flickr page at least once a day for updates.

If anyone has any questions please feel free to ask. Additionally if you have an omni recipe that you would like to veganize and don’t know where to start let me know. I am happy to give you ideas.

Good luck to all of you, and I can’t wait to see your creativity!

Recipes Submitted:

Cream of Tomato Soup - Vegan Epicurean (Alicia)
Orange, Avocado, Fennel and Raddicho Salad - Dandelion (Rose)
Stuffed Heirloom Tomatoes - My Green Diet (Mary)
Summer Chopped Salad - My Green Diet (Mary)
Spinach Mushroom Tortillas - Meatless Mama (Janet)
Broccoli Slaw - Ordinary Vegetarian (Sarah)
Broccoli and Wheat Berry Casserole - Where's the Beach (Heather)
Creamy Potato Soup - Abby's Army (Morgan)
Ginger Rice Soup with Tofu and Kale - Easy Veggie (Oraphan)