Zucchini Lo Mein with Eggplant, Mushroom, Cabbage and Onions

Today has been a busy one for us. Dan didn’t work today, which was great. We took the opportunity to run a few errands and had a very fun and productive day. I will tell you more about today in a bit. For now let’s talk about dinner tonight.

After our day of errands we couldn’t decide between going out for dinner and staying home. When we got home and realized our refrigerator was completely stuffed with produce we thought staying home made the most sense. I was in the mood for Asian food but didn’t know what I wanted. Since Asian is always high in sodium I checked the sodium content on all my sauces and the vegetarian oyster sauce was the lowest. Here is what I made tonight but any veggies would work:

Zucchini Lo Mein with Eggplant, Mushroom, Cabbage and Onions
Serves 2

Ingredients:

2 cups onion, thinly sliced (allow to stand 10 minutes before heating)
2 large cloves, garlic finely minced (allow to stand 10 minutes before heating)
1 zucchini, spiral cut
1 tablespoon vegetarian oyster sauce
3 tablespoons mirin or rice wine vinegar
1/2 pound mushrooms, any type (used fresh oyster mushrooms)
1 eggplant, cut into bite sized pieces
1 cup green cabbage, thinly sliced
1 cup red cabbage, thinly sliced
1 – 2 tablespoons water, if necessary
1 tablespoon pine nuts for garnish

Directions:

Slice the onions and garlic and allow to stand 10 minutes before heating. Then cook the onions and garlic in the oyster sauce and rice vinegar until they just begin to soften. Add the eggplant, mushrooms and cook for a few minutes. Add the cabbage just two to three minutes before you are ready to serve. You want it warmed through but not cooked.   Cruciferous veggies (like cabbage) are more nutritious if very lightly cooked. You may need to add a little water to make a sauce depending on the temperature of your burner.

Lightly heat the spiral zucchini in the microwave or toss it into the veggies and heat for a few minutes. To serve, top with pine nuts.

Nutritional Information:

Amount Per Serving
Calories - 251.65
Calories From Fat (13%) - 31.89

Total Fat - 4.31g
Saturated Fat - 0.44g
Cholesterol - 0mg
Sodium - 283.22mg
Potassium - 1867.04mg
Total Carbohydrates - 56.59g
Fiber - 16.39g
Sugar - 17.82g
Protein - 11.39g

Comment:

This was a mountain of food. The picture doesn’t do it justice. I was stuffed after we ate. It never ceases to amaze me how much food you can eat for so few calories when you aren’t using oil.

If you have given up sodium you will enjoy this. However if you still use salt you may want to double or triple the oyster sauce. The brand I used contained 450mg per tablespoon. WE have gotten so accustomed to food without sodium that this had plenty of flavor for me.

Twitter:

As promised I am trying to learn more about using Twitter. For now I am muddling my way through. It is definitely not intuitive. But I think I will get the hang of it in short order. I have put the most recent tweets on the blog (top left corner) if you are interested.

Today’s events:

We started the afternoon with a little clothes shopping. Can a girl ever have too many outfits? I don’t think so. Dan doesn’t mind shopping with me because I shop quickly so he doesn’t get bored. After clothes shopping we went to lunch at the Flying Avocado and ordered two things to share. We had a green salad with blackberries, blueberries, oranges, carrots, cucumber, walnuts, flaxseeds and dried cranberries.

To go with that we got a smoothie with strawberries, blueberries, bananas, pineapple, wheat germ, flaxseeds and hempmilk.

Both items were very good. Our only complaint was that the salad came out in a warm bowl. That is one of my pet peeves. Salads should be served on cold dishes. Other than that we were very pleased and will go back.

Then we stopped at J’s produce on Reisterstown Road and bough fresh mangosteens,

lychees,

and dragon fruit.

I did not buy the eddo root because I had no idea what it was or what to do with it. Anyone have any experience with eddo root?

For those of you in the area it was an interesting store and had good prices. They did also carry standard produce not just the exotic stuff.

After the produce store we stopped at H-Mart (an Asian grocer) to pick up a few things. They had frozen jackfruit which I picked up. We also stocked up on dried shitakes, organic black beans, organic tofu (with no soy protein isolate) and spices.

Overall it was a fun day and very productive. I love finding new restaurants and stores. Tomorrow I will be breaking into the fresh mangosteen. Since this is a first for us I will definitely let you know what we think of the flavor.

It is getting late here and we need to get moving early tomorrow for the farmers’ market. Talk to you all tomorrow.