Today's Recipe - Asian-Flavored Broccoli with Tofu

Today's Recipe
 
If you don't know what to serve for dinner tonight ...

You can have a complete meal in a matter of minutes when you add this Asian-inspired broccoli dish to your Healthiest Way of Eating. Like other cruciferous vegetables, Broccoli is not only an excellent source of vitamins and minerals but of those special health-promoting sulfur compounds that help make them some of the most nutritious vegetables around.

Asian-Flavored Broccoli with Tofu
Prep and Cook Time: 15 minutes
Ingredients:

• 1 lb broccoli, florets cut into quarters
• 2 medium carrots, sliced thin
• 8 oz tofu cut into cubes
• 3 TBS extra virgin olive oil
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• 2 medium cloves garlic
• 1 TBS soy sauce
• 2 TBS grated ginger
• 1 TBS rice vinegar
• red pepper flakes to taste

Directions:

1. Fill bottom of steamer with 2 inches of water.
2. While steam is building up in steamer, cut broccoli florets into quarters and let them sit for 5-10 minutes to enhance their health promoting properties. Also cut stems into 1/4-inch pieces.
3. Press or chop garlic and let sit for at least 5 minutes.
4. Add tofu and sliced carrots to steamer and steam for 2 minutes.
5. Add broccoli and steam for 5 more minutes.
6. Toss with rest of ingredients.

Optional: To mellow the flavor of garlic, add garlic to steamer for the last 2 minutes of steaming. Serves 2
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In-Depth Nutritional Profile for Asian-Flavored Broccoli with Tofu
Healthy Food Tip

Can you tell me which is better for you, spinach or Swiss chard?

Both spinach and Swiss chard are among the most nutrient-rich foods I know. Nutrient richness refers to the quality by which a food provides a concentration of nutrients for the calories that it contains. If a food is nutrient-rich, it means that you'll get a lot of nutrients but you won't have to "spend" a lot of calories on them.
In our World's Healthiest Foods ranking system, both spinach and chard offer an amazing total of 22 nutrients in excellent, very good, or good concentrations. Spinach contains a few more nutrients than chard in excellent or very good concentrations, but both are outstanding examples of highly nourishing foods.
But the real answer to your question involves your individual nutrient needs. If you're not getting enough folate in your diet, you may want to choose spinach over chard, since you'll be getting over 15 times the folate in spinach! However, if you're already getting plenty of folate but too little vitamin E, you may want to reverse your decision and select chard over spinach. Compared with spinach, chard will provide you with almost double the vitamin E.
Another thing to consider is biochemical individuality. For example, both spinach and chard are high-oxalate foods, and may both be foods to avoid if a person needs to follow a low-oxalate diet. For a person especially concerned about toxic exposure and not purchasing organically grown vegetables, chard might be a more attractive choice than spinach, since spinach has repeatedly appeared on lists of vegetables and fruits with higher amounts of pesticide residues. These types of concerns will vary from individual to individual, and always play an important role in finding the best match between your food and you.
I may have provided you with a more complex answer than you were looking for, but I wanted to go through this process as I think that it is an important way for people to think about their food and what would best serve them.

The bottom line is this…

If you don't have any biochemical individuality issues (these considerations are listed in the Individual Concerns section of the foods' website write-ups or individual chapters in The World's Healthiest Foods book) that would preclude you from either eating Swiss chard or spinach, I think that you can't go wrong with enjoying both foods. They are incredibly nutrient-rich foods that can do wonders in terms of providing important health-promoting nutrients.
For more information on this topic, please see:

• Spinach
• Swiss chard