Prices are soaring.

We're paying more for everything from gas to groceries.

And while you may be cutting back on your food budget, that doesn't mean you have to sacrifice its flavor or nutrition.

On the next Health Matters.

we're kicking off summer with healthy, delicious recipes that are sure to become family favorites.

"So good."

Plus, how to stretch a dollar by meal planning and having a well-stocked pantry.

- [Narrator] Health matters is made possible with the support of Providence Inland Northwest Washington.

- [Lady] Oh, life, how we admire you, all your twists, and turns and wild rides you take us on, you are the reason we'll always provide world class healthcare, Providence.

We see the life in you.

(upbeat music) - Good evening and welcome to Health Matters.

- Welcome to "Health Matters".

I'm Teresa Lukens.

The price of everything is so high right now.

You get sticker shock going into the grocery store.

We've got a little bit of help for you tonight on "Health Matters".

And joining me in the Second Harvest Kitchen is Carolyn Negley.

She's a registered dietician and the nutrition education manager here at Second Harvest.

Thank you for being here.

We need help.

- Yes.

- We definitely do.

We are in the Second Harvest Kitchen, where you're the education manager.

Talk a little bit about Second Harvest for people that still might not be familiar with what's done here.

- So what we call Second Harvest, a good way to summarize it, is that it's a food bank for food banks.

And so we work with about 280 partner agencies where people can come and pick up food.

So we don't directly distribute food from this warehouse, except for through programs like our mobile market.

And that reaches a lot of like food deserts and places where people can't easily access a food bank.

- There's a lot of fresh food in this warehouse.

- We get a lot of produce, and that can be directly from farmers or through Grocery Rescue.

And so one of the things we do in the kitchen is teach classes to teach everyone how to use those foods.

- Yeah, the main function of this kitchen is to cook.

And because we are all tightening those budgets, we have some great recipes we want to share with everybody tonight.

So let's first of all, list off the recipes that we're doing.

And then we'll get started with the first one.

So what are we making?

- So the first one's gonna be a West African-inspired peanut stew.

And I really like this recipe because it uses up a lot of things that you may already have in your pantry, like peanut butter, for example.

But you're thinking like, "Okay, peanut butter.

"I'll make peanut and jelly sandwiches.

"Maybe put it in my oatmeal, "but what do I do with it beyond that?"

So this is a great answer for that.

Next we'll be doing secret ingredient guacamole.

And we'll find out what the ingredient is later.

- Okay.

- With homemade corn tortilla chips.

And then we're gonna finish it all off with black bean brownies.

- That one got my attention, so I'm looking forward... All of them did really, though.

So, let's get started.

- All right.

- Okay.

- We're gonna start with a big pot.

We will start out by adding just a tablespoon of oil.

I'm using olive oil today, which is high in monounsaturated fats, which are great for you.

And this little thing, I went ahead and measured out our garlic and our ginger powder.

It's four cloves of garlic.

And I went ahead and used minced garlic, which you can get just in a big jar.

And that's a really cost effective, fast way to do garlic stuff.

Next we're gonna add our onions.

And this is just one small onion that I've diced up.

And the size of the dice for this recipe doesn't matter a whole lot.

You can do a rough chop or a fine chop.

It's gonna cook down pretty well.

We're just gonna stir this a little bit.

And it's gonna take a couple of minutes for it to become translucent is our goal, the onions.

- Okay.

- Since we've got that going, we're gonna go ahead and bring out our corn tortillas and slice those up for our next recipe.

- Okay.

Do you like to make your own corn tortillas rather than buy the bag?

- I don't usually buy corn tortillas, so this is a nice treat to be making them today.

- Are they better for us?

- Yes, so these have less oil because we're just doing a quick spray on top.

And then we also don't have the salt that you would find in purchased tortilla chips.

And it's great if you're already buying tortillas for like taco night or something like that.

And you have like just a few leftover, it's a great way to use them for future.

- [Teresa] Okay.

- And our goal is to kind of make them the same size as what you would buy at the store.

But you could also, since you're doing it yourself, you can make them any shape or size that you want.

I would caution you to try to stay consistent so that they'll cook at the same rate.

- Good point.

- For this, I'm just gonna alternate how I'm laying them down so that we can fit more in.

- Do you add a little salt, too, or are we avoiding the salt?

- I'm not adding salt today.

You can definitely add salt.

You can try other spices, like a chili lime seasoning would be really great.

Any kind of like fajita kind of seasoning, that sort of thing.

I think cumin could be really good.

- [Teresa] Oh yeah.

- Yeah, so I have my first layer done.

I'm gonna go ahead and spray this real quick before I do my other pan.

And so it's just a light spray across.

You don't have to worry about getting every little bit of the chips.

- And this is just a standard canola spray.

- Um-hm.

- Okay, all right.

- You can do an olive oil spray or canola spray.

Like, whatever you have lying around is great.

- All right.

You mentioned having the corn tortillas on hand, if you're gonna have taco night and you have these.

How important is it or how much can we actually save on our food budget by just doing some meal planning, thinking ahead, making lists, rather than those...?

I tend to make those, you know, last minute trips to the grocery store because I've decided I want to make something for dinner.

So, how critical is that?

- Meal planning is super helpful when we're trying to save money.

Even just in describing that you mentioned a couple of things.

You mentioned that you're spending more time shopping because you're going to make multiple grocery trips.

So that means time.

It means that you're using up gas to go to the store more than once.

And then another thing to consider is just being able to use everything that you buy.

And so when you plan ahead, you can say like, "Oh, I know that I want to do soup and pasta this week.

"So I'm gonna make sure that I can get ingredients "that I can do both things with."

And so I can use up all the tomatoes that I buy or use up all the onions that I buy.

And we're gonna go ahead and pop these in our oven.

They cook at 375 for 12 to 15 minutes.

- Oh, okay.

- And so you just check to make sure that they're golden brown.

- All right, do we need to do another stage in our soup?

- So, we're gonna revisit our soup.

This is a sweet potato that I diced up.

Something to consider when you're using potatoes in a soup is how small you want to chop them.

And that'll depend on the amount of time that you have to cook.

And so if you have it going for a long time, you might do a larger chunk.

This size is pretty appropriate for the time that we have, which is about 20 minutes.

- Talk about sweet potatoes.

They have a lot of nutrients.

- Potatoes are a great source of vitamins, minerals, fiber.

I feel like for a while, carbs got like a bad rap, and we were trying to avoid potatoes.

But that's just not really necessary.

- And sweet potatoes are gonna add that element of sweetness.

And then we're adding the peanut, it's great combination.

- Yeah, and it's interesting because sweet potatoes versus like white potatoes.

It's tempting to think like, "Okay, like sweet potatoes, "that sounds like it's like more sugar.

"And like, that might be worse for me."

But actually sweet potatoes have a lower glycemic index than white potatoes.

- Oh, really?

- Which means that they don't affect your glucose as much.

And so, in some ways it's like a healthier option.

- So now we want to do this secret ingredient guacamole.

- [Carolyn] Secret ingredient guacamole.

It's time.

- I'm so intrigued.

- So for this one, I've prepped a lot of ingredients, and I saved the onions so we could chop it together.

- Okay, I'm ready to jump in.

- So I went ahead and diced it in half and took the peel off.

And then what we're gonna do is try to hold our hands kind of like in a claw fashion so that the nails are guarding your fingers.

- All right.

- And then you just- - And am I doing any cross cuts first or...?

- We're just gonna go down.

- Just slicing, okay.

- And then you hold the tip of the knife with the board.

- [Teresa] How am I doing?

- [Carolyn] You're doing great.

- [Teresa] Nope, no pressure with TV cameras on you or anything.

- This is a recipe that would lend itself well to different types of onions.

Like you could do a red onion, and that would taste really good in this, too.

- Yeah, and add that little pop of purple in there, too.

- I was kind of surprised when I was reading the recipe.

I was like, "Oh, I thought this one might be red."

And I was gonna talk about substituting white, but... - Okay, all chopped.

- Okay.

- I think I did okay, there.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- Great job, thank you.

- You're welcome.

- So after that, we're just gonna kind of keep them in a stack.

- [Teresa] Oh, okay.

- [Carolyn] And then slice down this way.

- [Teresa] Aha.

- All right, so we're gonna set this aside and go back to our soup for just a moment.

- Really developing those flavors.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, they smell great.

- All right, the potatoes are getting a nice little crust on them so we're gonna go ahead and add our next ingredients.

So we're gonna start with a tomato paste.

- Wanna remind everybody, too, that we're gonna put all of the recipes on the KSPS website on the "Health Matters" page so you can check 'em out there.

- Yeah, so I love this recipe because it uses up things that you probably might already have in your pantry.

- What are some of those critical things that we should always have at hand so that we're not making bad choices?

- Some of my favorite things to have on hand are lentils.

They go great in curries, soups.

You can use them as a meat substitute, which is really nice, especially when prices of meat are going up so much right now.

I'm gonna add this peanut butter next.

And this is just half a cup of peanut butter.

With peanut butter, there's a whole wide range of extra ingredients that are sometimes in peanut butter.

And so if you have the option to kind of compare labels, then going for like a more natural one can be great, but any peanut butter will do.

And also a lot of recipes lend themselves well to different kinds of nut butters.

And so oftentimes we'll end up using almond butter instead of peanut butter.

And it just adds a little different flavor profile.

And some people have a preference for one or the other or allergies.

- Okay, so now we've got chicken broth or stock?

- So this is chicken stock.

And this is an example of making a substitution based on what we had on hand.

So the recipe I'm following today calls for vegetable stock.

But what we have in our pantry here is chicken stock.

- Okay.

- And it's gonna taste just as good.

And I wouldn't have a concern about it unless you were avoiding meat.

And stir until it's kind of evenly combined.

And then we're gonna let it simmer for about 15 to 20 minutes.

So our secret ingredient guacamole.

I don't think we've revealed the secret yet.

- No, we haven't.

- Okay, so we're gonna keep the suspense going just a little bit longer.

(Teresa laughing) The cilantro is not the secret ingredient.

But it is one that I wanted y'all to see me chop just 'cause I feel like herbs can be a little bit intimidating to work with if you haven't done it before.

- They definitely can.

- So we're looking for half a cup of cilantro.

You see that you have this like long stem, which is totally edible.

And then you have the leaf part at the end.

I tend to do kind of like this part, like kind of- - Okay.

- I don't try to get rid of all the stem - The little stem.

- 'Cause that's just like insanity to try to do that.

So I just kind of feel around.

Sometimes I use the knife, sometimes I just kind of rip it apart like that.

And if you don't like cilantro, then a substitution for this recipe could be parsley.

That's probably the direction I would go.

- And this is also one of those herbs that I think going fresh is a definite on this.

There's some where you could turn to the dried herbs, but what do you think?

- So I used dry cilantro when I forget to buy cilantro.

(both laughing) - It just has a much different flavor to it.

- Yeah, I don't like to say that anything's off limits necessarily, when it comes to substitutions.

Because I think it's really important just to like make it work with what you have and work within your budget.

And like there's not always flexi... Cilantro's a really affordable herb.

- Sure.

- But sometimes there's just, like, not that wiggle room.

So I kind of just bunch it up a little bit like that.

- [Teresa] That's a great tip.

- [Carolyn] With herbs we do like a really rough chop.

- Yeah, otherwise you feel like you're chasing 'em all over the cutting board.

- [Carolyn] Yeah.

- That's perfect.

- I'd say another exciting thing about budgeting is that when you start substituting cheaper foods for some things, like if you're trained to substitute out some shelf-stable protein for meat, which is a lot more affordable, then that gives you some more flexibility for the little extra add-ons like herbs that you might not have thought to spend money on before.

- That's an excellent point, yeah.

So we've got, what, about a quarter cup?

- Yeah, we got our half a cup that we were aiming for.

So we are good to go on that.

I'm gonna give this a quick look.

And it's boiling really well.

It's looking gorgeous.

I'm gonna turn it down to like a medium-low.

You can go low, medium-low.

Are you ready to find out the secret ingredients?

- I am so ready, Carolyn.

I'm so ready.

Okay, secret ingredient.

- I'm gonna grab.

So earlier today, before we started filming, I went ahead and did the first step of this recipe, which is to boil a cup of green split peas.

- [Teresa] Really?

- And so I just added one cup of peas to two cups of water and just let it go for 20 minutes.

And in this case, all the water was absorbed.

You can see that there's not really anything that I need to drain out.

These are finicky, and sometimes you'll find that there's extra water.

And so in that case he would just run it through a strainer.

- [Teresa] Oh my gosh.

Now I'm so intrigued.

It's got the color of avocado.

- Exactly.

So, I love avocados.

And I don't have anything negative to say about them, except for that they're really expensive.

- Yeah, for sure.

- And then even if you have the money to buy the avocado and you go to the store and you buy your avocado, it might be bad when you cut into it.

It's not always consistent.

- Right.

- And so I love the idea of having something I can consistently rely on, and shelf stable goods are that.

- So now you're just kinda kind of start mashing?

- Yeah, so I'm just mashing this.

Peas are a great source of protein and fiber.

I love that there are so many affordable options for those things.

And so they keep you feeling fuller longer.

This is a great snack to have that would travel really well for like a lunch.

You could send it to your kids as a school lunch as part of their school lunch.

You could take it to work yourself.

- Again, we need to think out of the box, you know.

We think split pea soup and- - [Carolyn] Right.

- There's the only thing we can make with peas.

Well.. - This is probably like the first recipe that I've seen, that isn't soup based.

So I think it's really exciting when we learn to use beans and legumes in a different way.

One thing that we do a lot in the kitchen is use lentils for, you know, like out of the box kind of recipes.

Like we have muffin recipes and cookie recipes.

And it's really cool to be able to teach people how to use things in an unexpected way.

All right, so we're gonna go ahead and add in our onion.

- Now, is this something that's better if it sits for a while in the fridge, kind of lets all those flavors combine> - Yeah, we're gonna let it chill.

And so the flavors meld together a little bit more.

- And how long will that keep?

- I would say a couple of days should be fine.

And one of the other benefits of using the split peas over avocado is that you don't have to deal with, like when you save avocado-based products, they just get- - That layer of brown on the top.

Yeah, yeah.

- So I don't anticipate that happening with this.

All right, so we're gonna add in our lime juice next.

And that's gonna give us some nice moisture and tang.

- [Teresa] Layering the flavors, so important.

- This is cumin, which is one of my favorite spices ever.

So it just gives it like a nice little heat, but not too hot.

Just kind of like a - Lots of flavor.

- Interesting depth of flavor.

We'll also include some garlic.

And we'll do tomatoes.

The recipe called for one small tomato, and I ended up using baby tomatoes instead, just cause I really like the texture of them.

With the canned tomato, I would check the sodium label or the sodium portion of the label.

And if it was high in sodium, then I would probably just not add as much salt later when I'm cooking.

'Cause the final step of this recipe is to season to taste.

All right, and then the final step is the lovely cilantro.

- That's beautiful.

With the tomatoes in there.

You mentioned reading the label.

Labels have gotten a lot easier to read lately.

The basic information that we need to know about nutrition and sodium is now become a lot, you know, top of the can or the box, if you will.

So we need to do that more, don't we?

- It's good to stay aware of what you're putting in your body.

That's the great thing about cooking at home is that it gives you control over what you're putting in your body.

And you know when you're cooking what you're adding to it.

And so at a restaurant you don't always know.

Sometimes they make calorie information available, but not always.

So this just gives you a better idea of what's going on.

Okay, so that's all mixed up.

I'm gonna go ahead and put it in the fridge for it to meld a little bit before we add our salt and pepper so we can get like a true taste of what it's gonna taste like.

- Okay.

All right, so if we were kind of looking at this as an entire meal, now we're looking at dessert.

- Dessert.

(Teresa laughing) - We started our dinner.

We had our appetizer in the meantime.

And now we're onto dessert.

So we actually made, this is our black bean brownie recipe.

We made this last night in our community cooking class, and it was a smash hit.

Everyone loved it.

And have you had black bean brownies before?

- No, I'm really curious about this.

- They're absolutely delicious.

The beans are a fantastic source of fiber and protein, like we've been talking about.

We don't use any flour in this recipe, so it's very gluten free friendly.

We do use oats.

So we're gonna start by draining our beans and rinsing them.

And our goal is that we want the water to run clear.

- [Teresa] Oh, okay.

- And sometimes it'll start running clear and then you shake it.

And then it's like, "Oh wait, we're not quite there yet."

So this is just under cold water.

This helps get out some of the sodium that may be in the canning juice.

It also helps get rid of some of the bean-y taste, which we don't really necessarily want in our brownies.

- So the idea here is that the beans sort of absorb the other flavors and are hidden in the brownie recipe?

- Yeah, it's kind of like flour would be, where it's not really adding flavor to it.

It's just kind of like an agent for everything else that we have in there.

- [Teresa] Now, if you don't have a Cuisinart or some type of food processor, can you still do it?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So last night in our class, we did the food processor up here, but then we had everyone else working in teams of four with a blender at each station.

- Okay.

- And that worked just as great.

If you didn't have a blender either, you could even just hand mash it with a spoon and just be really thorough.

And that would work also.

So for the ingredients for this, we're gonna start with our wet ingredients.

You can really add everything in any order.

We have our olive oil.

And I think this is a quarter cup of olive oil.

Yeah, that's it, quarter cup.

So our next ingredient is vanilla extract.

Vanilla's one of those items that can be extremely expensive, but the imitation vanilla works great.

We have baking powder here.

That's gonna give us a little bit of rise.

I think that was half a teaspoon.

We have a quarter teaspoon salt.

Two tablespoons of cocoa powder.

We have half a cup of oats.

- And just standard oatmeal oats?

- Yep.

- Okay.

- Any kind of oats are gonna be fine.

And then our honey.

- So that's our sweetener.

- This is our sweetener.

- Okay.

- And this is really versatile.

You could use maple syrup.

You could use agave syrup.

I haven't tried using like plain sugar instead of honey, 'cause I kind of feel like you need the liquid a little bit.

So we're actually gonna save the chocolate chips for later.

Once we blend all this up, then we'll mix the chocolate chips in.

- If I don't eat them first.

- We'll put them over here so that you can't.

(both laughing) All right, so we're just gonna blend this all together until it looks smooth.

(food processor whirring) Okay, so we have our brownie batter mixed up.

We're gonna grab our prepared tray.

So this is an eight by eight baking pan.

You can use spray to line it like we did earlier, or you could use paper.

And the paper is nice because, as we'll see later, you can just easily pick it up.

And so the trick is just cutting the paper a little bit more narrow than the side of the pan.

A lot of people have hesitation about beans and lentils because it may make them gassy.

And one of the ways you can combat that is by soaking them for overnight.

So if you're working with dried lentils or beans, you soak them overnight and that helps release some of the fiber that causes that.

And then also make sure that you're drinking a lot of water when you're having these meals because the water helps.

The fiber is absorbing water.

That's part of the discomfort, is just bring it all up in there.

And so we're going to mix in our chocolate chips.

This is a little over half a cup because I wanted to make sure we have some on the top.

- And how long will these bake?

- These only bake for about 15 minutes.

- Really?

- Yes.

And so you could do this whole thing within like 20 minutes, if you remember to preheat your oven.

- Wow.

- [Carolyn] I'm just gonna shake that a little bit.

- 'Cause standard brownies are like 45 minutes.

- Yeah, and your standard standard brownies usually have like eggs in it and things that you really need to make sure that they're cooked all the way.

And this, like, it'll taste better when you cook it, obviously.

- [Teresa] And they're ooey-gooey, too.

- Right, but like there's nothing in there that if you ate it like a little undercooked it would be harmful.

All right, so we're just gonna throw this in the oven.

- Okay.

- All right, so our soup is looking great.

It's nice and thick.

- And then remind us again what we're adding.

- So today we're adding kale.

The recipe calls for collard greens, but any kind of dark green will work great.

So this was one bunch of kale, which is about four to six cups.

We're just gonna stir this in, try to get the leaves under the liquid some.

I don't know if I really have mentioned that we have these community classes twice a week.

We have one on Tuesday night and one on Thursday night.

And they're geared towards people facing hunger.

And we try to teach them really effective ways to use their money and use their groceries to create nutritious meals for themselves and their families.

And we just have like a lot of fun.

It's a really warm, safe community.

And I think people learn best when they feel safe and when they're having fun.

And like, those are definitely two ways I would describe our kitchen experiences here.

So I actually, pre-made a batch of brownies last night since we only have so much time together.

- [Teresa] Well, they look amazing.

- So, remember that we put our parchment paper around the side so we could easily lift it.

So I'm gonna go ahead and do that.

I'm gonna flip it over.

This is my first time actually doing this.

I thought, be on TV- - [Teresa] Nicely done.

- So, nearly perfect.

And so I'm just gonna take a couple pieces of paper at random, and I'm just gonna do that and see if it looks cool.

- [Teresa] Okay.

- And then we're gonna take powdered sugar.

And another little sifter thing.

And then we're just gonna tap it along.

This is something that's easy to do every day that makes it feel like a special occasion.

We're just gonna throw some strawberries on there.

- [Teresa] And you could use different berries?

- [Carolyn] Absolutely.

- [Teresa] Yeah?

- [Carolyn] Yeah.

That's a good idea.

All right, so we're gonna reveal our soup.

- And remind us again what this is called.

- West African-inspired peanut stew.

- [Carolyn] tOkay.

- Look at me digging right in here.

I'm dying to try this.

This has everything I love about a soup.

It's rich.

It's got some thickness to it.

The flavor is incredible.

A little bit of a kick, but not enough that I don't, you know, it wouldn't scare somebody off with the heat, but just enough.

This is incredible.

I love the peanut butter in there.

- Mm, that's really good.

- If she does say so.

- If I do say so myself.

I have to find out who cooked it.

- I must meet the chef.

Yeah, that is delicious.

- Oh, that's really good.

- All right, then the other recipe we made where the chips with the secret ingredient guacamole, which turns out were split peas.

So I'm dying to try this as well.

We let this sit in the fridge for just a little while to get those flavors.

There's onion and tomatoes and... - It's a great thing to make before a party that you can just kind of make it and forget about it, you know?

- Oh, Carolyn.

Love that.

I would've never thought of it.

It's brilliant.

It's got a brightness to it.

It's delicious.

And then finally, these black bean brownies.

I'm really looking forward to this.

Are you kidding me?

That's amazing.

- This whole thing, for a family, is less than one person eating out for the day.

- Well, it's all delicious.

It's all incredible.

Carolyn, thank you so much.

- Thank you so much for joining us.

- For being here in the Second Harvest Kitchen.

We really appreciate it.

The recipes will be at ksps.org on the "Health Matters" page.

And that's gonna do it for us for tonight.

We hope you have an incredible evening.

Thanks so much for joining us.

I'm Teresa Lukens.

Until next time, good night.

- [Narrator] Health Matters is made possible with the support of Providence Inland Northwest Washington.

- [Lady] Oh, life, we hear you beating out the rhythm of our days.

We know you live fully.

It's why we pioneer new treatments, because when it comes to matters of the heart, you deserve world class healthcare.

Providence, we see the life in you.

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