Healing through plant-based meals
Enriching ourselves with good food can help us boost not only our health, but also our minds especially during these trying times. And with the limited stores to give us the resources we need for our good meals, getting more creative about preparing food has been a constant quarantine challenge.
Founder of Mesa ni Misis (@mesanimisis), an organization advocating healthy living through food, Juana Manahan-Yupangco shared her insights on how to revamp home meals through plant-based products. She also shared her tips in fully embracing the healthy lifestyle during the quarantine and beyond.
Daily Tribune (DT): People would say, “Oh vegetable, is that salad only?” What else can we come up with like breakfast, lunch, dinner?
Juana Yupangco
(JY): In our recipes in Mesa ni Misis, I think we only have two salads and that’s because I want people to get busog when eating vegetables and show them that we can feel satisfied with just vegetables. And we use local vegetables so it’s cheaper and accessible. We have recipes like
upo lasagna, which is lasagna but instead of using the noodles, we use the actual
upo slices thinly and with a filling of chick peas, kangkong pesto, tomato and you baked for a few minutes. It’s one of the dishes that people request from us.
Another personal favorite is our kare-kareng monggo.If you have it vegetarian, you’ll just remove the meat, right? But I said, “No, it’s not enough.” so what we did is we made the dish have a kare-kare flavor plus all of the vegetables.
My other favorite is monggo Bolognese. Our aim is really to come up with recipes that are familiar to other people but when you look at the ingredients you will realize, “Oh, alugbati lang pala ‘to or kangkong
pala.” Lately, I developed a recipe for the Korean pancake where they use zucchini but I used kangkong — half the price and there’s kangkong all-year round.
DT: How do you get inspired? Does it start with the ingredients and then the base profile? A tip for cooking?
JY: My goal was to make recipes that are not just pinakbet so I read different websites, cook books and then I think what do we have here in the Philippines, what is cheap and affordable? Because a lot of these recipes… it’s expensive like kale, spinach, Brussels sprouts, saan natin mahahanap
yan ngayon? I always think when I read recipes that, “Okay maybe we can substitute these with local one’s.” Then I tried to follow the flavor profile. So we have like Indian, Japanese, Korean. Those are easy to make with vegetables.
DT: With the extended quarantine, people are thinking about raising their own food through urban gardening. Is that part of your advocacy as well in Mesa ni Misis?
JY: We teach urban gardening in the schools so it’s actually part of our Gulayan sa Paaralan program. But a lot of times, they don’t have the time or resources to do that so we go back to help them with that and show them what they can do with the food.
As part of the advocacy of Mesa ni Misis, we definitely promote it. We have on our team (someone) we call our farmer girl. If you tune in to our Instagram lives, she teaches how to plant your own things. Tomorrow, she would be teaching how to grown a kamote. I was telling her, “We could not just tell people to grow alugbati, walang mabubusog diyan. We should teach people how to grow something that is filling.”
DT: I guess it is an irony that although it is an invisible war, it’s the coronavirus, at the same time it is also mother nature that’s helping us become well, helping us fight against this life-threatening disease.
JY: Absolutely. Mother nature is giving us stuff to build our immunity with to prevent disease.
DT: Juana, just listening to you, we got inspired with your positivity. Besides the good food that you are eating, what are the other tips you can give us like for self-care just to make the practice more wholesome.
JY: We pray a lot as a family together. Prayer will keep you centered knowing that God is in control of everything and just being peaceful with the food you eat — it gives you peace inside and out. So that is my number one tip. Number two is to sleep. I know that people now have disrupted sleeping patterns because they are not doing anything in the day so it’s just day to night. Perhaps create a schedule or workout. Cook your own food — I love doing that. We rarely eat outside now because we’re very scared of take outs. It’s that simple.
We’re not eating as much junk food anymore. We feel much cleaner at home because when we have the craving to eat junk food, we have to go to the grocery and line up. And then we realize we can do away with it after all.