Victorian State Nutritionist, Veronica Graham shares with us a healthy and delicious festive season recipe for vegetarian stuffed mushrooms. Whatever way you celebrate the festive season, healthy food choices are important. Check out our related recipes and information below.
This is pretty easy and again, this is a meal you'd get ready the day before.
I'm going to put the mushroom stalks, chopped, into the falafel mix. The falafel mix has been soaking. It's usually made into balls and fried but in this case we're not going to do that – we’re going to use it as a base for the stuffed mushrooms.
We’re going to put a piece of tomato down the bottom as a surprise and we’re going to top it with the falafel and mushroom mix. Not too thick and we want it to cook through – it’s so easy, and once again it’s the day before you’d do this and have them ready in the fridge to put in the oven.
Depending on taste you can add some basil, or not – we’ll do some without. And some grated parmesan on top to give it some flavour and that lovely golden colour when the cheese melts down. And that is one half done and that took minutes.
The other one is as easy. It's just frozen spinach which is great to use, inexpensive, convenient. Mix it with some ricotta – it’s about 50/50 but I have a bit more spinach there. Add 1 egg.
All of these recipes are extremely healthy – you’re not going to feel full and over-indulged at the end of Christmas lunch. In fact you’ll have increased your serves of vegetables so much.
Spoon them in – how easy is this? Beyond easy really.
Quickly spoon them in. This combination of ricotta and spinach is really popular. People put it in pasta, pastry. It’s a real crowd-pleaser. Very few people who don’t like it. Even if you have people who usually eat a lot of meat, they’ll tend to like these concepts here.
Bit of parmesan on top and that's it – in the oven until the mushrooms are cooked – about 20 minutes, no more. Keep an eye on them, you don’t want them to fall apart.
And there you have a very nutritious, healthy, vegetable-packed part of the festive lunch.