Basic Edamame
By Catherine Newman
By Catherine Newman
Makes: 4 servings
Total carbohydrates: 7 grams per serving
Hands-on time: 10 minutes
Total time: 10 minutes
This is in the class of foods I used to call, when my own kids were little, Busytown Vegetables. It includes artichokes, corn on the cob, celery sticks with ranch dressing—anything that required a little bit of (happy) effort on the part of the eater. Edamame are green soybeans that you pop out of their pods and eat (you don’t eat the pods unless you’re my weird cat). They’re tasty and fun to eat, and they make a great substitute for chips or popcorn or other less nutritious snack foods, since you can eat them while you’re watching a movie or playing a game.
Ingredients
1 (1-pound) bag frozen edamame
Salt
Instructions
1. Steam the edamame until they are tender. I do this in one of those UFO steamers, the kind that’s always weirdly missing one of its hinged segments, over an inch of boiling water, for about 10 minutes, even though the bag says “5.” (You can also cook them in a couple of inches of boiling water, in which case I would salt the water.)
2. Drain the edamame well, put them in a bowl, and add a lot of salt. Most of the salt is going to stay on the outside of the pod, and the idea is to get the pods salty enough that your salty fingers kind of season the beans as you eat them. At least that’s my idea. Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature.
Consider adding one or more of the following:
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A squeeze of lemon or lime juice
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A few shakes of Sriracha or another hot sauce
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A big grinding of black pepper
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A sprinkle of seasoning, such as celery salt or garlic powder
About Catherine
Catherine loves to write about food and feeding people. In addition to her recipe and parenting blog Ben & Birdy (which has about 15,000 weekly readers), she edits the ChopChop series of mission-driven cooking magazines. This kids’ cooking magazine won the James Beard Publication of the Year award in 2013 – the first non-profit ever to win it – and a Parents’ Choice Gold Award. Last year they started the WIC version of the magazine for families enrolled in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and are currently developing Seasoned, their senior version, commissioned by the AARP. They distribute over a million magazines annually, through paid subscriptions, doctor’s offices, schools, and hospitals. Their mission started with obesity as its explicit focus – and has shifted, over the years, to a more holistic one, with health and happiness at its core. That’s the same vibe Catherine brings to the diaTribe column.
[Photo Credit: Catherine Newman]
