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Good morning, dear friends. Today we are going to prepare a very simple vegetarian and Mediterranean meal. We’ll start with risotto, prepared with pistachio, just as I saw it in Italy. This pistachio is already shelled, but it is not salted and not roasted; it is raw. We put it in the oil together with the other vegetables. We use some cauliflower, carrots, and any vegetable you have available according to the season. As the mixture is a little dry, we put in the rice. Make sure you wash the rice very carefully three times so that it is clean and free of impurities or stones. We mix everything together nicely. Now would be the right time to add the spices. We don’t want them overcooked, but now is perfect. So we put in a little jeera (cumin seeds). It’s very nice if we grind them; then they have the best flavor. Take the grains and grind them. If you could only smell it now, it’s delicious. Jeera makes any food very easily digestible. Then we put in some coriander seeds. We will also grind them; they are very soft and easy to grind, and their fragrance is truly delicious. As we have white rice, it would be very nice to put in a little curcuma or haldi, which you may also find under the name turmeric. It’s all the same. So you put a little in. The turmeric will decrease the glycemic index of the food, which is very good when using white rice. Now, as the rice is a little roasted and no longer white—it looks like glittering pearls—it is time to add water and maybe a little salt. We add just a little salt, not too much, because it is easy to add more but difficult to remove if there is too much. Then we add warm water. The amount of water is approximately twice the amount of rice. So, for one cup of rice, we add two cups of water. This is very easy, especially since we already have vegetables in it. It would be nice to cover it, as it will then cook very slowly, but we can also check on it like this. Now, while the rice is cooking, we continue by making some vegetable soup. Today we will use something green: broccoli. It is very good for us. We simply put it in boiling water and add a little salt to help retain its nice green color. We will also add some spices at the end. In the meantime, while this is cooking, we can prepare some salad dressing. It is very easy to prepare salad dressing with yogurt and spices. But for vegans or those who cannot eat milk products, you can do it very easily with besan or chickpea flour. Just put a little in water, mix it up, and make a cream. We only need a very little bit; add some water and mix so that we don’t get crumbles. We will cook it just a little so that it becomes creamy. Chickpea flour is difficult to digest, just like chickpeas, but if we put some jīrā (cumin) in it and also add some coriander and haldi (turmeric), then it becomes much, much easier to digest. So we’ll do this. This food will be very easy to digest, even for children, so do not hesitate to give them some. These spices are very useful for us. They help prevent any parasites in the digestion, in the stomach. They are also very powerful antioxidants, and it is very good for our health to use them every day—but in small amounts, not in large quantities. That would be too much. Let’s say, per person, it would be nice to have just half a teaspoon of haldi and half a teaspoon of green jeera. We use chili very little or not at all, according to your constitution and your body’s needs. We can put in more coriander because you can almost not overdose on it. Ready? In the meantime, while this is cooking, we can prepare some salad. Put it on a nice plate. We have here very fresh, nice cucumbers and salad leaves. Decorate it a little, because we also eat with our eyes, and the eyes are hungry sometimes—you have probably heard of that. Then add a little red, perhaps shaping it like a flower. Here too we use some spices, not only salt and oil—though that is okay too if you don’t have anything else. Add some young, nice green onions, sliced thinly. They go very well with tomatoes. We might also add some paprika. You can make this salad with cauliflower if you have some left over from cooking the soup, and you can also add some chips. It is very nice and healthy, but make sure you find a very strong knife so that you can cut nicely and easily and don’t cut your fingers. Cool it down because we want it to be cold when we add the other spices; we don’t want it cooked, we want it fresh. It is almost ready, and the risotto needs just a little more time. The pistachio is cooking very nicely and quickly becomes very soft. The taste is delicious, so you should try it sometime. We now have broccoli soup. You can use any other vegetables. Celery is very good, especially in winter when we don’t have many fresh vegetables. Just cook it like this and then make a cream of it using kitchen tools to make our soup very creamy and easy. You can mix in anything you want. Even children will eat it when they don’t see what’s inside—sometimes that can be a problem. You can also use fresh sprouts, like alfalfa or mustard sprouts; they are very good for the salad. They make any kind of salad much easier to digest, and you can also put this dressing on a vegetable salad with cauliflower, potatoes, or fagioli (beans). Add a little more of these nice small onion pieces—you can cut them much better than I did. Now we also add some salt. In this way, all the spices are in the salad, in the dressing. Maybe you can add only some oil and a little lemon. This way, we have all the spices in it, perhaps a little more salt. By doing this, we use much less salt because we don’t want to eat too much. If we put salt on the salad in crystals, we eat too much because we consume all the crystals. In this salad dressing, the salt is already dissolved, and when it comes to our tongue, we feel just enough seasoning and don’t need any more. It’s a very good trick, especially for people with certain health conditions who don’t want to eat too much salt; this salad dressing is very good for them. Now, back to the risotto. I will just add a little more water, as we didn’t cover it. Sorry—since we didn’t cover it, it uses much more water, of course, so we must add some. It is cooking nicely. The soup will be ready very soon. Now we will make this soup soft and creamy. It is almost cooked, so we’ll just make this broccoli creamy. We should cook it for at least 10 minutes. I don’t know if we have that much time, but it’s almost ready. So, we only put spices in it and some olive oil. We can also use some other oils, maybe sesame or sunflower oil. It’s okay; it’s up to your choice. As this soup is not so thick, we can make it thicker by adding the cream we made from chickpea flour. It makes the soup very nice and thicker, and also adds a little more nutrition and more protein, because chickpeas contain protein as well as carbohydrates, so this soup becomes richer. We want to put in a little of this green young onion, maybe a little dhanyā (coriander). This is already ground coriander, so we put just a little. And salt, of course—we already put a little, and now we can add some more, but not too much, just a little. Okay, and oil. We must be careful with olive oil because it is cold-pressed. Virgin olive oil is made from fruits, not seeds, and it has much more nutrition, not only fat. So we should not burn it. The women in Dalmatia always put onions and vegetables on olive oil while it is still cold and then light the fire under it, so that the temperature never rises above 100 degrees. That way, they preserve the oil from spoiling. So we should do the same, or be careful to put it in at the end—when the cooking of the soup is finished, then add the oil. Okay, the risotto is ready. It looks nice and smells delicious, so we can arrange it a little. Of course, you can also cover this risotto with Parmigiano or some other kind of cottage cheese that you like. It’s not necessary to be just rice and vegetables; add some nice vegetables on top, maybe basil or a little decoration. Paprika would look nice as a small piece. I always like to add a little bit of cheese because it is so healthy and good for us; we should use it much more. It is very easy to grow chives; you can put them in a flower pot on your window and have them all year long. They are very easy to grow and very good for health. So, this is it—and the soup, of course. We need a special tool for serving. Okay, how does it look? It is very green because it is early summer, and we long for green things, green food. Bon appétit! Thank you for today, and I hope to see you again. Have a nice day!