In the twelve years that I’ve been running the Cook for Good project, my ingredient palette has changed. My recipes started as vegetarian and shifted to vegan. Now I’m cooking with very little oil and lots of superfoods like mushrooms, blueberries, and turmeric. Many recipes survive with some fine-tuning, like this week’s nomelets (which are not omelets).
- The whole idea of a nomelet is that chickpea flour can replace chicken eggs in certain recipes.
- The classic nomelet includes a tablespoon of olive oil in the batter, which makes it tender. The new, lighter nomelet drops the olive oil from the batter and uses water for sauteing the onions and mushrooms. This new nomelet is a little less tender, but you’d only notice it if you tried both versions side by side.
- Mushrooms add flavor and nutrition.
- Red onions replace yellow ones in almost every recipe for added nutrition.
- Organic chickpea flour I get online replaces the conventional kind I can find locally. The more I learn about the value of organic ingredients, the more I am willing to go the extra mile to get them.
Read on to see how these changes affected the cost and nutrition for the recipes.
Cost
See the cost below for one nomelet, using organic ingredients. Using organic chickpea flour increases a nomelet’s price by just 18 cents, a sensible investment in health for my family, the farm workers, and the planet.
I’d serve one nomelet with a few side dishes (say, roasted sweet potatoes and fruit) or two nomelets with fruit as a main course. I assumed each chicken-egg omelet would use 1 1/2 large eggs, making two the equivalent of a three-egg omelet.
- Original nomelet with conventional chickpea flour: $1.00
- Original all-organic nomelet: $1.18
- New oil-free recipe with mushrooms: $1.38
- Like the new oil-free recipe, but with eggs instead of chickpea flour: $1.76
Comparing Nutrition
As you can see from the nutrition labels above, the new oil-free nomelet with mushrooms has less than half the fat of my original nomelet and one third the fat of the chicken-egg omelet. Chicken eggs also bring more than the total allowed daily allotment of cholesterol at 318 mg. Both plant-based recipes provide nearly a quarter of your daily fiber and a balanced amount of protein (16% and 19% by calories). The egg omelet is 27% protein. Remember that almost no one who gets enough calories is short on protein, but too much protein can make your life miserable and short.
The next time you make a savory recipe, see if you can:
- Replace chicken eggs with chickpea flour or chickpea broth (aquafaba)
- Reduce or eliminate the oil
- Add mushrooms
- Switch to red onions
- Go as organic as possible
