Healthy Lettuce Wraps

A healthy diet is not about strict limitations, striving to be unrealistically thin, or depriving yourself of the foods you love. Instead, it's about feeling lively, having more energy, improving your physical and mental health, and boosting your mood. Personally, I don’t believe in fade diets as typically once a person reached their target weight, they go back to bad eating habits and put on the weight faster than they lost it. Adopting a healthy balanced diet as a lifestyle is the answer to maintaining an ideal weight and daily activity like walking, running or whatever gets the body moving is part of it. For me, this recipe is a meal we would all happily eat in the family. It is high in fibre, packed with vitamins, and low in calories. Avocado is a healthy fruit to introduce into our diet as it reduces blood triglycerides, lowers LDL which is bad cholesterol and increases HDL, which is good cholesterol.

Vietnamese have a unique style of cooking that has taken advantage of the abundance of

aromatic herbs native to their terrains like mint, coriander, amaranth leaves, shisho and more. Vietnamese love rice and lettuce rolls, which are used as vessels to bind all the freshness together with grilled meat, fish, or other seafood in one morsel. Rolls are typically dipped in a sauce that could be sour, sweet or spicy or a combination of all, like my chilli-lime fish sauce and my sweet and sour cucumber sauce.

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Servings: 6 rolls

Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

• 1 carrot

• 1 cucumber

• 1 bell pepper

• 1 cup red cabbage

• 1 cup white cabbage

• 2 scallions

• 100 grams fish fillet

• 6 lettuce leaves

• Coriander leaves

• Mint leaves

• 1/2 avocado, optional

• Rice noodles, optional

• Dipping sauce

Method:

· Wash and dry all the vegetables.

· Steam the fish following the method in my steamed fish video.

· Slice the carrots, cucumber and bell pepper into match sticks.

· Shred the cabbage and the green onions and set them aside.

· Prepare the dipping sauce as in the video.

· Pile up the veggies, fish and aromatic herbs into the lettuce leaf, roll and dip in the sauce.

NOTES:

· This recipe is suitable for diabetic and persons on a low carb diet.

· You can substitute the fish with any lean protein, even tofu.

· You can use any green leaf like kale or Swiss chard.

· For a more filling meal you can add any cooked whole grain such as brown rice, quinoa, freekeh etc…

· I highly recommend adding ½ an avocado to your daily diet.

Per roll (excluding avocado & dipping sauce): 59 Calories; trace Fat (4.9% calories from fat); 4g Protein; 10g carbohydrates; 2g Dietary Fiber; 7mg Cholesterol; 21mg Sodium.