5 Interesting Ways to Incorporate Lettuce Into Your Diet

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Sam Mlambo

5 Interesting Ways to Incorporate Lettuce Into Your Diet

Guest Post From Gardener's Path

Some people absolutely adore lettuce. And some people think it’s extremely bland and pretty tasteless. I suspect that the latter outweighs the former a little bit, and if you’re reading this  you’re probably not too keen on the green stuff yourself.

It’s kind of a shame though really, because lettuce has quite a few health benefits and it’s something that is generally pretty easy to incorporate into your diet. There are a lot of dishes that you can just add lettuce too as an extra source of nutrition. Plus, you can totally grow it yourself, which is always a nice benefit in its own right.

If you’re not a fan of putting on your sandwiches or having a cesar salad for dinner then you’re not a fan, but you are missing out on some of the advantages. So why don’t I give you a few alternatives? Let’s take a look at 5 unique ways to start eating more lettuce:

 

1.    Juice

It’s a well-known fact that lettuce is great for hydration. It contains a lot of water, and if it was liquified it would probably be just water. So suggesting that you can turn lettuce into juice doesn’t really make much sense on the surface, but that’s not really what I’m suggesting.

Lettuce works really well as a part of a kind of multi-vegetable smoothie juice. Something like V8. It’s actually a part of the original V8 recipe and with good reason, it’s one of those ingredients that’s going to ensure moisture.

You can make V8 yourself, and this is probably the best way to do it because you can control how much of each ingredient you put in and you if there is one of the vegetables that you’re not a huge fan of you can leave it out completely or replace it with something else.

Even if you don’t like lettuce all that much, it hardly matters when it’s just one of eight different vegetables in this awesome concoction of nutrition!

 

2.    Sauce

You can’t turn lettuce into a sauce you say? Well of course you can, I’ve justified lettuce juice to you already so you don’t doubt me on this one. Lettuce actually makes for an excellent sauce when you prepare it the right way.

You’re going to want to mix it with something else though.There’s a lot of moisture in lettuce as we’ve discussed already, and so it doesn’t provide a great base ingredient for a sauce but you can mix it with another vegetable that would be in need of more moisture.

So what you could do is take a recipe for basil pesto such as this one right here. Instead of doing two full cups of basil, have one cup of basil and a cup of lettuce. Nothing else really needs to be changed other than that.

You’re adding a second green to pesto and it also widens the amount of dishes that you could add the sauce to. When it’s made with just basil, pesto can tend to have a taste that’s too strong for people and would deter them for adding it to certain things.

The moisture in the lettuce can help lighten up the basil’s potency, making it easier to enjoy and easier to add to your favourite dishes.

 

3.    Wraps

But people are putting lettuce in wraps all the time that’s nothing new! Okay first of all, you’re going to have to stop interrupting me, and second of all, I’m not suggesting that you put lettuce in a wrap, I’m suggesting you use lettuce AS a wrap.

Of course, it’s not going to work exactly the same way as a wheat wrap does, and you most certainly can’t toast it because that’s going to turn the lettuce to mush, but this is a creative way to get lettuce into your diet while adding an abundance of flavours.

It’s super easy to do. You just lay out your lettuce leaves and then fill them up with whatever ingredients you want. You don’t even have to wrap them up like the name of this idea might suggest.

Treat the lettuce leaves more like an edible cup. You won’t even notice the lettuce flavour, it’s just there to keep all of the other more favourable flavours together. There are so many things you could put in your lettuce wraps.

Beans, sliced potatoes, meat, tuna, root vegetables or hey you could even put all of that stuff in their together. It’s like having a burrito without all of the extra carbs. 

 

4.    Soup

When mixed in with your favourite soup, the lettuce will melt down just enough to where it’s not the dominant flavour, but not so much to where you don’t get that nice crunchy texture and it will also become sweeter than you would normally expect from lettuce.

This works with pretty much any soup too. Chicken or tomato soup in particular are quite nice, being ingredients that you would often find combined with lettuce anyway. And these soups do sometimes tend to have a bit of a bland flavour so adding some sweet lettuce will help that.

I would suggest using shredded romaine or iceberg lettuce. You could buy it pre-shredded but it’s super easy to shred it yourself. You can cut it into thin slices with a cleaver or you could just straight up shred it in a blender.

 

5.    Nacho Dip

Okay I’m not going to lie to you, this one is a tad bit less healthy than the other ones that we’ve discussed here, but it’s still got lettuce in it so it still gets the job done. It adds a healthy element to something that isn’t normally known for being particularly healthy.

You can add lettuce to several different traditional nacho dips, but I would suggest going for a cream cheese and mayonnaise recipe. Lettuce compliments cheese and mayonnaise quite well and those two ingredients mixed together will provide the necessary texture for a dip.

Use shredded lettuce for this, and also add in some grated cheese. Mix the mayo and cream cheese up in the blender first before adding the lettuce and grated cheese on top and then let it cool in the fridge for a few hours before serving.

So there you go. Lettuce doesn’t have to be boring at all. You can include lettuce in a good chunk of your favourite dishes and there are many creative ways to include it in your diet.

 

About Gardeners Path

Gardener's Path has for its goal to bring you the best of everything about gardening, from tips for beginners to the more advanced green thumb gardeners, thorough guides to learn more about building your soil and planting for specific conditions like shade or direct sun, and troubleshooting tips for dealing with pests and plant diseases.

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