You might have noticed a “disturbing trend” in the last post and this one - is Cheap Eats going to turn into some kind of HEALTHY blog? Where’s all the chips, dips, chains and Banquet Dinners by gum? I want my Artificially Processed Food Product Review!

The truth is that while I’ll always feature the “fun” product stuff, lately I’ve been trying to eat healthier and cook more often. (**Everyone roll eyes** - like we couldn’t see it catching up with you) That might be at odds w/ the overall mission of the blog - but then again, this isn’t a magazine. And truth be told some of the cheapest foods can be healthy, or at least I’m trying to convince myself of that.

(By the way, I’ve learned they took the Trans Fat out of Girl Scout Cookies recently - so now you can eat all the boxes you want…)

Anyhow, I’ll try to keep it interesting no matter what the subject material and still throw in junk food reviews every so often. Uh, so you’re not tempted to turn me off and go and watch the latest Lowest Common Denominator chump (or chumpette) on American Idol. But the meals of hot dogs and frozen salisbury steak every night are probably over..

Like the versatile potato, you can get a lot of mileage out of Asian Vegetables. I’m calling them asian vegetables even though I think most of them may actually have English names… but where I live they’re sold at the Chinese market and are called by their Chinese names.

If you happen to live near an Asian specialty market, there are a ton that you can try out at pretty spectacularly cheap prices. They work pretty well in stir frys or steamed/boiled - like you would do broccoli or spinach. The ones that I’ve had most commonly (and the spelling on these vary widely, I’m not Chinese so feel free to correct it) in restaurants and at home are Bok Choy, On Choy, Gai Lan, Napa cabbage and Yu Choy.

One of my favorite things lately is to heat up some main dish restaurant leftovers from the previous night and then steam or stir fry a bunch of Yu Choy. I think this has various spellings as well including “Yao Choy” and “Yu Choi” (and maybe also known as “green Choy Sum”?). And actually, I believe it’s a variety of the Edible Rape vegetable (a super unfortunate name for a veggie if there ever was one).

So anyhow, eating a bunch of boiled greens like this on the side of just about any oily or fatty restaurant leftover makes it seem like you’re being more healthy, hehe. The Yu Choy vegetable has a leafy top and a longer stalk… like spinach but the stalk is more substantial and thicker. It sometimes has yellow flowers as well which can be weird - if you don’t cut those off you might feel like you’re eating some flower shop’s leftovers.

It’s kinda bitter like spinach, and you can cook it in similar ways. In restaurants they often cook it whole without cutting it up (long vegetables = long life), but I’ll often cut the plants into thirds and then stir fry it. It cooks quickly so don’t fryor boil it too long. You don’t need to peel the stems like you do broccoli.

One of the only issues with some of these asian vegetables is that their shelflife isn’t as long as some of the other Cheap Eats staples. In fact, at the chinese market, you’ve gotta be careful - I think a lot of veggies are so cheap because they are right on the cusp of spoiling (This was my opinion only initially. But according to my brother, someone actually did a study on this to try and show how it’s possible that the ethnic markets can sell things for so cheap - and that turned out to be the actual reason). But it also depends on the turnover rate - and these vegetables fly off the shelves where I am, so I can buy them and they last at least a few days if not a week.

Snore…. OK, yes, I’m even beginning to bore myself with all this healthy food talk. Boring, boring, boring. It just doesn’t make as good copy as candy bars and soda. So I’ll adjourn until next time. This is Slightly Healthier Cheap Eats Admin signing out…