Recipes for Health December 7, 2012, 2:57 pm

Blend Your Vegetables

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times Winter squash and walnut spread

Your mother told you to eat your vegetables. Now the Recipes for Health columnist Martha Rose Shulman suggests blending them. She writes:

Here’s a new concept: view the holiday party season as an opportunity to eat more vegetables and legumes. I spent a week making Mediterranean vegetable and bean purées that we spread on toasted bread and devoured for lunch and dinner every day. My son and I managed to consume nearly a pound each of fresh spinach, carrots, and winter squash. Liam is admittedly a very hungry, athletic teenager, but this was a great indication that something healthy and delicious (and pretty, too!) on a canapé is just as likely to be gobbled up as something not-so-healthy.
Coincidentally, as I sat down to begin writing these words, I received an e-mail from a reader: “As the holidays approach, I know that get togethers at work are on the horizon. I’m vegetarian….People love to bring in delicious but unhealthy treats to work, and I’m trying to lose weight…I wonder if you could share some simple, healthy holiday treat ideas. It is so easy to make unhealthy versions! And the dreaded ‘vegetable tray’ is, well, dreadful.”
This week the focus is on the savory (in a couple of weeks I’ll bring you some sweeter and crunchier ideas). As always, the cuisines of the Mediterranean offer everything I am looking for – vibrant, nutrient-dense seasonal vegetables and legumes flavored with herbs, spices and aromatics. I transformed some of my favorite vegetable and legume dishes into spreads simply by blending them in a food processor. Serve these on toasted croutons or crackers, or if you need a lower-carb delivery system, spoon or pipe onto squares of red pepper, endive leaves, or cucumber rounds.

Here are five new vegetable purées.