Meatless and Marvelous

Our Health-e-Recipe for Summer Eggplant Stew is a flavorful mix of herbs, garden vegetables and chickpeas are all cancer-preventive ingredients. It’s also a handy dinner recipe to use for this week’s Meatless Monday, the national campaign to improve health by foregoing meat one day a week while helping the environment.

Inspired by the traditional French dish ratatouille (ra-ta-too-ey), we’ve added chickpeas to pump up the protein. Chickpeas also fill you up with plenty of fiber, strongly linked to cancer prevention and found in all plant foods.

Along with the chickpeas, eggplant’s hearty texture replaces meat’s density in this light summer entrée. The onion and garlic contribute powerful cancer-fighting compounds that are found in all relatives of the onion family (including scallions, leeks, shallots and chives). The green herbs and cinnamon have their own set of phytochemicals that give each one a unique taste; parsley offers especially strong cancer protection.

Tomatoes high liquid content blend this dish’s ingredients together. Lycopene, a phytochemical in tomatoes, becomes more prevalent when tomatoes are heated during the canning process. Lycopene studies suggest it may prevent prostate cancer.

Dish up this stew onto some brown rice, a whole grain, and you’ll add even more healthy fiber, phytochemicals, vitamins and minerals. Try all of our delicious cancer-fighting recipes for free at AICR’s Test Kitchen. Subscribe to our weekly Health-e-Recipes.