I think I finally found my favorite coleslaw recipe. Bruce told me I should make this recipe every time we have coleslaw. Usually, I just chop up some cabbage, add some mayonnaise, sweet pickle juice, salt and pepper and be done with it. This recipe is a non-mayonnaise version of coleslaw so it's lighter and has an Asian flare to it with the addition of tamari and sesame oil. Tamari is the Japanese version of soy sauce so if you don't have tamari, you can easily substitute soy sauce. Tamari is darker, less salty and has a strong umami flavor to it. You may have heard of umami being our fifth taste sensation in addition to sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Umami is described as a meaty, savory, broth-like flavor and it sure tastes good in this recipe! I made this recipe last week and then took some to Nick's house to share with them for dinner and they also loved it and immediately asked what was in it. The recipe also calls for topping with nori sheets as a garnish so I figured Nick and Sachiyo would like it since they all eat nori in their household. I now buy nori snack packs to keep here at home when the grandkids come over because they love it. We've been over to their house twice when we've had sushi for dinner and our granddaughter loves to show us how to make it, especially how to pile the rice onto the nori sheets. 
Like I've said before, they eat a traditional Japanese diet. How many 4-year olds do you know who will eat octopus? Yummy!
This coleslaw recipe is another Hannah Freese, RD recipe. She encourages us to avoid mayonnaise unless we use avocado mayonnaise because it's so hard to find mayonnaise without the "Dirty 6" oils in it. The "Dirty 6" oils contribute to a broken metabolism which I'm trying to repair with her diet so I'm avoiding soybean, safflower, sunflower, canola, corn and cottonseed oils. Actually, it's hard to find a lot of "clean" foods without these oils so you end up spending a lot of time reading the ingredient lists on everything. These oils are the #1 most damaging food for a woman's metabolism. The second most damaging food is sugar. You probably think it's impossible to follow a diet without sugar but Hannah does allow dark chocolate on her diet that is greater than 70% cocoa which I admit that I do eat everyday. If you can eat chocolate on a diet, I can totally comply with it! I am losing weight and losing inches around my waistline, too, so I know it's working and am very happy with it. I feel like her diet is very do-able and sensible without being overly restrictive at all. I'm also eating a lot more vegetables and love her recipes so that helps a lot. It does take time to plan your meals but she provides meal plans that make it a lot easier. When we first went into lockdown in March with stay-at-home orders from the governor, we got into the habit of only going to the grocery store once/week so we did a lot better job at planning our meals. If you follow Hannah's meal plans, she even provides a grocery list of everything you'll need for that week so she's made it as simplified as you can possibly get. She gave me permission to post her recipes, thank goodness, because that's mainly what we've been eating. Bruce has no complaints eating her recipes because he has loved everything I've cooked. We each eat differently for breakfast and lunch but we eat the same for dinner which is usually one of her recipes. She doesn't use weird ingredients in her recipes, like the Plant Paradox diet that I tried to do a couple years ago. And Hannah is a R.D. so I can relate to her. I know my metabolism has been messed up ever since I had thyroid problems in the early 2000's so her diet made sense to me. I don't know why a diet to repair your metabolism hasn't been more mainstream. It makes perfect sense to me. Most the patients I saw at work had metabolic syndrome but we had no diet for it. We were basically suppose to tell them to lose weight - eat less, exercise more. IT DOESN'T WORK! If your metabolism is broken, you won't be able to lose weight. And if you do starve yourself to lose weight, it won't stay off. You'll gain it right back. I remember seeing patients with horrible lipid profiles but they were not overweight. So, we'd tell them to eat a low fat diet anyway and avoid saturated fat. IT DOESN'T WORK! They all end up taking statins. I am impressed with Hannah because she doesn't stick to the standardized advice that dietitians were taught to give. She has said a couple times that she was afraid of losing her license with the advice she was giving but she bases all her advise on scientific studies so there is really no concern of that. It's just that she isn't giving advise promoted by Big Food who put all this crap in our food in the first place who finance so many of the studies. Hannah knows which studies to pay attention to because there is a lot of politics in this field of nutrition and it can be a challenge to know what is legitimate and what is not. Most of the participates in our group are women like me who have been on diet after diet and none of them work. Why is it so hard? Because we all have broken metabolisms so nothing is really going to work until we fix that. I'll be on this diet for a long time because I have a lot to lose but Hannah says once we reach our goal weight, then to eat this way 80% of the time and if you go off of it 20% of the time you won't gain weight because your metabolism can handle it. That's what I'm looking forward to. I have a lot of recipes on this blog that do NOT fall into Hannah's eating guidelines so I've got to repair my metabolism so I can continue to enjoy my favorite recipes once in awhile or for special occasions without detrimental effects. In the meantime, I'll continue with her recipes like this one and no longer make my coleslaw with my usual Best Foods soybean oil and sugar mayonnaise.
3. Add the dressing to the vegetables and toss to combine.
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