Wellness Wednesday: easy “peasy” hotel snacks

One of the great joys of travel is trying ALL THE DIFFERENT FOOD. But it’s sometimes a bit tricky to find really healthy snacks – a lot of street food, for example, is deep fried/coated in sugar or some kind of sweet or oily sauce/is based around meat*, and sometimes it is all of these things (which of course makes it delicious!). After having scoffed some peanut satay skewers and followed them up with sweet sticky rice cakes at a produce market in Denpasar recently (and this was after several days of eating until I nearly burst while in Bangkok), I was feeling a bit guilty … and then my eyes lit upon a vegie stall selling edamame. Green goodness in snack form (and only 50 cents for half a kilo!)! But with no kitchen in my hotel, how could I cook them?

Enter the tea & coffee making facilities at just about any hotel, aka an electric kettle, cup and saucer. It turns out you can just pour boiling water over a mug of edamame and cover it with a plate for a few minutes to “cook” them (you can throw out the first lot of water and pour a second lot on if you really want to make sure they’re done).

And that’s it. I know this hasn’t been a super glamorous post (as opposed to all my other ones, haha) but I was quite happy to discover this super healthy, simple and cheap snack for when I’m travelling and need to get into something green – or even for an evening back at home** with a DVD.

*I’m not a vegetarian, but I don’t want to eat meat for every meal or snack!

**Freshly harvested edamame would definitely not be as cheap here in Melbourne… but actually I don’t know if you can even buy fresh ones here? Let me know if you’ve seen them! They’re available throughout Asia (sprinkle on a little bit of salt during and after cooking and you have yourself exactly the kind of snack that is offered at any izakaya in Japan), but if you’re elsewhere and want a bean-y kind of snack I suppose you could do this with broadbeans, or use frozen edamame.