High iron veggie recipes

[Indecisivelurcher]

Asking for your high iron veggie recipes and tips please.

I'm not veggie but was moving that way and typically don't eat much red meat. However my iron levels have recently nose dived and I've been put on supplements. I would like to come off them at some point and manage this through diet. I will eat more red meat but I don't think I'll ever hit the 2-3 portions a week that the doctor suggested. How veggies manage to keep their iron up? What veggie meals can I make that'll still tick this box? Of course I've looked onto this a bit but a few more meal suggestions would be fab.

Sauteed greens with tahini, olive oil and lemon juice is nice as a side dish. There's a lot of iron in shellfish like mussels & clams if you're still doing fish. Molasses in cake like gingerbread or date loaf is good or fruit molasses on porridge. You can look at cooking with cast iron pans too - it all helps.

Pulses and leafy greens are good for iron, so something like a lentil dhal with wilted spinach or kale is a good option.

Green leafy veg! Yum - just stick them in everything. Remember that vitamin c helps iron absorption - so peppers or a glass or orange juice.

I'm an iron conscious veggie. I always have a bag of washed spinach in the fridge and I shred it and add it raw to loads of things. Salads, pastas, rice dishes. In fact, whatever I'm eating. I buy a couple of heads of broccoli every week to and try not to over cook it. And Kale. I eat a lot of Kale. I also have some floradix in the fridge (b12 and iron!) and spatone too, if ever I have a cold, or feel knackered, I have a spatone.

I used spinach in my nutribullet - easy peasy - or baby kale.

You also need to eat vitamin C /food containing vitamin C to help the absorption of iron from veg sources.

While spinach is not high in iron, it is higher than most other green veg I believe. Here is my tasty, super easy, spinach and pea soup:

1 onion, finely chopped
Back of spinach/baby spinach (frozen is fine too but just adjust amounts)
1-2 cups frozen peas
Chicken/vegetable stock
Lemon juice
Nutmeg
Greek yoghurt to serve

Gently fry onion in a little olive oil until soft and translucent.

If using fresh spinach, add with a little of the stock and allow to wilt before adding the peas and enough stock to just cover peas and spinach.

If using frozen, you can just add the spinach and peas then top up with sufficient stock to just cover cover the veg (if you try to top up the fresh spinach you have too much liquid).

Cook for approximately 10 minutes.

Allow to cool slightly then use a stick blender to whiz it all up. Add a dash of nutmeg, a squeeze of lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste.

At this point, it will be a very dark green, and quite thick. It's not HUGELY appealing. But store it like this in fridge or freezer.

To serve, pour hot soup into individual bowls and stir in a generous tablespoon (or more if you prefer) of greek yoghurt to each bowl. The colour fades to a gorgeous light vibrant green and the yoghurt adds a lovely tang to the flavour.

I often keep a bowl of this in the fridge and use it for lunches for a few days in a row. The peas add a slight sweetness which goes really well but to up the iron use a higher ratio of spinach to peas.

When I was pregnant my midwife advised dried apricots as the best source of non supplemental iron. Helps offset the common side effect of iron supplements as well.

I also eat lots of greens, and pulses.

Do you k ow why your iron levels have nose dived? Are you bleeding heavily? (Sorry for bluntness.) Because it's key to get that sorted if you are, rather then try to out-eat it.

No idea why, no. I have a coil so no periods. Good diet, so I thought. I eat what I thought was quite a lot of greens like Spinach anyway, always have a bag on the go in the fridge. The doctor was quite blunt and suggested eating 3 potions of red meat a week would be normal, I was a bit taken aback.

Haemoglobin was fine but stored iron was at 10, been told needs to be above 50 to feel better and some people it's in the hundreds.

Not really a recipe but what about fortified breakfast cereal with a handful of raisins each day?