Results tagged “5-a-day” from Mostly Eating

Inspired by Elaine, Wendy, Kalyn and a whole host of other inspirational gardeners this has been my first summer of growing my own vegetables.  I always enjoy looking at other folks "grow your own" pics so thought I'd share a few of my own. 

This summer has been a steep learning curve, with most lessons learnt the hard way. People say pictures speak a thousand words; these are just a few of the lessons I've learnt.

This is waaay to many radish for two people.  Nobody likes radish this much, even if it's very exciting that they're ready to eat before anything else.

Conversely, three sugar snaps looks like a lot of plant but is nowhere near enough to feed two people who really like them.

And everybody knows that two people don't need more than one or two courgette (zucchini) plants. It's not such a disaster then if you accidentally kill some of those extraneous seedlings by letting them get blown over and snap.
 
It's your garden and place to sit out of an evening so grow a few pretty things too

But don't sit and look at your beautiful handiwork for too long before eating. Somebody or something else will surely beat you to it.

Making a quick lunch from your larder needn’t be a big deal.  As a food fanatic it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-thinking your next meal, deliberating what to make for so long that eventually you are so hungry you’ll eat anything.  Sometimes it’s good to remember that you are just getting yourself something to eat, grab a few nutritious ingredients and get on with it.

Everybody has (or can plan to have) some combination of these ingredients in stock and use them to knock up a quick lunch. Unlike most stir-fries, this is a true one-pan meal because it doesn’t require you to cook a separate grain (thanks goes to Nigella Lawson for the nifty idea of using a can of drained beans instead of cooking rice or noodles). With the step of boiling water neatly side-stepped, your lunch really can be ready in ten minutes.

This recipe is just a template, a broad list of foods into which you can substitute whatever you have available.  The recipe given is a template from which you can experiment and find your own favourite combination:

Frozen meat substitute
Quorn, seitain, tofu, vegetarian “stir fry strips”, “chicken style pieces”
All of these ingredients are a good source of protein, lower in saturated fat than most meats and can be cooked straight from the freezer.

Canned legumes
Chickpeas (garbanzo), butter beans, red kidney beans, cannellini beans, flageolet beans, borlotti beans, mixed pulses.
Legumes provide fibre, carbohydrate and protein as well as providing a useful vegetarian source of iron. Contributes towards your five a day.

A flavoursome paste
Thai curry pastes, indian curry pastes, sun dried tomato paste, pesto, tapenade
These ingredients can be high in fat but a small amount can provide heaps of flavour.

Fresh green leaves
Baby spinach, kale, rocket, green cabbages, watercress, chard, spring greens
Rich in vitamins, minerals and fibre, counts towards your five a day.

A crunchy, quick cooking vegetable
Bell pepper, courgette (zucchini)
Rich in vitamins, minerals and fibre, counts towards your five a day.

A cooking oil
Olive oil, rapeseed (vegetable) oil
These oils are high in monounsaturated fats, thought to be beneficial for heart health.

Between the beans, green leafy veg and peppers a portion of this stir-fry provides at least two of your five a day.

There was an intriguing piece of research published recently regarding the power of eggs for breakfast. Two groups of dieters were each assigned a breakfast equal in calories: the bagel breakfast, consisting of bagel, yogurt and cream cheese; and the egg breakfast, consisting of scrambled eggs, toast and jam. After eight weeks the group prescribed the egg breakfast had achieved a 61% greater weight loss that the bagel group. Eggs it seems are a particularly satisfying breakfast and helped the study subjects to stick to their low calorie diet over the rest of the day. Eggs for breakfast won’t spontaneously cause you to lose weight without also trying to cut down on the amount of food that you eat, however they may make dieting that little bit easier and more successful.

A recent eggy favourite in our household has been cottage cheese french toast with a courgette and corn salsa. Weekends in our household often involve dashing out early, then catching up later in the morning for brunch (I’m writing this at 8.30am on a Saturday and hubby is already long gone, off competing in a local triathlon). This kind of recipe, where much of the preparation can be done the night before, fits with our schedule perfectly. In addition to the satiating power of the eggs, this french toast recipe contains cottage cheese blended into the traditional egg mixture, adding calcium and extra protein and giving the bread that creamy but slightly sour cottage cheese taste. The salsa is delicious and provides a portion of vegetables for breakfast (especially important to factor in if you are skipping a meal and having this for brunch).

The first time I made this I followed the traditional approach of pan frying the toast but the bread soaks up olive oil like a sponge and you have to use a large amount to prevent it from sticking. Baking the bread in the oven turns out to be easier and healthier, and has the added advantage of letting you easily make several servings at once.  That said, if you are stuck for an oven then you can always pan-fry.

Last week was all about those ingredients that sound like they are going to be wholegrains but turn out not to be.  This week is a little of the opposite - I have been cooking with cous cous.  Now those clever foodie types amongst you will know that cous cous isn’t really a grain at all, despite it’s teeny tiny appearance, but that it is actually little tiny pieces of pasta.  But surprisingly perhaps, you can get still get wholegrain cous cous; simply cous cous made from wholewheat flour.

The cous cous, sumac, pepper and date salad featured here is a very simple recipe.  Everybody makes a salad like this every now and then - perfect as a side dish or as a packed lunch to take to work.  Every time I make it this salad it is slightly different, however the ideas behind it are always the same.  I have five broad categories of ingredient in mind to make sure that my salad provides a good range of nutrients:

A wholegrain – choose from quinoa, brown rice, buckwheat, wholegrain spelt, wholewheat cous cous and millet or whatever else you fancy.  Wholegrains are higher in vitamins and minerals than their refined equivalents and full of fibre.  People often find that wholegrains are more filling than refined carbohydrates, so a wholegrain salad is perfect for keeping you energetic and wide awake well into the afternoon.

Fresh vegetables – any chopped fresh or lightly blanched vegetables such as peppers, green beans, radish, tomato, grated carrot, courgette, spring onion, red onion, cucumber or sweetcorn.  All of these will count towards your five a day as well as providing vitamins, potassium and fibre.  I like to include something that I know will give me a decent amount of vitamin C – usually red or yellow peppers.  You can of course use leftover roasted vegetables, in which case how about complementing them with some chopped fresh fruit so that you still get plenty of Vitamin C?

Dried fruit – dates, apricots, figs, sour cherries etc will all add an appealing sweet note to your salad.  Most dried fruits are very high in fibre and usually rich in minerals (particularly iron and sometimes also calcium).

Nuts or seeds – these provide healthy fats, more fibre and a little bit of protein. Most importantly they add bags of texture and flavour.

Flavour enhancers – a little something to boost the flavour.  I used sumac, which adds a lovely tart note against the sweet dried dates (not to mention an exotic pink hue!).  But pretty much anything goes; lemon juice, black pepper, fresh or dried herbs, chilli sauce, spices, seasoning mixes. The idea is to boost the flavour of your lunch without needing to add large amounts of calories or salt.

Last week while I was busy not blogging I got predictably excited about an idea on Culinate for a breakfast salad.  The said salad can be prepared the evening before, kicking the day off to a great start with two portions of veg taken care of before even leaving the house

But the real world doesn't always pan out like that and this weekend has been one of those weekends.  Suddenly it's four o'clock on Sunday afternoon and my total fruit and veg consumption for the day has been a handful of dried fruit at breakfast (one portion down, at least four to go).

Big salads are the perfect cure to a day of vegetable dodging and have an endearing way of combining the best of all culinary worlds: raw and cooked, spicy and sweet, hot and cold.  This roast squash and chickpea salad is delicious and the perfect catch-up job; four portions of veg in one dish.  Definitely make the full quantities of the roast squash and marinated chickpeas even if you aren't feeding four people and you will magically find yourself the owner of a ready made lunch to take to work the next day.

The recipe does have a few stages to it but there's no rush; this is one of those good-natured recipes that will fit in happily around whatever else you might be up to.  I made the dressing and put the chickpeas in to marinade at about 3pm and then went off to sort out some paperwork.  I peeled and diced the squash and sliced the onion late afternoon before settling down to a bit of light blogging, finally roasting the squash and slow cooking the onions just before we wanted to eat.  With all of the prep done the actual cooking part seemed pretty trivial.

Back in the olden days, the only fresh veggies available to eat in the long dark Scottish winter were potatoes and when the potato crop failed there was scurvy.  Scurvy (overt vitamin C deficiency) is thankfully [virtually] unheard of in the modern age, but the urban legend of the student who ate nothing but porridge got me wondering.  Are those of us trying to eat locally through the winter eating a wide enough range of fruit and vegetables to get all of the nutrients that we need? Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting that we are all about to get scurvy, but I don’t think there is any harm in putting a bit of attention into making sure that you fit a couple of good sources of vitamin C into every day, especially if you have slipped comfortably into a routine of roasted root veggies for dinner.

There’s still no evidence that lots of vitamin C will stop you getting a cold, unless you are living life on the edge in extremes of cold or physical stress (soldiers, marathon runners - it might help you guys out), but you do need a top-up of it every day for a whole host of important bodily functions. Vitamin C makes collagen for you, the connective network of tissues in your skin and bones, as well as carnitine, without which you feel would be feeling very tired and weak.  It is also one of those antioxidant nutrients, working hard in combination with other antioxidants to stop the kind of damage to individual cells and arteries that can lead to cancer and heart disease over time. Last but not least, vitamin C gets to work every time you eat a vegetarian iron-rich food making sure that you absorb as much of the iron as possible.



There are a whole host of good and relatively sustainable sources of vitamin C for the winter months:

Juicy fruit
There are lots of fine fruity sources of vitamin C (raspberries, kiwi fruit, citrus, pomegranate) and sadly none of them are growing anywhere near here in the middle of winter. In Britain importing fruit in Winter is a centuries old practice and meeting your five-a-day is difficult without it come February/March/April (the hungry gap) when even the British apples have run out. Delicate fresh strawberries and raspberries are lovely and full of vitamin C but to my mind they are going to taste all the better for the wait next Summer. A workable compromise position is to buy fruit that is sturdy enough to ship and which comes from the same continent (so this week Spanish clementines are in). 

Finding out how your fruit has arrived in the shops can be tricky – hassle your regular supplier for more information if their labelling isn’t very helpful.  Certain suppliers and certification schemes will do this for you - the Soil Association is looking at excluding air freighted produce from its certification programme and many organic box schemes only provide shipped imported produce, no airfreight.

I adore Meeta’s definition of comfort food - “food that hugs you from the inside”. Sums up this kind of food just right doesn’t it?

Dal is very special class of comfort food; it feels like a comfort food (all soft and squishy), it tastes like a comfort food (soothing but moreish) and you can dip your choice of bread into it or shovel with a spoon, bowl to chin. All good stuff. But unlike other comfort foods, dal need not have a touch of cheese, butter, chocolate or cream to their name. In fact they are positively brimming with nutritional benefits, especially when you combine them with a vegetable as in this butternut squash and red lentil variation.

The cinnamon, turmeric and cumin lend a very gentle touch here, imparting aroma to the lentils and squash rather than spice. A tarka is simply a garnish, in this case slow cooked red onion, fiery chilli and garlic. Tarka are generally made using ghee, a saturated fat heavy clarified butter, replaced here by olive oil.

All of those enthusiastic things I said about beans being “agriculturally sustainable and nutritionally multi-tasking” hold true for lentils and I plan to get to know them even better this year. Red lentils are a forgiving place to start if cooking with lentils is new to you, disintegrating into the requisite creamy puree whatever you do to them.

There’s one question that I need to get out of the way quickly before my lovely husband gets any ideas. Yes, these little cakes do have vegetable in them, but no, they don’t count as a portion of veg. I hope I haven’t upset anyone else with that revelation? A portion of veggies you see needs to be at least within shouting distance of 80g, and a slice of carrot cake or any of its culinary siblings come in nowhere near that, not even nutritionist Kathryn’s Chocolate and Beetroot cake or Heidi’s Special Zucchini Bread. These little squash bites are in the same boat – a meagre 12.5g of squash per cake. But don’t worry, it is not so much what you are putting in that is important here, it is what the squash lets you leave out. Here's the low down on why these are worth firing up the oven:

• Crystallised ginger and butternut squash are the perfect autumn flavour combo


• Roasted butternut squash provides plenty of moisture leaving the recipe to be naturally low fat


• Flour is OK (unless you have coeliac disease), especially wholemeal, but just doesn't do as much good stuff for you as oats. This recipe is loosely based on the kind of proportions you would use to make muffins but skips half of the flour in favour of low GI, cholesterol busting oats.


• There's no butter or marg in here, just two tablespoons of rapeseed oil to make twenty cakes. Rapeseed oil is the one also known as vegetable oil or canola and is predominantly monounsaturated like olive oil (indeed you could use a mild olive oil instead if you prefer).


• You won't miss the butter, I promise, because there are also a handful of buttery macadamia nuts in there.

These are an every day sorta cake. They aren’t particularly pretty or delicate (meaning that you can dunk them in your tea), but they are as nutritionally well balanced as you can expect a cake to be. Like most low fat cakes they don’t keep for too long but this works in their favour – I keep a batch in the freezer and when I fancy something sweet with my tea I take one of these out at breakfast and it is ready to eat by coffee break.

This is an entirely self-invented recipe and I'm not a baking expert by any means; feel free to tweak the recipe and report back on any improvements you come up with! I’m sure you can think of plenty of things to do with the rest of the butternut squash but if not pop it into the freezer for now (I have an easy savoury recipe to use the rest on its way).

My foray into vegetable-based baking coincides with a beta carotene theme for regular blogging event Sugar High Friday so I thought I would take the opportunity to join those guys for a change (the event is hosted this time around by Leslie at Definitely Not Martha). It sounds good so I will put a link to the round-up here when it appears.

For the last few weekends I have been a triathlon widow, which has been OK with me because I have had plenty of time to potter about in the kitchen and ponder on what to do with the bounty from our fruit trees.

The usual suspects when it comes to preserving fruit to use through the winter are jams and chutneys. Most years I make plum chutney and I have nothing against a bit of jam but somehow it always seems such a shame to take a super healthy food and to mix it with its weight in sugar. If you want to make your fruit last without adding large quantities of sugar then one answer is to turn it into softly stewed compote and freeze.

Unlike in jam making where the sugar has a central role in preservation, when you freeze fruit the amount of sugar is dictated only by palate, so unless you have a very sweet tooth you can go a lot lower with the sugar than most recipes suggest. I've been mulling this over since Heidi's Plum and Rosewater compote in July (20% sugar to fruit) and more recently Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's article on British plums (25% sugar to fruit) and decided to try my luck at 10% sugar to fruit. This worked out perfectly for my taste buds and is a respectable level of sugar for healthy people to eat as an occasional food (nutrition guidelines suggest that any foods with over 15g of added sugar per 100g be regarded as high in sugar, with 5g or less per 100g considered low).

Despite losing a little bit of certain vitamins compared with eating raw, cooked fruit is a very nutritious food to eat, 'counting' towards that five a day while being up there with a ready meal in the convenience stakes. For those of us who like to know these things, a portion of cooked or stewed fruit is three tablespoons. I have a bunch of reusable containers from Lakeland and have frozen my compote in roughly three portion batches so that I can take out one tub a week through the Winter. Our freezer isn't big enough to store a batch for every week of the Winter but I have stuffed quite a lot in there, largely aided by accidentally leaving the freezer door open a couple of weeks before (I wouldn't advise this as a strategy, it was quite messy and expensive). There is something very satisfying about having a freezerful of healthy food squirreled away, though as always I’m sure there are pros and cons in the sustainability argument. Freezing fruit will use more energy than traditional preserving methods but for me compote fulfils a completely different space in the diet from jam and I love it that I won't need to rely so much on imported fruit during the Winter.

I have made two compotes, one from plum and one from apple, but you will probably have your own ideas depending on what fruit you have a glut of or can buy cheaply. I'm pleased with the contrast between these two - one week I will have a gentle, aromatic plum compote perfumed with vanilla and the next week a fresher, chunkier apple compote spiked with a clean rosewater flavour.

In Oxford you know that autumn is approaching when it is time for St Giles Fair. The two main roads that merge on the North side of the city centre are closed and an old-fashioned funfair springs up overnight, causing traffic chaos for three whole days. Colleges, offices, shops, pubs and museums all suddenly find their main entrance opening out onto the back of a fun house or zero gravity ride and on good years a big wheel offers sneaky peeks into college quadrangles and secret gardens. St Giles Fair also brings with it three unmistakable smells: diesel, candyfloss, and the irresistible waft of frying onions from the fair’s numerous burger vans.

Fresh from the fair and armed with my local, seasonal but mainly just very cute aubergine (see picture), I knew I wanted to pair it with some of those sweet, slow-cooked onions and a really rich (and dare I say) autumnal tomato sauce. The final recipe is a little more time consuming than most of my cooking but griddling the courgette and aubergine and slow cooking the onions is what makes this dish. Lightly brushing the aubergine (eggplant) and courgette (zucchini) with olive oil and griddling until they have golden criss-cross markings on them brings out their flavour in much the same way as slow cooking does for the onions, without letting the aubergine act as too much of a giant olive oil sponge. Speaking of the aubergine, these italian heirloom types have a sweet and creamy flesh with no hint of bitterness to need salting away.

I totted it up quickly on my notepad and a serving of this recipe easily provides three fruit and veg portions. I’ve teamed the vegetables up with quinoa because it has a pleasant nutty flavour and is a healthy choice in carbohydrate terms but I don’t really believe in any of that individual ‘superfood’ business; if you don’t fancy quinoa just substitute it for another wholegrain like brown rice, bulgur or barley. For the curious there is some detailed information on the GI News site from Sydney University about the interaction between wholegrain goodness and glycaemic index.

You know it only just occurred to me that all this quinoa we’ve suddenly started eating has to be coming from somewhere and sure enough when I checked the brand I bought last is imported from Bolivia. Do we grow quinoa in the UK? Yes we do apparently, as a tall dense cover crop for game birds to hide in! I wonder if that is starting to change.

There was some hesitation before deciding to post this (it is after all a cheese sarnie) but as people are still working through their zucchini/courgette bounty it seemed the public-spirited thing to do.

Low-fat cream cheese used to be a regular sandwich filling but lately I’ve been conscious that it isn’t available in a cow friendly organic form and so I have been experimenting with organic ricotta. Cheeses are amazingly varied in their nutritional content and Ricotta is one of the lowest fat cheeses. It’s versatile too - think ricotta, berries and a drizzle of honey on sourdough for breakfast or substitute it in place of higher fat goats cheese in recipes (for example in my spaghetti with courgette, lemon and goats cheese, the pasta twin of this sandwich). If you fancy reading more about why all cheeses are not equal, the Good Cheese Guide from the dietitians at Hillingdon Hospital and Does cheese have any nutritional benefit? from Kathryn over at Limes and Lycopene both do a fine job.

This sandwich is a breeze to make (I know, you wouldn’t expect any less of a cheese sandwich) but this one also bestows lunch with a decent hit of calcium and one of those portions of fruit and veg. A julienne peeler (or clever knife skills) will give you a delicate tangle of zucchini strands, perfect to absorb the clean citrus and mint flavours and to disguise any bitter tendencies in the zucchini. If you don’t have a julienne peeler /fancy knife skills just aim to cut the courgette into as fine matchsticks as you can; grated, sadly, is too soggy for most bread to stand up to. Ricotta, courgette, lemon and mint are a real taste of summer; revel in them while you still can Northern Hemisphere!

Grills and barbecues often turn out not to be the most balanced of meals, majoring in meat and then some more meat, maybe with a bit bread on the side. They can be a bit dull too, without any vegetables to add crunch and colour except a leaf of lettuce or two as an afterthought. A warm salad is surely the way to go - lean meat with grilled vegetables and ripe fruit, all of the juices melding together and forming their own dressing. The salad I made uses organic chicken breast, earthy field mushrooms and more of those beautiful figs from my garden but you could just treat this recipe as a basic formula. How does skinless duck breast, asparagus and cherries, or turkey, red onion and apricot sound?

The possibilities are endless as nearly all vegetables can be grilled successfully but you do need to toss them in a little tiny bit of oil to stop them sticking to the pan or rack. To keep it healthy I used olive oil with its high monounsaturated fat content and got my fingers into the bowl to spread the oil across the vegetables so that I didn't have to use as much. Asparagus, peppers, mushrooms, fennel, squash, aubergine, potato, onion, sweet corn, courgette, sweet potato, parsnip, spring onion and tomato will all give good results. National Geographic’s Green Guide has a great article on how best to prepare each different vegetable for grilling and gives two particularly good tips. The first is to cook thin and watery veg like asparagus, tomatoes and spring onions whole. The second tip, to avoid blackened and charred offerings is to grill the vegetables for just long enough to give them those attractive golden grill marks and then to put them into a bowl with cling film over the top, letting them finish cooking in their own steam.

Like many people we have recently returned from our Summer holiday (a wondeful nine days in Barcelona) and I have been trying to make that rested holiday feeling last, switching my laptop off at a respectable time and getting to bed early. Without any conferring, my other half seems to have made the same decision – he’s sitting out in the garden hammock with a book right this minute.

As well as bringing home a different pace of life, I’ve noticed that a few holiday eating habits have tagged along with me. Pondering on this it occured to me that a holiday is one of the few times that we ever dramatically change what we eat. If you’re not that interested in food then yes, you could stick with what you eat at home, but I’ll take it that if you are reading this page then you probably aren’t that person. For a foodie holidays are just full of opportunity for new eating adventures: exciting new markets and shops to forage in, streets upon streets of lovely restaurants and cafes to try and maybe even the fun and challenge of cooking away from your own kitchen.

The healthy habits I brought home
Pa amb tomaquet
The best discovery! The Catalans have bread with absolutely everything, but rather than smothering it with butter, it comes rubbed with fresh, juicy tomato and a drizzle of heart-healthy olive oil. I have been obsessively making this every since I got back and with all kinds of bread: baguette, granary, rye, you name it. Ximena over at Lobstersquad wrote a post about this recently (even though she is, in her own words, from enemy territory in Madrid) and can give you the skinny on the correct way in which to add the tomato, oil and salt to the bread.

Bowls of fruit
The apartment we rented was a five minute stroll away from the Santa Caterina market and for once we had the luxury of an empty fridge to fill. A constant therefore was a huge bowl of washed, ripe fruit which we brought out at every mealtime. It was partly having plenty of fruit in that made the difference, but also having it all cleaned up and ready to eat, there to tuck into the moment it takes your fancy.

Smaller measures
Many of the bars we went to served much smaller measures of wine than are customarily served in England – around about the 70cl mark. After feeling a bit short-changed at first I kinda got to like this. It slowed me down a little bit and made sure that the white wine was always fresh and cool (plus you had the ample opportunity to try something different if the first one isn’t to your liking!).

Slower eating
Even breakfast became a leisurely two course affair, with Pa amb tomaquet and little bit of lean meat or a pastry, followed by fruit or a yogurt. Back at home this has translated into finding little ways to extend meals without piling on the calories, for example a few chopped vegetables with a spoonful of dip or some veggies in olive oil before dinner (Nigella Lawson suggests a bowl of miso soup but the weather has been too hot for this). A little bit of fruit after dinner has made a healthy pudding on several occcasions, sometimes with a dollop of yogurt or a sliver of cheese on the side.

How do you sum up a Laksa for somebody who hasn’t tried it before? On the one hand it ticks lots of boxes that somehow bring to mind healthy thoughts: spicy; fresh-flavours; crunchy veg and soup. On the other hand it has that essential comfort-food ingredient carbohydrate (in the form of noodles), and is bathed in luscious, creamy coconut milk.

There is an interesting wikipedia page on laksa for those who like to know more about culinary traditions and history; apparently there are actually two types of laksa, curry laksa and assam laksa. I must admit that my recipe is a complete culinary hybrid with the coconut milk base of curry laksa and the sour notes of an assam laksa. The main inspiration for my recipe is in Jo Pratt’s lovely new (and surprisingly pink and girly) book, In the Mood for Food, with a few twists of my own inspired by health and storecupboard. It comes out just creamy enough to feel like a treat and has a great mix of textures. Sometimes I think it is just the small things that really make a difference, for example I’ve followed Jo’s tip to slice the prawns in half lengthways which means that you get a bit of prawn in nearly every mouthful.

Noodle soup dishes like Laksa and Miso soups are fantastic places to use up bits of leftover veg from the fridge (within reason, I suspect parsnip wouldn’t go well here). The original recipe had a couple of spring onions in it per person but given that all you have to do is chop them up and throw them in it's a good opportunity to eat a bit more veg. You can put in as much or as little as you want but for this dish to count as one of your ‘five a day’ you want to include at least 80g of veg per person.

Something that this post made me think about that I've never really considered before is whether or not coconut counts towards your fruit and veg quota. The whole ‘what counts’ thing is essentially based on scientific consensus so there isn’t a definitive answer, but my hunch is that counting coconut flesh or coconut milk as a portion would be considered counter-productive because of its very high saturated fat content. There isn't an official fruit and veg portions expert group to give a verdict on the matter but I did see that Sam, the Food Standards Agency’s nutritionist agrees with me on this (coconut apparently is considered more akin to a nut than a fruit). In this laksa the effects of the saturated fat in the coconut milk are tempered by diluting it with stock and adding some richness back in the form of peanut butter. The final result is not low-fat but the balance of fats in the dish are improved by these two adjustments. Nuts are full of monounsatured fats and replacing saturated fat with these monounsaturates can help lower LDL (bad) cholesterol levels.

A few people I know turn their noses up at Quorn because it “doesn’t taste of anything”. To my mind they are missing the point; it is precisely this quality of Quorn that makes it useful. Yes, the plain imitation chicken fillets are decidedly uninspiring (and a little odd) but ignore those and go for the mince or the pieces; Quorn is at its best in something like a stew or a chili where it can absorb all of the other flavours like a sponge.

This vegetarian chili is not the most elegant dish around but the huge batch I have just made will be most welcome over the next few weeks when I am going to be very busy with limited time to cook and shop. It freezes beautifully and is very highly rated by the more carnivorous half of the household.

The important thing with this one is that you have to make this recipe the day before you want to eat it if you want it to taste good. I think there are two reasons why this is even more important for a quorn chili than a meat version. Firstly, because parts of the dish are relatively bland tasting, you need to allow longer for that magical merging of flavours that happens to make any stew type dish taste more than just the sum of the individual parts. Secondly, some of the lovely aromatic compounds in the spices will dissolve in the water component of the dish and others in the fat. Because this version is so low in fat compared with a meat dish again you need to give it a bit longer for all of the flavours to spread throughout. So, make it while you watch a movie on a rainy Saturday afternoon, wandering into the kitchen to give it a stir occasionally, and then it will be ready and waiting as a quick dinner on Sunday or Monday night. Bag or box the remaining portions and put them in the freezer from which they will emerge even tastier.

Friday was a big day for me, my last day after working in the same place for nearly nine and a half years! As is tradition when somebody arrives or leaves we had a big communal coffee morning, known locally as a Beano.

This isn't the place to describe the perfectly chosen flowers, photos and other gifts I was given, the lovely speech (though Stuart did you really need to bring up the rugby tackling incident?), or the sniffing on my part. But I would like to say a big Thank You again to everybody involved in giving me such a fantastic send off - you know who you are! Anyway, enough of the sentimental stuff now, if you are reading this blog you probably want me to shut up and get to the food part.

My offerings for the occasion were some Chocolate and Chili bites. These went very quickly and a few people asked for the recipe so I’m guessing they were a hit; you can find the original recipe for them on the Chocolate and Zucchini web site. These are very rich (more akin to a brownie rather than a muffin) and very tasty. I'd love to tell you all about how good for you they are with their antioxidant-rich dark chocolate but given their other major ingredients (lots and lots of butter and sugar) it would be terribly unethical of me to encourage their regular consumption on health grounds. What I will say is that these are suitably small so as not to make you feel too guilty, and that a little of what you fancy does you good.

Today was not a day to go out to buy something for lunch – the weather forecast said “damaging winds gusting 60 to 70mph” and it was not exaggerating. It was so bad that every so often the wind gusts through the roof and makes the hatch from the landing to the loft lift up and drop with a bang (boy did that scare the cat!).

Lunch was therefore something concocted from the remainders in the fridge. The last of the virtuous seasonal, organic and local parsnips fried in a little olive oil and thyme, with a dollop of cottage cheese on the side and finished off with a sprinkling of seeds. The whole thing was surprisingly good; the sourness of the cottage cheese complemented the sweet, caramelised parsnips and the seeds added a welcome crunch to the whole thing.