Results tagged “fats” from Mostly Eating

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.

There are always raw food enthusiasts around telling you that a diet exclusive of food cooked using heat is the way to eternal life but in reality the answer (as is nearly always the case in nutrition) lies in variety. As much as some nutrients are diminished by the water and heat that they encounter during cooking, there are a whole host of others that only become user friendly with a touch of heat and a drizzle of oil. The Japanese are probably the best at this balancing act with their talent for mixing raw and cooked vegetables within a single dish, providing bags of texture and nutrients.

This winter I have been studiously avoiding imported salad vegetables as far as possible but I miss the crunchy stuff, and there are only so many kettle chips a girl can reasonably eat to fulfill this particular craving. Enter the winter coleslaw – fantastically crunchy and very nutritious.

Delicious magazine had the obligatory healthy eating focus for its January edition, which came a free supplement on 50 ways to lighten up and feel great. These things can be a bit formulaic don’t you think? Swop your cheddar for stronger tasting parmesan so that you don’t need to use as much, that kind of thing. But this supplement contained more than a handful of fresh ideas on how to maintain a healthy body weight, many of which were about how to tweaking your favourites to make them a little healthier. The supplement was written by registered dietitian Juliette Kellow who knows her nutrition but has also been editor of Slimming magazine. For those of you who can’t get hold of magazine, here are a few of the best tips:

Keep roast meat juicy
Roasting meat on a rack is an excellent way to lose much of fat but is prone to leaving the meat a little dry. You can keep your meat moist but still lose the fat (and extra calories) by basting periodically with vegetable stock or wine.

Substitute the mayo
Substitute mayonnaise with a mix of two tablespoons of low fat natural yogurt and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard (I wouldn’t have gone for this idea a couple of years ago but low fat yogurt is not the sad, watery thing that it once was).

Friday is Burns night, a celebration of all things Scottish and first proper foodie celebration of the new-year for many. By all means serve your haggis in the traditional way with neeps and tatties (mashed swede and potato for the uninitiated) but make sure that you shop generously and have some leftovers to play with. Warm haggis served with soft floury tortilla wraps and creamy tzatziki is an unexpected match made in heaven!

Wonderful Scottish food champion and cookbook author Sue Lawrence talked about this idea on Great Food Live last year and it was one of those combinations that made perfect intuitive sense. Haggis spice blends are closely guarded secrets but the spices at the core are also staples of Greek cookery (pepper, cloves and nutmeg), making haggis a natural match for tzatziki. I couldn’t bear to wait until January to try this out and hitting the shops to buy a haggis (veggie in this case) in mid-November I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to find one. This version of Sue’s dish is made with vegetarian haggis and a winter tzatziki, a fancy way of saying that it is tzatziki made with dried mint, thus neatly avoiding the need to buy air-freighted herbs from the supermarket.

Soup is the perfect food for this time of year; suitably healthy if you ate a few too many mince pies but comforting enough to pacify those of you stuck with snow blizzards or malingering colds. This recipe is for my new favourite, a soup made with roast parsnips, chestnuts and finished off with fresh orange juice and a dollop of zesty, spiced yogurt.

Full bodied is the most fitting description I can conjure for this soup. My other half (the triathlete) raved about it for its deep, near meaty flavour and for myself, well I can’t resist a roast parsnip and the nutmeg, orange zest and yogurt topping adds that bit of freshness that I can’t help looking around for now that autumnal roasts and stews are starting to seem “so last year”.

Chestnuts are a funny old thing aren’t they? Delicious, but very different from your average nut and I couldn’t help but be intrigued about their composition. Chestnuts don’t have the typical nut benefits of high protein and heart healthy monounsaturated fat, but they do have plenty of fibre, and with hardly any fat (good or bad) they have massively less calories than your conventional nut. Pretty good for you, but strangely much closer in make-up to a parsnip than an almond.

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.

You’ve probably made a recipe like this yourself – add a bit of olive oil to the pan, fry the garlic, add another drizzle of olive oil and sizzle the meat, add a handful of veggies and a dash of cream or creme-fraiche to finish it off and voila, you have an instant sauce for pasta. Maybe with just a touch more olive oil to loosen it up at the end. This is the recipe I intended to make, but when I reached for the olive oil I was alarmed by the speed with which the bottle seems to be emptying. I’m sure it was full three weeks ago and now there is only about a third left. Sometimes I’m just too engrossed in its wonderful heart healthy monounsaturated fat profile, busy living the Mediterranean diet, that I forget that all of those drizzles are slowly and effortlessly stockpiling calories. So here’s my tip for the day for anybody else who thinks they might have gone a bit too mediterranean – get a tablespoon from your drawer, fill it with olive oil and then empty the oil into the pan that you use the most. It’s quite a good amount, yes? There, you never have to measure olive oil again – you now know what a tablespoon of olive oil looks like and also what 120 kcal of olive oil looks like, give or take a little.

So to the pasta. The whole dish contains just one teaspoon of olive oil per person, with the extra moisture provided by a big glug of vegetable stock. The stock is a great twist – pop the lid on and the broad beans and chicken effectively steam instead of fry. Vegetable stock gives the final sauce a rich savoury flavour and with the mustard it only needs a little touch of creme-fraiche to finish it off (hats off to my supermarket who now sells creme-fraiche that is both half-fat AND organic). Adding a big handful of mint at the end is a vital stage to make the whole meal lively and fresh (it is still supposed to be summer after all).

This salad is a regular fixture in our house for workday lunches. It tastes fabulous and provides a neat package of heart healthy ingredients: omega 3 rich oily fish, fresh vegetables and a wholegrain in the form of bulgur wheat.

There is just one area of contention in this recipe – it contains a green pepper! Personally I think green peppers are much maligned and love them in certain dishes (especially in this recipe and in a stir fry) but I know some people aren’t keen on them so feel free to substitute with a different colour (yellow looks good). Bulgur wheat is a low GI carbohydrate and so ideal for a lunchtime recipe - its slow energy release is tailored to prevent you from nodding off or reaching for the cookies mid-afternoon (my extensive desk-based trials show that this works approximately 95% of the time!). If you haven’t tried it yet bulgur wheat is super simple to cook, a bit like a sturdier cousin to cous cous; much less temperamental and with a bit more about it. In this recipe the bulgur wheat is made extra delicious by soaking the grains in stock – I’d definitely suggest trying this way of cooking it just once, even if you don’t fancy trying the whole recipe.

Oily fish and heart health

Back to the main ingredient, the mackerel. Did you know that we still don’t know exactly why the omega 3 fatty acids in oily fish are good for your heart? Some of the benefit is thought to be due to its effect in lowering triglyceride levels but increasingly it seems that one of the main ways that oily fish works is by correcting arrhythmias, abnormalities in the natural rhythm of your heart.

Different places recommend different amounts of oily fish and for different people. The Food Standards Agency in the UK recommends that most people have at least two portions of fish per week, at least one of which should be oily and the American Heart Association simply recommends fish twice a week. For people who have already suffered a myocardial infarction (a heart attack), the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the UK, quaintly known as NICE, have recently published a recommendation (in May 2007) for doctors to advise these particular patients to have two to four portions of oily fish per week. While this may all sound like a big list of numbers and recommendations I think the important conclusion is that despite a little bit of adverse publicity a couple of years ago about oily fish and its impact on heart health, most groups are now recommending eating oily fish more than ever.

In our local supermarket you get one type of nut butter, the ubiquitous peanut butter. There is a bit of a choice with texture (crunchy or smooth?) and a choice of which additives you would prefer (would you like extra salt with that or a little palm oil or perhaps a bit of both?) but that’s about it. How about selling me just plain ol’ nuts ground up for a change (nothing added) and maybe a choice in the variety of nuts?

The answer I now know is to make your own nut butter. I’m a recent convert to making nut butter so apologies if you’ve heard it all before! I read a post over on Chocolate and Zucchini about Beurre de Cajou last Summer and then was even more tempted when I read about the upgrade to spiced chocolate peanut butter but somehow it has taken me until now to stop dragging my feed and gave it a go. Its one of those kitchen tasks that sounds like it’s going to be rather drawn out and labour intensive, but in fact only takes about twenty minutes, most of which can be spent online/on the phone/in front of the TV. If only everything in life were so easy!

No more label reading, you can choose your favourite nut and can even perpetually re-cycle the same jar. For me this has meant out with the peanuts and in with the almonds – a more delicate flavour and a better balance between monounsaturated fat (the good stuff) and saturated fat (the bad stuff). The only downside I have found so far is that it does work out a bit more expensive than buying manufactured peanut butter, partly because I chose to use organic nuts and partly because almonds are more expensive than peanuts (you can fiddle with both of these variables to suit your taste and budget).

About 10 years ago, all you could get in the supermarket was tinned tuna, and fresh tuna was luxury, something that you might have out at restaurant. Fast forward a few years and apparently our obsession with fresh tuna has gone too far and tuna is the latest fish to be added to the list of those in danger of over-fishing. This is least in part due to it's popularity in Japan, but hey, they aren't the only country that eats sushi these days.

Happily, the humble but versatile tinned tuna has had time to regroup and reinvent itself. Our local supermarket now sells tinned premium tuna fillets - beautiful firm slices of fish, glossy with olive oil and with a somehow Mediteranean air to them. These have been a revelation to me; it's a bit like comparing beautiful, thick sliced traditionally cured ham with that wafer thin stuff that is about 90% water. But are they good for you and is it ethical to buy them?

Homemade lasagne is fantastic, but I am a lazy cook so for me this statement generally only applies when somebody else makes it. Make a ragu, make a white sauce, layer it all up without running out of one set of ingredients before the others and then cook it all again - and this is without even mentioning the washing up and the possibility of only being able to get the sort of lasagne sheets that you have to precook (life is definitely too short for that last one!).

“Too much faff” is a poor excuse for a foodie not to make something so I have stuck with two more respectable excuses; first and foremost like many people I don’t eat all that much red meat these days, and secondly (and possibly more surprisingly given the state of our kitchen cupboards!) I have never actually owned a lasagne dish. But I have had a recipe in mind for a while, should I ever own a lasagne dish and as santa (Mum and Dad) was very kind this year I have just had the opportunity to give it a go. The idea for the recipe is something I saw on UKTV food some time ago, with a few things added here and there. Here’s how easy it is: chop and fry some veg, add a tin of tomatoes and a few other bits and bobs, layer up with precooked lasagne sheets and blob some mozzarella about in lieu of a white sauce.

As well as the easiness/low washing up quota of the recipe, I was attracted to it for it's potential as a healthier alternative to a normal beef ragu-style lasagne (by which I'm thinking of this kind of thing from Delia Smith) and so I thought I would contribute it to the Heart of the Matter event on heart-healthy pasta dishes. I'm not suggesting that this would be the way to go if you need a very low-fat diet or are trying to lose weight (if either of these are the case the lasagne food group is just not really the place to be hanging around). But for those of us who are just trying to make the things we eat every day a bit healthier then this recipe has a lot going for it, especially if you can team it with a salad and skip the garlic bread.

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.

Cooking Outside the Box: The Abel and Cole Seasonal, Organic Cookbook is the first book by Keith Abel of the Abel and Cole organic home delivery company. Abel and Cole offers weekly nationwide deliveries and seems to be one of (if not the) biggest box schemes in the UK (as an entirely unscientific poll, I know that at least two of my ten closest neighbours get a weekly delivery from their egg-yolk yellow vans).

I’m really enthusiastic about this book and hope that Keith is already pen to paper writing his next one! Cooking outside the box is a rare thing; a book about seasonal, planet-friendly cooking that doesn’t assume that the reader is either a vegetarian or already a confident cooker and buyer of only the best ethically sourced produce.

The friendly tone of the book strikes a happy balance between providing loads of guidance for those that need it, and fostering a bit of culinary experimentation for those who want to make the recipes their own (or who are simply operating under the constraints of their latest box delivery!). Measurements are in handfuls, dollops and mugfuls and virtually none of the recipes have more than about three steps to them. There is even a helpful list of which vegetables you can easily substitute for which others (one of those things which is just obvious to some people and a black art to others), and guidance on temperature settings for electric and gas ovens as well as agas and over-enthusiastic fan ovens like mine.