Results tagged “healthy heart” from Mostly Eating

• Mix together oats, natural yogurt and  a grated apple with a pinch of cinnamon and leave to meld overnight in the fridge. The oats will soften perfectly and breakfast is ready in an instant in the morning (just remove from the fridge and drizzle with honey).
• Choose an oat-based cereal. There’s a much wider choice on the market these days than just muesli; compare labels to find one that isn’t loaded with fat or sugar.
• Thicken your smoothie with a spoonful of oats
• Whistle up a batch of oatmeal pancakes topped with fresh fruit and maple syrup (or veggies if you prefer).
  
• Bake your own oaty Wholemeal porridge bread and serve with poached eggs or baked beans
• Another non oatmeal fan, Clotilde from Chocolate and Zucchini, has a recipe for an Oatmeal Breakfast Clafoutis (great made with raspberries and warmed through just before eating)
• Love porridge but in a bit of a porridge rut? I've written before about some of my favourite porridge combinations which might give you ideas for new toppings.
• And OMG, I can’t believe I nearly forgot the fruit, nut and tahini breakfast bars, a great idea from Cassie and perfected by Kathryn with her tahini twist.

• Swop meatballs in marinara sauce for these fantastic Walnut pecan balls. Great with pasta and tomato sauce and the leftovers are handy in a salad or sandwich.
• Use oats as an alternative to breadcrumbs to coat chicken or fish as in this Pan fried mackerel coated with lemon oatmeal
• Oat groats can replace spelt, brown rice, buckwheat groats etc in cold salads or serve them warm like this Warm savoury oatgroats with kale recipe from Martha Stewart.
• Scottish savoury oat dish Skirlie is quickly prepared and can be used as a side dish or a meal in its own right topped with a poached egg.
• This savoury crumble recipe has the added benefit of being packed with vegetables plus canellini and kidney beans.

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.

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.

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!

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.

A few years ago we had a short trip to San Francisco where a rather dry conference was brightened up massively by my bright-spark of a colleague suggesting that we all stay at the Hotel Phoenix. The Phoenix is a day-glo, 1950’s motel-style hotel famous for being the residence of choice for passing bands and other arty types. Such a hip venue was a little daunting at first (boy did I feel like I’d bought the wrong clothes) but the hotel had such a party atmosphere and the staff were so friendly that we had a fantastic time. Even more cool than the hotel was its then newly opened cocktail bar/restaurant, the Bambuddha Lounge. Numerous items from the asian-fusion menu were sampled but the thing that has stayed in my memory was the Eight Element Salad. A big bowl of finely chopped delicacies were mixed at the table, (I remember lime, ginger, garlic, chilli, peanuts, coconut and sesame seeds) and we were left with a pile of verdant greenery with which to parcel them up. The greenery was apparently la lop leaves and the end result was a very invigorating (and slightly surprising) mixture of crunchy, sweet, sour, fiery and citrus.

When Ilva and Joanna had the splendid idea to host an event on heart friendly finger food I was immediately filled with enthusiasm; heart health is such a vital part of nutrition and choosing what to eat that I’ve hardly got a post that doesn’t mention it in some way! After my initial giddiness I realised that for all my healthy-eating talk I actually had very little in the way of finger food in my repertoire. Surely such a worthy event deserved better than my usual standby nibble of chopped veg and houmous? After a bit of pondering I decided to create a heart-friendly homage to that eight-element salad; soft spinach leaves filled with a vibrant asian pesto and topped with fresh spring onion, pepper and cucumber. I still have no idea what a la lop leaf is (I’m pretty sure you can’t get them round my way) but a humble spinach leaf is more than up to the job and creates a pleasing boat shape, curling safely round its cargo when you pick it up.

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.

Macaroni Cheese is one of those foods that many of us have placed on our mental ‘banned substance’ list because of the stonkingly high saturated fat content from all that cheese and butter and cream. But everybody loves it, including my other half who specifically requested macaroni cheese (and shepherds pie, but we haven't got round to that one yet). Thereby is tricky thing about cooking for somebody else regularly; if you love somebody do you feed them what they want to eat or what you hope will be good for them? Hopefully there’s room for a bit of both, which seems like a good theme for my Valentine’s day recipe; a grown-up but slightly more heart-friendly take on macaroni cheese to make for somebody you love.

This macaroni cheese contains wholegrain pasta and breadcrumbs, a mix of full fat and half fat dairy and a tasty leek. Reducing the saturated fat, including some wholegrain ingredients and a fresh vegetable are all great ways of modifying a recipe to make it more heart-healthy. But there is no need to dwell on these things (or even mention them at all); all that is really important is that this is a gooey and cheesy macaroni cheese with a contrasting, golden crunchy topping.