Results tagged “less than 20 minutes” from Mostly Eating

Even if you only dabble in growing your own vegetables, chances are that you grow a few radish here and there.  Few crops are as reliable or quick, speeding from sowing to serving in as little as three weeks. Our garden alternates between the mild, multi-coloured globe shaped radish that were my first ever crop and the hotter, torpedo shaped french breakfast radish.

This raita was inspired by a memorable keralan dinner cooked for us by friends, inspired in turn by their recent trip to India.  All of the food was vegetarian and included a dish that looked like a regular cucumber yogurt raita.  The first taste was cooling yogurt and cucumber, but swiftly followed by an unexpected and warming kick of ginger.  The same concept works equally well with the modest radish, which is also much easier to grow in the UK (though I am tempted to have a bash at propogating supermarket ginger indoors).

Like tzatziki and cucumber raita, this dish doesn’t keep terribly elegantly.  It’s not that it goes off overly quickly, just that the vegetables steadily seep water which separates from the yogurt.  You can easily drain off the excess liquid give it a good stir, but as the whole thing only takes five minutes to pull together I just tend to make a batch as I need it.  We use this as an accompaniment to veggie dishes (like the spicy chickpeas in the photo), simply cooked fish and barbecued or griddled meats.  If you fancy it you can add some finely chopped ginger for extra heat.

In the snowy weeks at the start of the year there were a couple of days when I couldn’t get to work and I had the opportunity to really immerse myself in some reading. Springing off from Elaine’s excellent collection of links on How to build & maintain healthy bones on a plant-based diet I spent a happy couple of days reading up on bone health and found inspiration very close to home.

In Oxford (where I live and work) there is an ongoing research study called EPIC, the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. EPIC is an impressive undertaking; it has been running since 1993 and has followed the diets of 65,000 Oxford residents since then, watching and waiting to see which patterns emerge between the food we eat and our health.  Because Oxford has such a lot of vegetarian folk, the study has provided excellent opportunities to look at the pros and cons of being vegetarian and vegan.

Are vegan diets (by definition dairy-free) good or bad for your bones is one such conundrum the researchers hope to answer.  So far in the EPIC group, the meat eaters, fish eaters and vegetarians all seem to have about the same overall risk of having a fractured bone.  The vegans in the group however had about a third more fractures than those other groups.  It’s a deceptive result this one though, and the true picture only emerged after the statisticians had a closer look at the numbers.  Those vegans who had enough calcium in their diet were no more likely to have a fracture than those following other styles of diet.  It seems it’s not a vegan diet that is bad for your bones at all, just a badly balanced vegan diet without enough calcium in 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.

This week has seen something of a glut parsnips in our house, having bought a few in the shops and then been sent a few more by Abel and Cole who kindly sent me one of their fruit and veg boxes to try.  Parsnips have been popping up in the expected places such as soups and a few less expected like the tiny cubes dotted through a winter frittata along with leeks and smoked cheddar.  And then finally there was this lunchtime salad using raw parsnip, chickpeas and goats cheese coated in a honey mustard dressing.

Raw parsnip seems like a different vegetable from a soft, caramelised roasted parsnip.  A far feistier entity indeed; crunchy and unexpectedly peppery. I had some doubts about sharing this recipe; I’m not big on wacky ingredients, even when they are nutritious, and I’m definitely not a raw food diet advocate.  But then I saw Sally Schneider had used raw parsnip in her book The Improvisational Cook, in a Celery Root, Parnsip and Beet Slaw recipe.  Sally is a former chef, regular contributor to The Splendid Table foodie podcast and all round culinary genius, ergo it must be OK. 

I’m delegating responsibility to Jamie Oliver for the nutritional component of today’s post. As he comments, it’s nearly all water. 

It does have a bit of vitamin C, some calcium and fibre, but that’s not the point of rhubarb…Instead it has an amazing flavour spectrum

Jamie Oliver

He’s right too, I double-checked in my always to hand “incredibly detailed guide to the nutritional composition of everything” book. But not every fruit and vegetable has to be an antioxidant superhero; sometimes it’s just enough for them to be there, saving us from some riotously unhealthy alternative choice. And it does a fine job of tasting amazing, even when people turn it into whacky sounding dishes like hot and sour rhubarb sauce and rhubarb and ginger oat thickie.

...people are rediscovering the health benefits of eating rhubarb and it fits into modern tastes

Janet Oldroyd

The distinguished history of rhubarb was one of the topics discussed on clever quiz show Q.I last week. As well as discussing Yorkshire's rhubarb triangle, it turns out that rhubarb was very popular for its health-giving properties in Queen Victoria’s time. So popular in fact that during the First Opium War China threatened to withdraw the supply of rhubarb to the UK, thus wiping out the entire population through mass constipation. Phew, it’s a good job we won...

Nobody is more surprised than me by my current emotion (well OK, maybe my Mum will be a bit more surprised than I am if she’s reading this).  I’m upset because …. march is the end of the brussels sprout season!

Sprouts are a fabulous winter source of vitamin C and being so readily available locally meant that this winter just seemed like the time to put previous prejudice aside and give them another try.  I’ve always hated brussels sprouts, but a couple of factors have won me round.  First and foremost, sprouts are just tastier than they used to be – growers have been working hard to come up with sweeter tasting varieties (if you don’t believe me, well then that's all the more reason to give them another try).  Secondly, the blogosphere has sprouted some amazing recipes over the last couple of winters. If you look closely at the recipes they all have one quality in common; the sprouts are at no time be cooked using water. Therein lies the top tip - if you want to learn to love sprouts in all their glory then you need to start by steering well clear of anything boiled or microwaved.  

Heidi’s golden crusted spouts recipe dusted with cheese was the deal clincher for me, after which I have progressed swiftly through cheesy pasta sauces and on to virtually undisguised sprouts in healthy stir fries.  Still to come is the ultimate pinnacle of sprout acceptance, the raw sprout (roll on the first frost of winter 2008).

Five recipes to make you love brussels sprouts
Start with Heidi's golden crusted sprouts and work your way through.  Not a recipe but useful for those who have been willfully avoiding sprouts is Vegan Yum Yum's article on How to Buy and Prep Brussels Sprouts

• Golden-Crusted Brussels Sprouts Recipe Heidi at 101 cookbook
  
• Pasta with Hashed Brussels Sprouts and Pine Nuts Molly at orangette
  
• Brussels sprouts with spiced breadcrumbs recipe by Tom Norrington-Davies (channel 4)
• Roasted Brussels Sprouts Recipe with Balsamic, Parmesan, and Pine Nuts by Kalyn at Kalyn's Kitchen
  
• Caramelized strips of tofu served over sauteed shredded brussels sprouts Heidi at 101 cookbooks
• Brussels sprouts and tofu by Yotam Ottolenghin and ably tested by Wendy

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.

Everybody has their favourite way of making porridge. Purists will tell you that porridge has to be cooked long and slow to develop the correct consistency, stirred with the attention usually only reserved for a good risotto. There's no way I'm standing around doing that first thing in the morning, so to the microwave it is. Mind you, there is a way get some of that traditional creaminess into a microwave porridge and that trick is to soak the oats in the milk before you cook it.

Here's how it works in our house: fall out of bed, stumble down stairs, pour oats and milk into a bowl while making obligatory cup of tea, put bowl into microwave out of way of the cats, go back upstairs and get washed and dressed, come back down, cook porridge, eat. If you are feeling crazily organised you can do the soaking stage the night before and leave the porridge mixture soaking in the fridge where it will become even creamier (I have even been known to eat this mixture cold without cooking it, on the train. Funny looks? Yes!).

Porridge is just made for experimentation and this fig and plum porridge is a joy (think christmas morning, every day). Dried figs are an excellent partner to porridge, keeping their texture better than most dried fruits because of all of those little tiny seeds (did you know that they also contain a surprisingly large amount of calcium and iron?). Allspice is this year's winter spice of choice for me, having the requisite warm, mulled wine fragrance but with a bit more punch than cinnamon. And nutritionally there are pretty much only good things to say about oats; if you would like to read more about these good things I highly recommend Canadian Dietitian Leslie Beck's Featured Food article on oats. Scratching around, the only thought close to a criticism I have ever managed to come up with is that oats are a little lower in insoluble fibre (the roughage sort) than some other cereals. The addition of fresh and dried fruit boosts this and I also throw in a teaspoon of flaxseeds at the soaking stage (these are also called golden flaxseed, flax and linseed). The finishing touch to the porridge is a decadent sprinkling of dark muscovado sugar crystals that melt into the top in an irrestibly fudgy way.

This salad has been a regular fixture in both of our work lunchboxes ever since I first made it a couple of months back. It isn’t anything fancy, just a quick tuna and bean salad that you can assemble in under five minutes, and for which you can keep most of the ingredients in the cupboard. It is a lunch for a greedy day, for when you feel like a great bowlful of something to munch through but don’t particularly welcome the accompanying calories (very rarely do you get such a big helping for around the 300kcal mark).

The tuna is good quality tuna fillets in olive oil for taste, sustainability, and for the small helping of omega-3 fatty acids this will contain (you can find more detail about this in an earlier post; Some tips for buying ethical and healthy tuna, with a simple nicoise recipe). For anybody who doesn’t really like canned tuna but who likes most other fish, I would really recommend hunting out some top quality canned tuna like yellowfin ventresca fillets and giving it a try (see the aforementioned earlier post for details). It tastes much better than the usual sort, which can be a bit dry and bland, without being overly expensive. I also use organic beans for this salad where possible, working on the theory that they will have been grown using sensible agricultural methods.

This recipe and my last post about the great health benefits and sustainability of beans were inspired by Nigella Lawson's prodigious use of canned beans in her latest book Nigella Express (you can find the earlier post here "The perfect convenience food? Why a humble tin of beans is good for you and the planet"). Ironically this declaration of inspiration was followed by a passionate discussion about how we were all a bit disappointed in Nigella for unhealthy and envioronmentally unfriendly ways of late!

Nigella suggests her tuna and bean salad as part of a shared antipasti meal, but we prefer this on its own for lunch, lightened with a generous helping of salad leaves. Nigella’s recipe uses red onion, leaving me mildly perplexed as to why she didn’t take her own advice and go for spring onions, which you can simply snip into the salad with a pair of scissors. Instead of parsley I have gone for our very own indigenous designer leaf, a big handful of crunchy, emerald watercress, snipped into short lengths for easy eating (there are few things less glamorous at lunch time than trying to bite your way through a stubborn, dangling piece of watercress). If you are really lucky you might be able to find watercress puncutated with cute little white flowers.

As much as I love Nigella Lawson, cast your eye over the recipes in her latest book, Nigella Express, and it becomes obvious that healthy eating and sustainable food shopping were not really at the front of her mind. Chocolate peanut butter sauce anybody? And just don’t get me started on the disposable oven trays and plastic bags. But anyway, enough of the griping, there are some great quick recipes in the book and I do think she has really hit on something with all of those tasty recipes using canned beans and pulses (chickpeas with rocket and sherry, cod and cannellini, and white bean mash to name just a few of them). Canned beans might just might be the perfect convenience food for the modern age; quick, comforting, healthy, agriculturally sustainable and nutritionally multi-tasking (counting as a “five a day” vegetable while also being a great veggie and vegan source of dietary protein).

A huge range of plant foods fit under that interchangeably used legumes/beans banner (lentils, peanuts, beans, chickpeas, soya beans to name a few). The ones I am talking about here are all those lovely types of beans that we dry or buy in cans to eat at our leisure later. Cannellini beans (white kidney), borlotti beans (cranberry), chickpeas (garbanzo), black beans, kidney beans and butter beans (lima), to name just a few.

Most vegetarians and vegans have known that beans are a good source of protein for years and the amino acid make-up of their proteins is a perfect complement to many of the other common plant protein sources. Fiddly protein combining for vegans and vegetarians we now know isn’t necessary, but it helps to eat from a wide variety of sources across the day, advice that applies just as much to us growing band of nearly-veggies. But the health benefits of beans go far beyond providing this basic nutritional cornerstone. Beans are a key part the much-researched Mediterranean diet, when eaten with lots of other tasty foods like fresh fruit and vegetables, olive oil, nuts, fish, wholegrains and the odd glass of wine. Research in this area is still ongoing but at the moment there is very good evidence that this diet can reduce the risk of heart disease, with newer evidence emerging which suggests that this type of diet also reduces the risk of several major cancers, when compared with the diets people more typically follow in the UK and United States. Some of this goodness is likely to be down to the soluble fibre found in beans, the type that seems to lower cholesterol.

Spiced chilli hot chocolate is an idea as old as well, hot chocolate! The earliest traces of hot chocolate, found in Mayan tombs in Guatamala dating back to 460 A.D, had been made from a paste ground from cocoa seeds mixed with cornmeal and chillis. I like this spicy hot chocolate as an occasional mid afternoon pick me up when I am struggling to concentrate on something complicated – there’s definitely something in the research from Nottingham University showing that a cocoa rich drink can improve blood flow to the brain. Chilli is also well known for improving blood flow all over your body so this would be equally welcome to warm you up after a bracing winter walk outside.

Sadly chocolate is not the health food that some clever marketing people would like us to believe (or that we would like to believe perhaps?), but for an occasional sweet treat a mug of hot spicy drinking chocolate is not such a bad thing. Two tips to keep it on the healthy side; first, use good quality plain chocolate rather than a sweetened milk chocolate or chocolate powder and second, use semi-skimmed or skimmed milk to keep this on the low fat side. All chocolate is high in sugar and fat (dark chocolate just has a little bit less fat and a little bit more sugar) and so the health gain in choosing dark (plain chocolate) is not really about fat but is because dark chocolate contains more cocoa solids, usually around the 70%. It is the cocoa solids in chocolate that have been associated with having heart health benefits and that contain valuable anti-oxidants.

If you've ever heard nutritionists talking about sugary and sweet foods being empty calories they mean that these foods provide calories but bugger all else of nutritional usefulness. Happily this hot chocolate is well away from being empty calories with those 70% cocoa solids and a good helping of bone healthy calcium in the milk. If you don’t drink cows milk just go for whatever alternative you normally use but try to choose one that has been fortified with calcium.

And now to the all important third tip - for a super enjoyable, guilt-free beverage experience make your drink from tasty fairly traded dark chocolate! Rachel who makes and bakes many lovely things over at Rkhooks is gathering together all of our best chocolate recipes to promote the chocolate campaign from Stop the Traffik. The chocolate campaign is there to draw attention to the shocking practice of using trafficked child slave labour to harvest cocoa beans on the Cote D'Ivoire. The chocolate campaign web site has some information about where to buy your traffik-free chocolate from but essentially for a chocolate to be awarded Fairtrade status it must be guaranteed not to have involved any trafficked labour in its production so you can just look out for fairtrade chocolate.

As mentioned in my earlier post about the french beans with almonds, I'm going through a phase of 'messing about with my vegetables', finding new ways to cook and prepare that don't bring anything disagreeably unhealthy into the equation. Roughly translated, this means no lashings of saturated fat heavy butter (well not every day anyway!) and not too much salt. Most of the time it also entails cooking methods that maintain the vitamin content of the vegetables as much as possible, so the methods that don't use too much water to and which do involve quick cooking (stir fry, steam, microwave). This week's experiment has been baby carrots, sort of steamed and coated in a sweet, sticky plum and honey glaze (secretly sneaking in extra fresh fruit without adding any salt or fat).

My shock discovery of the week has been about the baby carrots of America. You guys can’t get enough of these carrots apparently, so much so there is a roaring trade in taking full size grown-up carrots and whittling them down into faux baby carrots! My first reaction to this was outrage (surely this has be an incredible waste of natural resources?) but in fact these carrots are a clever solution to consumer fickleness. Piles of misshapen, knobbly carrots that nobody wants to buy are magically twirled into standard 2-inch babies in a process that was the brain-child of Californian Mike Yurosek. Mike developed his process because he was fed up with watching all the wastage from the carrot business, seemingly a great example of a sustainable business idea. In a strange twist, demand for the baby carrots has been so massive that business is no longer a niche charged with using up an industrial by-product; carrots are now being grown in long, thin shapes better suited for turning in to several ‘babies’ apiece. I really don’t know where the baby carrot industry stands now in sustainable terms (possibly not so good any more?) but from a nutritional point of view you have to be pragamatic and conclude that anything that persuades people to use vegetables as a snack is probably positive.

There is one thing I am sure about – those fake baby carrots can't taste anything like a real, fresh from the ground, naturally cute 'n stumpy baby carrot! You can see from the picture that my carrots arrived reassuringly caked with mud and mishapen and so I'm fairly sure they are the real deal. The plum and chilli sauce gives this an almost oriental sweet and sour feel but the carrots themselves remain uncontrovertibly earthy and english. We had ours with pan fried Irish trout and noodles tossed with raw pak choi and sesame oil but I think these carrots would be equally at home at the side of a roast dinner. Trout is an oily fish (containing a good measure of omega 3 polyunsaturated fatty acids) and is ideal for a quick supper, cooking almost instantly in its filleted form. This particular trout was a mini adventure in itself as my other half did the shopping and bought home one whole trout for us to share (I've only ever bought trout ready filleted before – I know, such a sheltered life!). Funnily enough he hadn't really thought ahead to how he was going to get the trout into shareable form. Anyway, a bit of googling of 'trout filleting' and I was soon getting my knife dirty and fingers slimy rather cackhandedly cutting off the two fillets. The end result was a bit untidy around the edges but tasty and I think somewhat underrated at only £2.50 for an organic trout to feed two.

There are all kinds of tasty pod-based vegetables around at the moment and I am determined to make the most of them before we can only get them by flying them in from Kenya, Thailand and other far-flung countries. Over the last few weeks we have had the most amazing technicolour array of french beans, a vegetable I used to call the green bean. This seems like something of a misnomer now; so far this summer I have had yellow beans, purple beans and green beans as well as several variations on the stunning purple and green speckled beauties in the photograph.

We set off eating the beans very plainly cooked (steamed or boiled) but recently I have had a bit more time in the kitchen and have been trying to expand my vegetable preparation repertoire, while still retaining their ‘good for you’ status. French beans are best of friends with almonds but more often than not this combination is accompanied by large amounts of butter, something which seems a bit unnecessary when you already have all the natural butteryness of the nuts. My variation on this traditional French theme involves steaming the beans first and then adding the nuts, with just a hint of oil to coat. Steaming is great for preserving certain vitamins in your vegetables (the ones that are water soluble) because there isn’t much contact between the vegetables and the water, but you can boil or microwave your beans if you prefer. I have used almond oil for a little extra nutty flavour but don’t buy a bottle especially – olive oil would be just fine here. Chopping the beans up into small pieces was done on a whim but turns out to have the advantage that you get some bean and some nut in every bite (besides, I always think that really long beans can be a little ungainly when you have to fold them up onto your fork, especially with delicate flakes of fish!).

We have tried these with trout and chicken so far but they would make a good side dish for anything that isn’t too strongly flavoured. A few more french bean recipe suggestions that sound good are:

• Green beans with olive oil and tomatoes (Mark Hix)


• Chicken Family Green Beans (from Chocolate and Zucchini)


• Sweet and sour green beans (Claire MacDonald)


• Stir-Fried Green Beans with Lemon, Parmesan, and Pine Nuts (from Kalyn’s Kitchen)

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.

Don't you think trying to shop ethically sometimes seems mind-bogglingly complicated? Should I buy the imported but sun-ripened tomatoes from Spain, or the ones from 50 miles away but that have been grown in a heated greenhouse. On the one hand, it is great that the modern world lets us share so much information about these pros and cons but I’m sure that it discourages nearly as many people because it all just seems too complicated and difficult.

There’s no way I can keep everyhing I have read up about in my head for long enough to take it grocery shopping so my approach has been to distill all of the good stuff into some uncomplicated rules of thumb. And here’s one I prepared earlier, ta da!

Buy delicate food locally

This stems from a very simple theory. Delicate foods like herbs, salad leaves and berries perish quickly and tend to be air freighted, whereas sturdier foods like citrus, squashes and most vegetables last long enough and are hardy enough to be shipped. In practice all it means is that everytime I pick up something delicate I look at the label to see where it was produced and if it isn't local I don't buy it. If you wanted to join in you would need to come up with your own definition of local, by which I mean a virutal boundary marking out an area within which perishable items can get to your shops quickly without being flown. This is easy if you live on a large island - for me that boundary is anything produced within the UK.

Obviously this is a simplistic approach and will fall down occasionally; I’m sure I do occasionally unwittingly (and wittingly) buy an air-freighted item. What matters to me is finding ways to making ethical shopping easy so that the temptation isn't there just not to bother. Lots of people shopping ethically most of the time will have a far bigger impact on both the environment and the food industry than a select few managing to do all of their shopping ethically but via an incomprehensible rule system that most of us just don't have the time to keep up with.

The main alternatives to air freight, shipping and road, are not saintly but are better and are the realisic options while most of still buy a lot of our food from the supermarket. Shipping contributes far more overall to CO2 emissions but this is simply because much more food is transported in this way - air freight is far more harmful on a per item basis and growing in popularity. If you like numbers, Sami Grover over at Treehugger has calculated that “shipping 1.5 tonnes of product by ship to the UK created 0.124 tonnes of CO2, while shipping only 0.5 tonnes of the same product by air created 4.5 tonnes of CO2”. It isn’t the kind of article that goes into great detail about how these numbers were reached but it is a thought provoking read as is the Soil Assocation's consultation about how (or if) they should tackle the environmental impact of air freight within the setting of organic certification standards.

The produce lowest in food miles has to be all of that fabulous fresh stuff so many of you are busy growing in your own back gardens! Lots of people seem to be busy munching through very impressive courgette harvests and there have been some fantastic courgette recipes posted including those from Kalyn, Wendy and Joanna to name just a few. I’m also much enthused by the Royal Horticultural Society’s Grown Your Own Veg site complete with blog, calendar and gardening tips. However, I'm all talk and no trousers because life was too hectic here earlier in the Summer to get round to planting much more than a few herbs. There is no such abundance in our garden, but we are starting to reap the rewards of our lovely fruit trees (oh except the poor pear tree, which the blasted cat has killed by scratching through the bark right the way round the base of the tree).

Least productive in the garden is the fig tree, from which we had two figs across the whole of last Summer. Such a rare treat, these were eaten gratefully and unadorned. But this year we have already had at least ten huge juicy figs, not even counting the four we gave to a neighbour who was waiting patiently when we returned from our holiday to ask politely "did we like figs, and were we planning to eat them?". We were happy to hand over the current ripe batch, and were rewarded by the promise of a donation from his Muscat grape harvest later in the Summer (not sure if this will be before or after he turns it into homemade wine).

It's a funny thing having so many figs because frankly it hasn't been the best Summer here in Oxford (OK, so it has in fact been the worst Summer since records began). But figs work to their own timetable, with the small, hard green fruits on the tree not ripening until the year after their first appearance and I suspect that the bumper harvest owes more to last Summer which was how a Summer ought to behave.

Originally inspired by a recipe for Fig and honey milk shake, every second pair of figs that ripen on our tree are turned into this glorious, turkish delight-scented froth. A little bit more sophisticated than your average smoothie and wonderfully fragrant, I can't help thinking that this would make a lovely finale to a middle-eastern feast, particularly if it was served in pretty gold-edged Moroccan tea glasses (like the beauties on this Flickr photograph).

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).

You may not know this but I'm a very lucky girl - I'm married to triathlete! There is an informal rule of thumb amongst those who take part which is that if you have done at least one triathlon in the last year then you have earnt the right to call yourself a triathlete; any longer ago than that and you're pushing it a bit. I think the Blenheim Triathlon a few weeks ago was triathlon number three for this year, so Nik is definitely allowed to use the moniker triathlete and I am therefore allowed to boast proudly about my triathlete husband (though I must admit I am secretly quite relieved that he hasn't decided to jack in the day job yet).

If you are going to put yourself through such a thing, then there are few more beautiful places to do it than the lake and grounds of Blenheim Palace. The event in question was a sprint distance triathlon; a 750m swim (alongside all of the lake's regular inhabitants, pike, duck poop etc, yeuch) followed by a 20km bike ride and 5km run through the spectacular but undulating palace grounds. Obviously such exertions require a hearty meal the night before, which is where this courgette, lemon and goats cheese pasta recipe came in. We have had this before many such events and a few long distance bike rides, but it is also the perfect summer pasta recipe (especially if you are not up to anything athletic the next day and can enjoy it with a big glass of chilled white wine). Goats cheese and mint are a perfect complement to one another and the lemon zest adds a wonderful fragrance (often so much nicer than going straight for the juice). The courgette taste is not particularly prominent in this dish because of the long thin pieces and the mint and lemon flavours so you may even be able to get this one past those people who claim not to be keen on them.

Breakfast is a meal that I expect to work hard for its money (nutritionally speaking that is!). I'm very attached to the idea that if I start off with a good healthy breakfast then the rest of the day (food and everything else) will magically fall into place. A fruit smoothie for breakfast is a very tempting idea but it doesn’t really do it for me in practice - my stomach starts looking round for its next snack far too soon (I’ve no idea how those people who live on black coffee until lunchtime cope). I’m confident now that it isn’t just me being greedy because one of the top purveyors of smoothies in the UK, Innocent, have come up with a clever solution to exactly this problem: the Breakfast Thickie. Fruit, honey and yogurt blended with a handful of oats to make something substantial enough to call itself a Breakfast. I’d happily buy an Innocent Thickie every day (I can’t even whinge about creating unnecessary packaging as they are in a fully compostable “eco-bottle”) but Innocent only make one flavour at the moment (Raspberry and Blueberry) which although lovely is starting to get a bit dull, not to mention expensive.

Rhubarb is the “in” fruit in the UK at moment (by virtue of being the only fruit actually growing in the country). I don’t think anybody eats rhubarb raw (I could be wrong?) and so my technique for rhubarb is to roast it in a big batch with a sprinkling of sugar and to munch through that gradually during the week. I’m into rhubarb for breakfast at the moment; tart rhubarb plus creamy porridge is fantastic (I'm even considering freezing a few batches ready for the Autumn). But then the weather got a bit warm for porridge hence my first attempt at making a thickie, with roasted rhubarb and little stem ginger for added wake-you-up feistiness.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. This one is so simple, it is really just a serving suggestion. No really, that’s not just me being modest, it literally is; I found it in that most unlikely of places for a recipe gem, the back of a lettuce packet!

These noodles are food at its most unchallenging. Effortless to make, easy on the mouth and completely lacking in feistiness (not hint of spice to be seen). They are a little bit bland even, but at the same time wonderfully calming. Sometimes that’s what you need after a hard day at work. If you’re feeling really pitiful, you could just eat a big bowl of these then go to bed, or if you’re not quite ready to hide under the duvet yet, have some salmon on the side, and maybe a green veg (It's not very nutritionally hard-working that lettuce).

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?

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.

This one is for when you really fancy something with a thai curry vibe but without the calories and fat of coconut milk which is very high in both of these things but particularly saturated fat (shame!). The recipe is an adaptation of a mango chicken recipe I saw the wonderful Mary Berry making on TV a while back, a dish which was flavoured with peppadew peppers (a store cupboard favourite) and chinese five spice. Here I’ve gone for more thai flavours; fish sauce, red curry paste and lime juice. Chicken makes an excellent low fat starting point and the recipe also includes low fat yogurt and nutritious, fresh mango and pepper. Both the pepper and the mango are excellent sources of Vitamin C and beta-carotene but are most definitely not indigenous to the UK in February and will have been imported from somewhere far away and sunny. Food miles is a complex issue but my take on it is that reducing the overall mileage of your shopping basket is almost certainly a better plan than trying to become fully local then giving up in frustration. It would be great to only buy local, seasonal produce but for the moment in the winter months I’m happy with buying the odd imported ingredient, particularly when it is something very nutritious (or fairtrade chocolate). You can find out about stockists of fairtrade certified mangoes and chocolate on the Fairtrade Foundation Website.

We ate our chicken with boiled rice and edamame because I was keen to try out the new frozen edamame which have recently become available in the shops here. I had forgotten from my many visits to Wagamama that edamame have much more of a nutty taste than their fresh green exterior seems to hint at; I think if it was making this again I would go for something with a cleaner, springier taste (sugar snap peas perhaps, or even frozen peas for convenience). The sauce is surprisingly rich tasting given how low fat it is so something crunchy and fresh on the side would go pleasantly well.

I am more than happy to spend a bit extra to eat organic but there’s no getting away from the fact that organic meat costs more. I'm not going to buy non-organic meat so this leaves me with two strategies to play with, both of which I use. The first is to eat less meat, which many of us are choosing to do for health reasons. The second is to go for cheaper cuts, hence my purchase last weekend of a pack of lovely organic lamb mince. My usual recipe choice for this is Nigella Lawson’s “Greekish Lamb Pasta” from her Forever Summer book, a Mediterranean take on spag bol which I serve with crumbled feta and chopped fresh mint over the top (delish but decidedly not a low cal option) . This time I felt in need of something different and a bit lighter (it is January after all). The resulting dinner was lamb, sultana and mint polpettine served on a big flat tortilla that had been spread with houmous and then rocket and pinenuts added at the end for a bit of crunch.