Results tagged “summer” from Mostly Eating

Cooking pasta by the absorption method (risotto style) was all the rage in the food blog world a couple of years back.  A recent revisit has uncovered that it works really well with wholewheat pasta, especially when its combined with the bounties of summer (the sweetest tomatoes, fresh green beans and grassy pea shoots).

The absorption method is a pretty handy way to get a soft, savoury pasta sauce without the calories and fat of your alfredos and carbonaras. The starch released by the pasta is captured in the cooking liquor giving the pasta a silky quality and taking it a step beyond summer’s simpler pasta salads.  The aim here is to cook the pasta just as you would cook a risotto, gently adding liquid and stirring regularly.  The only real potential for error with this technique is if you add the liquid too quickly and on too ferocious a heat, creating a pasta with a soggy outside and hard uncooked centre. This is even more important to watch out for  when you’re using wholewheat pasta but that’s OK, treat this as a chance to slow down for a while and line up a cup of tea or a podcast or a book or just sit and stir.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a recipe this week, for a delicious cooling summer salad with herbs, salmon cucumber and spelt.  But first a digression into the world of wholegrains and spelt, with a couple of labelling tricks for savvy shoppers to be on the look out for.

There is a surprising amount of nutrition hocus-pocus on the web and in magazines about spelt. Apparently it is “easier to digest” and “better for you than wheat”. The digestive claims could have some substance to them (for one group of the population) if spelt was gluten free.  In reality if you have coeliac disease with its accompanying immune response to gluten then spelt is not suitable for you; it is not gluten-free.

For those of us who don’t have coeliac disease, is spelt better for you?  So hard to say with any great conviction!  Every grain has its subtle distinguishing features (a little more protein here, a bit more of this mineral). While spelt bread “with bits in” has been shown to be low GI like most other similar breads, there still don’t seem to be any reliable results for spelt itself regarding glycaemic index.

The big selling point for spelt therefore (in addition to the lovely nutty taste) is all of that wholegrain goodness with its associated fibre and cardioprotective benefits.  Something to be found in all wholegrain products, even those made from spelt’s much maligned cousin, wheat.  But as is so often the case with food, you need to look carefully at the label to be sure that you are getting what you think you you are.

Is your wholegrain still whole?
Certain ingredients just have an aura of healthy goodness surrounding them don’t they?  Spelt is one of those; nobody says nasty things about spelt in the same way they do wheat.  Spelt is a whole grain, right?  Well kind of.  Spelt is a wholegrain if it is a left as a wholegrain, but can be milled and processed until it is no longer “whole” just like any other grain can.  I put my hand up to falling for this one; upon closer inspection at home my newly purchased spelt wholegrains were actually not whole at all but semi-pearled; somewhere between wholegrain and refined.

It pays to read the label closely on "wholegrain" products.  Look out for terminology such as pearled, polished, multi-grain; these products are generally not wholegrain.  Flaked, cracked and ground may or may not be made using the whole grain.

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

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).

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.

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?

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.

Easter food is synonymous with chocolate for many of us (go on, admit it!). It was the first thing I thought of when I read about Johanna’s 'Waiter, there's something in my ... Easter basket!' event and I’ve been thinking about it pretty much ever since. Here is a sophisticated, fruity and very pretty way to get your chocolate fix – chocolate coated kiwiberries. There’s something very spring-like about these, with their mini egg appearance and beautiful colour co-ordination between the vibrant lime flesh of the berries and the green-tinged pistachios.

There's still very little seasonal fruit in the UK at the moment (just rhubarb!) so I have temporarily drifted back into occasionally buying exotic air-freighted fruit. I had never tried these kiwiberries before this punnet but I had read about them and was definitely keeping an eye out for them. They are essentially little tiny kiwi fruit (about 1-2 cm in diameter) without all the furriness and supposedly sweeter and even higher in Vitamin C than a full size kiwi fruit. Kiwi fruit are ridiculously high in Vitamin C already (better than oranges) so I was intrigued by something supposedly even better. But there was another reason why I wanted to try them - I don’t really like kiwi fruit and was hoping to be converted! There, I feel better now I've admitted it. Everybody else seems to like them - surely it's not just me? It’s a texture thing: those pesky seeds, that unexpected grittiness. It reminds me of when you add some spinach to a curry or sauce and then bite into it only to realise that you hadn’t washed it.

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.

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.