Results tagged “wholegrains” from Mostly Eating

Oats have a lot going for them. The soluble fibre in oats can help your body to get rid of excess cholesterol, something pretty much everyone can benefit from. I'm spending a lot of time working with people who have irritable bowel syndrome at the moment and it seems that oats are also one of the few starchy foods that can exert a calming influence across the full spectrum of uncomfortable symptoms that can come with IBS.  And did I mention that they're also tasty, filling, cheap and versatile?

So far so good, but what if you don't like to porridge (oatmeal)?  A bit of trawling through my bookmarks and cookbooks and it turns out that there are loads of different ways to include more oats in your diet:

Start at breakfast

• 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.

The main event

• 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.

We’ve just spent a few days in the glorious highlands of Scotland.  Me with my camera and the triathlete with his bike, taking part in the Caledonian Etape.  Or trying to anyway; the whole weekend turned out to be rather more eventful than planned when somebody sabotaged the event by scattering carpet tacks across the route, possibly in protest at the road closures put in place for the event (scheduled to last an incredibly inconvenient three whole hours).

The Scots as it turns out have a whole vocabulary to describe rain.  After a dreich day, the rain upgraded its status to stotting down. The weather in England hasn’t been much better since we got back from our break (grey and distinctly chilly) so this seems an opportune time to share a crumble recipe.

I’ve dallied with ‘healthier fats’ in crumbles, but haven’t yet come up with a satisfactory recipe (oils seem to produce a dish more rubble than crumble).  A compromise is to accompany the butter with a high fruit to topping ratio, not too much sugar and plenty of good stuff in the topping.  Wholemeal spelt flour, whole oats plus roughly chopped hazelnuts for texture.  Spelt flour has a toasty, nutty flavour and is my current favourite standby flour for all but the most serious of baking recipes.  (Shopping note: as with the unmilled spelt grains, spelt flour comes in wholegrain and white varieties. Check the label to see which sort you are getting).

Everybody and their Mum knows that porridge is a super-filling breakfast. Except that you really wouldn't think so from reading the comments on my last post about having quinoa for breakfast; it’s just not true that porridge is a filling breakfast for one and all.  There are a whole host of reasons why this might be and I’ve jotted a few of them down in this post. If nothing else, now you now know that it probably isn't because you are freak of nature if you don’t find porridge a filling breakfast. Plus the information here might also give you an inkling as to why nutrition research is so tricky; people and their food are just so variable.

But first, a little bit about why porridge does do the trick for so many people.  Oats are high in soluble fibre, which forms a jelly like substance in your stomach, slowing down how quickly porridge is digested compared with a cereal lower in soluble fibre.  Porridge is also classed as a low glycaemic index food meaning that the porridge releases its energy into our bloodstreams in a slow and steady way, theoretically delaying that bit just before lunch when your blood glucose levels drop low enough to cause hunger, prompting you to eat again.

So on to those reasons why you might not find porridge to be a filling breakfast:

Porridge and portions vary

• People have massively different portions size. Some people have a few tablespoons of porridge, others have a massive bowlful.  A quick scan across a few recipes and packages showed serving suggestions from 35 to 75g of oats per person. There is no right or wrong to this; a little bit extra everyday might contribute to weight gain or might be just enough to help you resist that mid morning biscuit.
• Some people embellish their porridge with all kinds of nutritious optional extras like fresh and dried fruit, seeds and nuts (I am very firmly in this camp).
• As I mentioned in that last post, not all porridge oats are equal.  Old fashioned big fat porridge oats are low GI; instant oats are not.
  

Glycaemic response varies between people
The Glycaemic Index values you read about are measured by looking at what happens to people's blood glucose levels when they eat a particular food.  Glycaemic index can't be calculated by a machine and instead is determined in a laboratory; those published values are an average value obtained by testing the food on at least ten different healthy individuals (you can read more about GI testing on the University of Sydney site).  Across those ten people there will be a range of responses and for some people the energy from the food will effectively be released more quickly, most likely leaving them hungrier sooner.  Which is a roundabout way of saying that for some people porridge might be a medium to high GI food.

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.

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

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I hope you all have a lovely time over the Christmas break. We will be off up North in a couple of days to see both of our families and before that I'm planning a leisurely couple of days wrapping presents and drinking mulled wine. For alongside this I have already made a batch of my favourite Christmas baking treat; sticky golden syrup flapjacks warmed up with a seasonal dollop of mincemeat and a snifter of rum. This recipe is as easy as baking gets and but will still fill your house with a satisfying dose of spicy, fruity Christmas scent.

I tried nutritionify-ing this recipe by leaving out a bit of the butter and golden syrup, but it told me in no uncertain terms that this was not what Christmas cookery was all about by promptly falling apart. I present here the full fat, full sugar, full syrup version to enjoy (normal service will be resumed in January!).

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.

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.

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.

This risotto is a rustic, weeknight supper kind of a dish, not for an elegant dinner or to impress somebody with your culinary skills. But it isn’t quite as unsophisticated as it looks; alongside the butternut squash and sprigs of rosemary it has a few hidden secrets, more of which later.

As a baked risotto this is definitely not an authentic recipe, but it is the only sort that you can bung in the oven and ignore while you sit on the sofa finishing off those last bits of Easter egg. Personally I think I have reached the stage of being pretty much done with chocolate for the six weeks or so. First there were those chocolate kiwiberries, then a bit of neat chocolate (a sample of all three colour varieties) and last night we rounded it all off by making Bill Granger’s Molten Chocolate Puddings. If you too are so over all that chocolate then this is the perfect antidote; simple, wholesome and very savoury.

Anyway, back to those hidden secrets. Nearly invisible from the photo but very strong on flavour are a few dried porcini mushrooms and hint of truffle oil. And if you look really closely, you might just be able to see that this is a risotto made with brown rice. What on earth was I thinking I hear you ask? Well two things really. First, brown rice has that great nutty flavour which is fabulous with those strong flavours like the rosemary and the porcini mushrooms. Second, brown rice is a wholegrain, and white rice isn’t.

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.