31 Days of Healthy Eating - Standbys

Ten standbys I try to keep in stock so that I can always grab something healthy to eat:

1. Bananas
2. Fruit bars (usually Nakd bars)
3. Seeded or multigrain bread in the freezer
4. Frozen berries
5. Nuts (usually brazils or almonds)
6. Apples
7. Dark chocolate
8. Dried apricots or dates
9. Granola bars
10. Tomatoes (I can happily eat them as a snack, or grill them and eat them on toast with a dash of black pepper as a light meal)

Book 5: E is for Eat

Eat Well Spend Less by Sarah Flower

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I don't have much to say about this one. I got serious about eating more healthily last year and thought this book might give my improved diet an extra boost and some new recipes. It was OK, but didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. There were a few useful and reasonably economical recipes I will probably try.

ETA: Coincidentally the topic for week 5 of 52 Books in 52 Weeks is Literary Cookbooks. I love the idea of The Jane Austen Cookbook. 

Thursday 13: Holiday Food

I enjoyed the Thursday 13 posted last week by Pamela at When Good People Get Together, where she listed memorable foods from thirteen different places she had lived. I haven't moved around enough to copy her directly, but I thought I'd adapt it to favourite foods I remember from different holiday destinations. Working roughly in chronological order:

1. Cornish Splits and Clotted Cream (Padstow, Cornwall) 
My great-aunt and uncle lived in Padstow until I was six, and I remember sitting at the dining table there (funny that I can still picture that dining room) eating splits - kind of like a cross between scones and bread rolls - with strawberry jam and clotted cream.

2. Knickerbocker Glories (Isle of Wight)
As a child we went to the Isle of Wight for a summer beach holiday for several consecutive years. Going to a cafe for ice creams was a treat, and I remember often copying my mum and having her  favourite, the knickerbocker glory.

3. Cornish Pasties (St.Just, Cornwall)
After a spell in Norfolk, my aunt and uncle moved back to Cornwall, where I developed a taste for pasties.

4. Curd Tarts (Yorkshire)
Yes, that is curds as in Little Miss Muffet's curds and whey - mixed with currants and used to fill a pastry case. I love curd tarts, and have never seen them anywhere except Yorkshire. The best ever come from Hunters of Helmsley.

5. Moussaka (Corfu, Greece)
The first Greek island I visited was Corfu, back in 1979, which is where I discovered that Greek classic, moussaka. Yum.

6. Kataifi (Kos, Greece)
Next up on the Greek list was Kos, and lots of time hanging out at a cafe-bar that sold the most gorgeous cakes. Traditional Greek desserts are a lot like Turkish, with lots of nuts and honey. For me kataifi, made with a kind of shredded pastry (looks like shredded wheat), has the edge over baklava.

7. Gelato (Rome)
Italian ice cream. Enough said.

8. Turbot (Calais, France)
Back in our very early days together, Tevye took me on a day trip to Calais, where we ate at a restaurant recommended by a former colleague with gourmet leanings. I had a truly memorable main course of turbot, cooked to perfection.

9. Crab Sandwiches (Jersey)
While Tevye was recuperating from surgery on his back we spent a week on the Channel Island of Jersey. Most days we ate lunch in a little cafe overlooking a bay, where they sold the best ever crab sandwiches. Delicious.

10. Vegetarian / Vegan Food (Totnes, Devon)
When I was three months pregnant with Angel we spent a week in a cottage in Devon, which coincided with the beginning of the end of pregnancy nausea and the realisation that eating was at least an occasional possibility. My first real meals in a couple of months came from a vegetarian / vegan cafe in Totnes. For some reason they appealed to my frazzled taste buds where meat based meals just didn't.

11. Danish pastries (Weymouth)
Since Angel and Star were quite small we have holidayed regularly at a caravan park in Weymouth, Dorset. One holiday treat is to share a giant slab of Danish pastry from the Dorset Cake Company for breakfast.

12. Moules a la Normande (Normandy, France)
Mussels are a classic dish for northern France and Belgium, and apples are ubiquitous in Normandy. Combine the two and you get mussels cooked in apple cider and cream. 

13. Doughnuts (Thassos, Greece)
Our favourite Greek island is Thassos, in the north. A fixture on the beach since we first went nearly twenty years ago is the doughnut seller who strolls round at intervals with a tray full of chocolate doughnuts, jam doughnuts and plain rings. No prizes for guessing my favourite.

Chocolate Caramel Shortbread

Today I made chocolate caramel shortbread ... that is one thing crossed off my list of things to do in July.

Here is the recipe I used, from Favourite Teatime Recipes. I have a handwritten recipe of my great-aunt's, dating back to the 1920s, which is identical except that it used larger amounts for the shortbread (9 oz / 6 oz / 3 oz). Not sure whether it was baked in a larger tin, or just made the shortbread part thicker.

Ingredients

Shortbread
6 oz (1 1/2 cups) self-raising flour
4oz (1/2 cup*) butter
2 oz (1/4 cup) caster sugar
Topping
4 oz (1/2 cup) caster sugar (I prefer soft brown suga)
4 oz (1/2 cup) butter
2 tablespoons golden syrup (light corn syrup)
1 small tin (170g / 6 oz) condensed milk
Chocolate to cover (I used 3/4 of a 200 gram bar)

Method
Stage 1
Cream butter and sugar well. Stir in flour and a pinch of salt. Knead well and place in a greased Swiss Roll tin (I used a 7 x 11 inch tin). Bake at 325deg F or Gas Mk 3 for 30 minutes until pale brown.

Stage 2 
Place topping ingredients in a pan. Bring to the boil and boil for 5 minutes, stirring continuously. Pourr over cooked shortbread

Stage 3
When caramel is set cover with melted chocolate. Cut into squares with a sharp knife dipped in hot water.

* I took the American conversions from another book. Hopefully I got them right!

The Care and Feeding of Children

A couple of throw away comments recently set me thinking about the way our children eat compared to the way Tevye and I ate as children back in the 1960s.

A typical day for our children ...

• Breakfast - some days grab as you go. Typically cereal for Tevye and I, toast or a breakfast bar for Angel, a glass of milk or fruit for Star (who isn't big on eating first thing in the morning), and a banana or cereal for Cherub. A couple of days a week I cook pancakes or hash browns and eggs.
• Lunch - usually sandwiches followed by fruit or yoghurt for Cherub and I; packed lunch - again usually sandwiches, though occasionally cold pizza or pasta - for the older girls. A couple of days a week Angel buys lunch at school. She mainly chooses pasta or  a filled baguette. 
• Dinner - hot, home-cooked meal, followed by fruit or ice cream
• Snacks - the older girls take a snack (biscuits, crisps, cake or fruit bar) for morning break, then graze on whatever they can find when they get home from school. A couple of nights a week Star goes straight from school to a dance class and usually buys a portion of chip (fries) on the way. Random snacks for the rest of us.

A typical day from my childhood ...

• Breakfast - cooked breakfast with cereal to start and toast on the side
• Morning snack - biscuits or bun or crisps
  
• Lunch - two course cooked school lunch, including hot dessert (sponge pudding, rice pudding, that sort of thing). At home during the holidays lunch was our main meal, and "tea" a lighter meal - egg and beans on toast, that sort of thing - but still with a dessert of some kind.
  
• Tea - bread and butter with jam or peanut butter. 
• Dinner - another two course cooked meal. 

Tevye took sandwiches to school, whereas I had a cooked lunch, but remembers always having three courses for dinner, even if it was only half a grapefruit for a starter and tinned fruit for dessert.

I thought I did quite well in (pretty much always) cooking a reasonably substantial meal from scratch every evening, but in comparison to the meals we had as children, most of our children's meals are slim pickings. The meals I ate included a lot more "fat" food - jam roly poly and custard, bacon and eggs, that sort of thing - but grazing between meals wasn't an option. Snacks were limited and regular, though not particularly healthy. Our children eat more raw fruit and vegetables, but compensate for that with more sweet snacks and a lot more junk food.

Which diet is best? Almost certainly the 1960s version, where meals were more substantial and mostly cooked from scratch from real ingredients. The "fat" food was still real food; junk was very limited; and more filling meals meant less snacking and grazing. I'm thinking I should be spending more time in the kitchen.

Pot Luck Dinner Menu

This was the menu we ended up with last night:

Starter: Bean, carrot, pea and mint, and aubergine dips, with flat breads (Morocco)

Main: Gedünstetes schöps (mutton stew) with Schwemmknödel (semolina dumplings (Austria)

Dessert: Kestane cicegi (chestnut meringues), Sekerpare (small cakes with lemon syrup), Kayisi tatlisi (apricots in syrup with cream and almonds) (Turkey)

Wine: eclectic, but heavy on Australian Chardonnay.

After each course those not in the know had to guess its origin. We got Morocco, but the closest guesses to Austria and Turkey were Hungary and Greece respectively. We were slightly handicapped by not being able to remember what countries we had put into the hat in the first place.

Great fun, and we are going to do it again next month. This time it will be our turn for the main course. After we picked our destinations we got carried away and added an extra sixteen countries to the pot for the next meal. That could get challenging!

Chicken and Mushroom Casserole

In response to overwhelming demand (OK, maybe that is a slight exaggeration, but a request is a request and I like to keep my readers happy), I posted the recipe for tonight's chicken and mushroom casserole at my long neglected cookery blog.

English Puddings

Jam roly-poly and custard, spotted dick ... my last couple of posts and the comments seem to have acquired a puddingy theme. For the benefit of puzzled Americans and nostalgic Brits, here is a run down of some classic English puddings. If you are on a diet, look away now.

Jam Roly-Poly

A self-raising flour and *suet mix dough, rolled out flat into a rectangle, spread with jam, rolled up and baked. Winter comfort food.

Spotted Dick

A steamed pudding with currants (the "spots"). Google gave me two main variants of the basic pudding recipe - either a sponge pudding made of flour, butter and eggs, or a suet pudding with flour, suet and milk.

Bread-and-Butter Pudding

Slices of buttered bread, layered in a dish with sugar and dried fruit. A milk and egg batter is poured over the top and soaks the bread. When baked it sets into a yummy, sweet, soft, fruity pudding. My favourite! Best served with cream.

Treacle Sponge

Another steamed pudding made of flour, eggs, butter and sugar. The "treacle" part is golden syrup (light corn syrup?) put into the bottom of the bowl before the pudding mixture is added. When the pudding is turned out of the bowl for serving, the hot gooey syrup mixture runs down the sides and soaks into the sponge. Another variation is jam sponge, with the syrup replaced by strawberry or raspberry jam.

Custard

Properly speaking, custard is a dessert or sauce made from milk, egg yolks and sugar. In practice, what most people think of as custard is a cornflour thickened yellow sauce made from "custard powder" and milk, or bought ready made in tins or cartons. According to Wikipedia 45% of custard sold in the UK is accounted for by the Bird's brand. Comfort food puddings like sponges and roly-poly should always be served with custard. It is, however, important that the custard has no lumps. Lumpy custard served as part of school meals has traumatised generations of English children.

*Suet ... is one of those things that is hard to translate as I don't think there is any American equivalent. Imagine little pieces of fat the size of grains of rice, rolled in flour. Originally made of beef fat, you can now get vegetable fat versions too. It was often used in English cooking as a filler for those on a tight budget - plenty of calories for little money. Suet pastry can be both sweet and savoury, and it is also used to make dumplings.

Welsh Menu

For a couple of years we have shared more-or-less regular meals with two sets of neighbours. Each meal has an international theme, we rotate houses, and we each bring one course. It is great fun, and pushes us all out of our cookery comfort zones by making us try out new recipes Last night we hosted a Welsh dinner (we have just started working round the British Isles), and it was our turn to be responsible for the main course.

This was the menu:

Starter: Salmon fish cakes and green salad

Main course: Oen Cymreig melog (honeyed Welsh lamb), stwns (mashed potato and swede mixture) and roasted leeks

Dessert: Honey cake with meringue topping, strawberries and raspberries

The lamb was the nicest I have ever cooked, with delicious honey and cider gravy. I posted the recipe on my neglected cookery blog.

Our themed meals are adults only (no juggling picky appetites, toddler bedtimes, and busy teenagers!), but we also add in a couple of whole family evenings - an American BBQ for the Fourth of July and a Christmas buffet in December. Next up on the British Isles tour is a Scottish meal for Burns Night in January.

Hold the Chocolate ...

Just a couple of weeks ago I made plans to rein in my eating and lose some weight. With hindsight it was not the best of timing to start just before my birthday. Birthdays mean chocolate. Diet? What diet?

I do, however, have a couple of recommended methods of damage limitation for slightly (ahem) overweight people who need to dispose of diet busting amounts of chocolate . The first - and least appealing - is to let your children help you eat it. Your children love you for it, but you do have to resist the temptation to develop a martyr complex as you watch all your yummy brown stuff disappear.

The second may have no scientific basis, but it is a great theory. If you attack the chocolate with gusto, eat large quantities in one go and finish it up quickly you put on less weight than if you eke it out over a longer period.

Excuse me, but a bar of Green and Black's is calling ...

Cooking With Cherub

Monday is baking day, and Little Cherub has reached the age where she loves helping to bake. I find the best way to approach this is to find her one or two specific jobs that are within her capacity while I get on with the rest ... it doesn't always work, but at the least it helps with disaster limitation.

Yesterday we made fairy cakes. Cherub "helped" with the measuring, and loved putting paper cases into the tins while I used the hand mixer. (Wonderful! A clean job!) Then I spooned the mixture into the cases and she helped to scrape the mix off the spoon. As it was only half an inch above the tin, that worked well. Mostly.


She was delighted with the results of her efforts, offering them to everyone with a proud "I make cake!". We looked through our Usborne What Shall I Cook? book, and decided that next week we are going to bake chocolate octopus biscuits (cookies).

Menu Plan Monday: July 28th

Thanks to Missus Wookie I discovered Menu Plan Monday at I'm An Organizing Junkie, which sits rather nicely alongside the Simple Woman's Daybook as a way of taking stock at the beginning of the week.

Monday: Lucy's Lazy Like Sunday Morning Chicken, carrots

Tuesday: Tomato and Pepper Pasta (a new recipe I am testing out)

Wednesday: Salmon salad

Thursday: Jacket potatoes and chilli

Friday: Fish fingers, oven chips (fries), peas (Friday is always a lazy, out-of-the-freezer or instant-junkish sort of day)

Saturday: Not sure whether we will be in or out ... maybe pizza?

Sunday: Roast chicken, roast potatoes and assorted vegetables

Shopping List

You may find this the most boring post ever, in which case, feel free to move on ...

Lucy of Our Very Own Little House posted her itemised shopping bill for a week as a snapshot in time record and inspired me to do the same. Mine breaks down into three: meat (bought monthly), organic fruit and vegetable box (delivered weekly) and a weekly run round the supermarket. I usually shop on Thursday evenings, so this is my grocery list for the week beginning Thursday July 3rd.

Conversions - 1 kg is around 2 pounds, 1 litre a bit less than 2 pints, and the exchange rate is roughly $2 to £1.

Meat
I buy and freeze meat once a month from Waitrose. It is more expensive than Tesco, but better quality and I believe their animal welfare standards are higher. I came to the conclusion that organic meat, particularly chicken, is simply beyond my budget so this is a good compromise. This is the meat I expect us to eat this week ...

1 large chicken - £3.90 (1/3 off as I bought it on the sell by date and froze it)
1 x 500g minced beef - £1.75 (2 for £3.50 offer)
2 x packs of 8 chicken drumsticks - £3 (another multibuy offer)
lamb and redcurrant sausages - £2.99

Total cost = £11.64

Organic Produce
I have a medium size organic vegetable box and an organic fruit box delivered weekly, paying £21.10 for the two. This week the contents were:

Bag of new potatoes (1.5 kg)
Bag of carrots
4 onions
2 green peppers
1 red pepper
3 courgettes
Red cabbage
Broccoli
Mushrooms
Lettuce
Bunch of wet garlic
6 large apples
4 nectarines
Small punnet of strawberries
10 plums
5 bananas

This is not enough for us for a week so I top up at the supermarket, usually with non-organic produce - trying to balance ethical shopping and budget here!

Groceries (from Morrisons)
I didn't buy much last week, so this was a slightly larger than average trolley load. I usually aim to spend between £50 and £60. I am very much a bargain hunter and will shop partly to my menu plan and partly according to what is on offer - particularly for snacks and things to throw into lunch boxes.

4 packs granary rolls @ 19p - 76p
pack of 6 teacakes - 25p
pack of 3 eccles cakes - 29p
4 cheese twists - 50p
1 x wholemeal loaf - 29p
(all these were heavily discounted as they were on their sell by date)
6 tortilla wraps - £1.09
1 x white sliced loaf - 65p
5 chocolate eclairs - £1.24 (for Angel's French picnic at school)
Small pick and mix salad tray - £1.39 (late dinner for Angel)
300g medium cheddar cheese - £1.71
2 x 250g butter - £1.80 (multibuy offer)
300g houmous - 87p
2 small sticks garlic bread - 58p
4 pints organic semi-skimmed milk - £1.65
2 x 4 Dairylea Dunkers @ £1 - £2 (special offer)
Muller "One" Yogurts 4 pack - £1.10 (special offer)
Egg mayonnaise sandwich filler 400g - £1.09
12 medium organic eggs - £2.61 (special offer)
Strawberry Crisp cereal (store brand) - £1.28
Cookie Crisp cereal - £1.65
Pack of egg noodles - 79p
500g bag 'value' pasta - 19p
500g bag wholemeal pasta - 78p
3 pack tins sweetcorn - £1.08
1 tin Campbells condensed tomato soup - 52p (for making BBQ sauce)
1 kg sugar - 84p
Dried yeast - 99p
Box 480 teabags (store brand) - £2.48
Bisto gravy browning - 91p
750g jar mayonnaise (store brand) - £1.35
Small bottle brown sauce - 31p
2 cans baked beans (store brand) @ 31p - 62p
12 pack French Fries
+ 12 pack Walkers Squares (both = potato chips) - £1.98 (BOGOF offer)
2 x Jacobs Hi Fibre Cream Crackers - £1 (multibuy offer)
2 x 5 Hob-Nobs Flapjacks - £1.25 (BOGOF offer)
2 x 5 caramel Rocky biscuits - 92p (BOGOF offer)
2 x Elkes Cow Biscuits - 69p (BOGOF offer)
3 x 1 litre cartons fresh orange juice @ 65p - £1.95 (special offer)
2 x 1 litre cartons cranberry juice @ 69p - £1.38
2 x 3 packs individual orange juice @ 62p - £1.24
4 x Muller "One" smoothies - £2 (BOGOF offer)
2 x 2 litre cola max + 2 litre lemonade - £1.09 (multibuy offer)
2 packs of 4 cod fishcakes - £1.50 (multibuy offer)
1 bag frozen sprouts - 58p
1 bag McCain oven chips (= fries) - £2.19
2 boxes of 6 vegetarian sausage rolls @ £1.29 - £2.58
2 cheese and tomato pizzas - £2 (multibuy offer)
490g parsnips - £1.12
2 x cucumbers @ 72p - £1.44
6 tomatoes - 69p
Bag small apples - £1
10 bananas - 99p
500g carrots - 45p
Honeydew melon - £1
2.5kg bag potatoes - £1.39
1 pack 6 rolls 'value' kitchen towel - £1.58
Eco-friendly washing-up liquid - 89p

Total cost = £66.67

My budget is £400 for the month and my total spend for the week was £99.41. We also get 4 litres of milk delivered by the milkman each week, which costs £3.02.

Eat like Granny

My organic fruit and veg box includes a weekly newsletter from the farm owner. Mostly his news is information about current crops and growing conditions. This week it was a more general piece about food and healthy eating, triggered by a newly imposed requirement to use computer generated nutrition analysis to establish whether school meals cooked by his company are "healthy".

First he quoted four guidelines from Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food, which sound eminently sensible to me:

1. don’t eat anything your great grandmother would not recognise as food
2. don’t buy anything with more than five ingredients
3. only eat at a table; eat slowly and communally
4. distrust any food claiming health benefits

He feels - rightly - that we have lost confidence in our ability to know what is "good" food, and spend too much time listening to scientific "experts" and not enough listening to granny. And he cites one of my personal bugbears:

Even today there is just too much that we do not know. Nothing illustrates this better than the thirty year vilification of butter only to find that the miserable, meal ruining transfats (margarine etc) that have displaced it are in all probability more damaging.

This was his conclusion:

Traditionally cooked whole foods have been elbowed aside in favour of highly processed functional foods designed, manufactured and marketed to solve the problems associated with a Western diet. They don’t seem to be working. Science will not solve a cultural problem; namely a collapse in the willingness, confidence and skills needed to cook and enjoy real food. There is no one healthy diet or silver bullet that can better the knowledge accumulated over generations of how to use predominantly locally sourced ingredients to sustain us through happy and healthy lives. Pollan’s advice is that unless you suffer from a specific dietary illness like diabetes, the best thing to do with a nutritionist’s advice is to ignore it.

You can read the whole newsletter here.

The book sounds good, and I was glad to find my library has a copy. Only one copy, and three reservations ahead of me, but I have added myself to the queue and can wait patiently!

Menu Plan 2008

I have been in menu planning mode, and have posted my new 2008 menu plan on my long neglected cookery blog.

Menu Plan Mark 2

I spent an evening earlier this week working on a new four week menu plan for autumn and winter. It was almost done ... until Star threw a spanner in the works. She announced that she wants to become vegetarian, as she can't reconcile being an animal lover and eating meat.

So ... we had a long discussion about why most people feel it is OK to eat meat, the option of only eating ethically produced (organic, free range) meat and the need for a balanced diet, the upshot of which is that from Sunday she will officially be a vegetarian, though she has decided she will still eat fish. (She can't start tomorrow as she is spending the day with a friend, and we felt it was a bit late notice to request a menu change!)

On reflection I am very proud of her. She actually likes meat, and there are certain things she will really miss. If she can give up something she enjoys on grounds of conscience at her age, I think that speaks well of her character and is worth the bit of inconvenience involved in replanning my menu and adapting meals.

Back to the drawing board ...

Weight Watchers

Two weeks ago I went back to Weight Watchers with my neighbour - time to lose those extra baby pounds (and, I must admit, a few pre-baby) I reasoned.

Today I sent her this text message (cell phone text messaging is cheap and ubiquitous here) ...

At zoo. Cold. Bought chips*. Am giving up Weight Watchers. Too hungry and not motivated.

Well, it was a choice of eating those chips with or without guilt. I chose without guilt. I've decided that Weight Watching while nursing is not for me.

*[Chips = fries]

Better than chocolate?

Maybe not quite ... but this culinary delicacy is, as Angel would say, lush.

Ikea's Swedish gooseberry jam - especially good on soft, fresh wholemeal bread.

Confessions of a glutton

It is Lent and I have given up chocolate, in all shapes and forms. A bit of self-denial and self-discipline ... which I am afraid are not my strong points. Nevertheless, I am doing well with the chocolate and keeping to my resolution. I'm afraid, though, that giving up one thing is just papering over the cracks. I had to acknowledge to myself this week that one of my besetting sins is gluttony. First, there were the cream cakes. I bought a box of four to share with Mum, Angel and Star. It turned out Mum already had some cream cake in the fridge ... so I ate that, then ate one of the others later. I give up chocolate, then eat double cream cake. The next day it was cheese and onion rolls. Angel and I walked to the shop to buy some bread for lunch. She asked for a snack to eat on the way home. We bought cheese and onion rolls. I ate one. She ate half. I ate her other half. So much for self-denial and self-discipline.

So here I am, confessing to being just plain greedy. As it is Lent, I'm going to try to deal with the sin of gluttony by eating more simply and less indulgently. And I'm going to keep myself accountable by posting here.

Carnival of Meal Planning

What a great idea! Meredith at Sweetness and Light is hosting a Carnival of Meal Planning, with lots of links to menu plans and recipes.

I have posted this week's menu over at my cookbook.