Chips With Everything!

My mother always cooked, and the nearest we ever got to convenience food other than tinned fruit, was the occasional treat of fish and chips from the local shop. I too have always cooked at home and very rarely buy anything ready prepared. The very fact that I do not now have to wash the dirt off potatoes or pick slugs out of cabbages prior to cooking as happened in the past, is the nearest I come to convenience!

There's a lot of hype and nonsense about convenience foods anyway. Take frozen oven chips/French fries for instance. Costing anything from about £1.20 to nearly £3.00 and taking up to half an hour to cook is hardly time-saving really. I buy a bag of cleaned potatoes, select out two large, or three or four small, do not peel, (as the peel contains much of the flavour), toss in a little rapeseed or olive oil, shove in the micro-wave for ten minutes to soften then spread on an oiled baking tray. The oven has been pre-heating while I prepare and fifteen to twenty minutes later, hey presto!

Whereas before I used always to fry in deep vegetable oil first on a high heat to seal, then low to cook through followed by a hotter blast to crisp, I now just use a hot setting 180. Shuffle around once or twice on the tray (the chips that is!) and you are guaranteed beautiful crisp chips, cooked in the same time or less than 'convenience' chips and at a fraction of the price. This method of course also works for sweet potatoes and parsnips.

By the way, whoever decided to put chips with lasagna or chips in a sandwich? Carbs with carbs? Ideally it should be carbohydrate with vegetables or salad. The answer (I suspect), is greedy restaurateurs with no real regard for nutrition and food balancing but who seize the opportunity to fill a larger plate with a cheap ingredient to generate a bigger customer spend, or are they just pandering to customers ignorant of food facts? What do you think?

Just writing about them has made me decide to cook some right now. Crispy golden home-made chips with a couple of rashers of bacon and a fried egg. Choice!

Gumbo! (Or not...)

Gumbo-in-the-making using the Christmas turkey carcass...

Our family has its main, heavier meal of the day in the evening. Even eating a relatively light meal in the middle of the day conjures the tendency for my husband and me towards a sleepy nap as the digestion surges and warmth spreads round the body.

And, let's face it, as retirees, we have generally not expended enough energy to warrant a full- blown three courses! So we often have a salad of some kind. Not the Sunday-evening sort of my childhood which was a floppy flat lettuce leaf or two and a few slices of tomato and cucumber together with a slice of ham or the special treat of a spoonful of tinned salmon dressed with malt vinegar and salt. Nowadays we have a tremendous choice so that we can enjoy the benefits of avocado, coleslaw, a whole exciting range of British meats and pies, Italian hams, German sausage, French cheese. Chutneys, mayonnaise and flavoured oils all add variety and interest to what could potentially be a boring plate.

A lot of people I know feel that a salad is not filling, but there is nothing to say you may not enjoy a healthy slice of wholemeal bread and butter with it or a small jacket potato. A helping of potato salad is always a treat and its benefits outweigh the calorie count. The point is to eat a sufficient amount to stave off hunger until the main meal five or six hours later. And If the stomach is not overloaded there is far more chance you will feel able to move around freely and avoid that sluggishness that can only muster enough spare energy to operate a remote TV control for the rest of the afternoon!

Something on toast is always a good quick standby and poached or scrambled egg, cheese or baked beans are great alternatives. I note all the 'trendies' are consuming 'smashed' (mashed?) avocado on toast as their go-to light health-fix food.

When the weather is particularly bleak in winter, soup is the best! I cannot comment on any bought varieties as I have always made my own. They are quick and easy if you have a pressure cooker or large saucepan, the gallonage one session can turn out is quite impressive! This means that each batch can be divided up and popped into the freezer for an even quicker meal another day. The list of ingredients is too huge and varied to note down. Meat, pulses, vegetables. All can be cooked separately or in combination.

It's a joke in my family and basically true that I can never produce the same soup twice. That's because I generally use seasonal vegetables in whatever quantity is to hand, plus often a few additions of split peas or lentils. Maybe rice of any description or cous-cous. Tins of chick- peas, mixed bean salad or even baked beans can all be shot in at the end! Seasonings are dried mixed herbs if no fresh is available from the garden and a couple of good quality stock cubes. 'Mother's Gumbo' is always anticipated with great interest, comment and enjoyment as you might imagine!

So in summary, adjust your midday meal to energy output if you want to keep a reasonable waistline. It's pretty obvious that a long gardening session or cleaning the car or house will expend more energy than reading or watching TV so try to bear this in mind when you sit down to eat.

Recipe/Ingredients:

About a tablespoonful of Rapeseed oil, two medium carrots, two medium potatoes, mushrooms (if liked), medium onion, two quality stock cubes. A good pinch of mixed herbs such as Italian or Herbs Provence. You probably will not need salt but may like a few twists of the black pepper mill at the end.

Method:

In a large pan gently soften the chopped and sliced onions and carrots in the oil before adding cubed potatoes and sliced mushrooms. Cover with hot water from the kettle and add a couple of stock cubes. Simmer until cooked through.

To this basic mixture you can add almost anything you please. Chickpeas for nutty crunchiness, baked beans for a tomato taste. Mixed beans for hints of colour.

If you think ahead a little and can remember, rinse red lentils/split peas until the water runs clear and steep overnight in water. They will plump up beautifully and should be added with the stock. These will break down in the cooking process and thicken the soup.

Of course, with a pressure cooker you just shove the lot in, bring to pressure for about ten minutes and hey presto! Super nutritious soup in no time at all and at virtually no cost.

As I said, my efforts are termed 'gumbo' and it's anybody's guess at what it might contain so if you have half a cabbage, a couple of courgettes or a potato, add them in. See what happens. You may just create the perfect tea-time treat!

P.S. Who says salad is boring?

Diet for Life - Breakfast or Not?

Would you choose a full English with a cup of tea?

In the quest for an all- round healthy lifestyle, the subject of diet cannot really be ignored. I don't mean following weight-loss fads or trendy new and exotic eating plans. What I am advocating is good, solid food, easily obtained, simple to prepare and in manageable quantities. Firm foundations on which to live and train particularly into older age and here is the question. When does the amount of food you are consuming become too much?

If you are going to burn energy, any energy, you will need to eat accordingly. This blog is not the place for highly specialised diets for elite athletes. Rather it is a platform to state what works for us. I am not a dietician but if what I am advocating helps anyone else, then I shall be be very pleased. All I can say is that our approach to eating works well for my husband who is 85 and myself ten years younger.

Firstly, let's take a look at breakfast. If you are still of working age or have high energy output then I think you can do no better than set yourself up with a good breakfast as the foundation for the day and there is so much to choose from. Will it be cereals? Or toast with additions? Perhaps a 'full English' - that is to say fried egg, bacon, sausage, tomato, mushrooms, fried bread and more? Maybe grapefruit, yoghurt etc., etc.?

Over a very long time we have sampled most breakfasts on offer but until quite recently, mainly settled on porridge. But porridge with additions. Anyone who knows me accepts that I rarely work to exact weights and measures when I cook being more intuitive than scientific. So, into my container of ordinary rolled oats in various measures and according to our personal likes, go all sorts. Sultanas and raisins, sunflower seeds and maybe chopped dates, or prunes or figs. Cranberries, apricots, whatever. Sometimes I add nuts. Anything we fancy at the time. I keep this, ready-mixed in a plastic container in the kitchen.

Incidentally, quite by accident we came across another very beneficial addition to our mixture; milled linseed. This you can buy in various mixes such as chia, sunflower seeds, goji berries and pumpkin. As linseeds are gelatinous particularly when crushed, they provide very useful mucilage to the diet, excellent if you suffer from constipation!

Porridge for breakfast is very sustaining and you shouldn't feel hungry until lunchtime. Also, if you are gluten- free, it is a very filling alternative to wheat products. We have never been fanatical about food so the occasional full English particularly when trekking or toast and marmalade when the urge takes us makes a lovely change. Porridge though remains king or at least it did until about a year ago when our daily routine changed quite radically.

Through chatting with medical friends and also reading of the importance attached to allowing one's stomach to rest for 12-14 hours in order to cleanse itself of unwanted 'debris', we experimented with what is now fashionably known as 'intermittent fasting'. What it boils down to for us is that we have cut out one meal a day and that happens to be the one we call breakfast since it naturally comes after the longest period without food and it is easy just to extend this time. We can both honestly say that we do not miss it in the least! For our advanced ages we are still brimming with energy and have also trimmed a little surplus from our waists.

We have not entirely abandoned our favourite porridge though we do not eat it on such a regular basis s before, swapping it now for dessert or for a delicious teatime treat.

Or would you prefer a bowl of porridge?

Tip: I soak our porridge for an hour or two. For two of us just under a tea-cup of dry mix is enough. This I just cover with water, later adding about the same fluid quantity in milk then cook as usual.