Dieting Dinner

We're on a diet. For over a week now it's been low fat, tiny portions and suffering but last night to celebrate a week of not eating very much at all we decided to have a small blow out. Really quite restrained in the end, each plate coming in at about 850 calories (as they are called by nutritionally challenged) plus some very welcome red wine that I forgot to worry about! There was even room for a few rosy red grapes and some raspberry jellies for pudding.



Portobello mushrooms were stuffed with mixture of crisply fried onions, some nutritional yeast and a couple of spoonfuls of soya yoghurt drained for few hours through a very fine sieve to remove a lot of the moisture. The mushrooms were then baked on a platform of puff pastry. To serve with them, parsnip chips, roasted in a hot oven after being tossed with a tiny amount of oil and fresh rosemary spikes.

The salad was oven roasted baby plum tomatoes on a bed of rocket dressed with a rather wonderful balsamic reduction which was black, sticky and deliciously piquant.

It has to be said, it all worked fantastically well.

And if we'd left the pastry out, each portion would have been 500 calories lighter.