Day 10 - Sprouts

Getting a bit behind, not every day is worth reporting.

Anyway, these are some sprouted seeds that have finally become ready to eat. They were planted on the 1st and, I suppose because it's been so cold here, have taken this long to grow. The beetroot didn't make it at all.

I love alfafa in sandwiches and the mustard is hot and spicy, excellent for garnishes as the winter is stopping most chances of growing or buying parsley and coriander leaf.

Planning for more sprouts to come, mung beans, ful, wheat berries so there should be a reprise of this in another 10 days!

Day 9 - Bread Making Day

Bread gets a hard time from 'healthy' eaters, too high in carbohydrate and calories, too easy to eat too much, too full of gluten and other allergens.

I love it. Even more, I love home made bread. There is almost no purchased bread I've ever tried that comes close to it (one bakery in France stands out) and as for supermarket pap, forget it.

The dough was started yesterday but because I was using a slow raise method it wasn't ready to bake until this morning. I've made three loaves from my 5kg of dough, one to eat now and two to freeze for later, and put the rest by to make flat breads, pizza bases and grissini during the week, which will leave just enough old dough in 9 or 10 days time to start the next batch.

The slow rise, low added yeast approach addresses most of the problems that are associated with modern bread and I can nothing better than to point you in the direction of Bread Matters by Andrew Whitely where he expounds on the issue in great and interesting length. If you can afford it, taking one of his courses is well worth while too.

Left over bread shouldn't be wasted either. I've just made some great croutons with some old hard crusts I found in the bread bin, so hard that they had to be cracked through with the bread knife to make cubes. Spread out on a baking tray and left for 20 minutes in a medium oven they turned golden and crispy without the need for any added oil at all. Ideal for eating with the leftover soup from Monday.

Day 8 - Rainbow Bean Soup

A pretty picture of some of the vegetables.

Brightly coloured fruit and vegetables are considered healthy because their colours are complex compounds of chemicals which are good for the body. The simplest way to ensure you are getting the full range of these useful components is choose vegetables in a variety of colours.

I give you Rainbow Bean soup.

Use the type of beans you prefer. I used pinto beans but red, black or navy beans would all work as long as they are really properly cooked and not at all crunchy when they are added to the soup ingredients.

Panch phoran is a Bengali spice mix comprising mustard seed, cumin seed, fenugreek seed, fennel seed, and "black onion seed" which is actually no relation to onions but the seed of Nigella sativa. If you don't have it substitute what you will from what you have.

Makes plenty for four.

300g approx cooked pinto beans (cook your own from dry or open a tin)

1 tbsp. olive oil
2 small onions, peeled and chopped finely
1 medium (2 small) orange fleshed sweet potato, peeled and chopped.
1 yellow pepper, cleaned and chopped into small cubes
2 stalks of celery, cleaned and chopped
1 small beetroot, peeled and chopped
6 or so button mushrooms, chopped
10 kalamata olives, stones removed and chopped
400g tinned chopped tomatoes with juice
1 dry red chilli
1 tbsp. dried basil
2 tsp. panch phoran
1 tsp. salt reduced vegan stock powder

Lime wedges and gomashio to serve.

Soak for 8 hours and cook your dried beans in a pressure cooker on high for 20 minutes, or open one or two cans and drain and rinse the beans.

Fry all the prepared vegetables except the tomatoes in the oil until they are warm and start to soften, add the beans, herbs, spices and stock powder, the tomatoes with their juice and enough hot water to cover everything comfortably.

Cover the pot and simmer for 30-40 minutes until all the vegetables are cooked through.

Serve in big bowls with a squeeze of lime juice and gomashio to taste.

Day 7 - Pumpkin and Potato Gnocchi

A really simple way to use vegetables we have in abundance from our stores at the moment, Pumpkin and Potato Gnocchi make a good low fat Sunday supper. The recipe is at the end of the post and makes enough for four so when I made these at the end of January I put half in the freezer for another meal. Today we ate them.



They were frozen spread out on trays until hard, then stored in a bag. Freezing them like this meant they don't stick together and you can take out just the amount you need. I made these with really big ridges to take a lot of sauce.



Cook them by adding them to boiling water, just enough at a time that the water continues to boil and there is room for them all to move around. When they rise to the surface use a strainer to remove them from the water. They can be cooked from frozen.



Arrange them in a lightly greased serving dish. Cover the boiled gnocchi with a sauce of your choice. The first time we had these we had them with a garlic and rosemary 'butter', tonight I used a tomato and pumpkin sauce that I had also tucked away in the freezer.



Top the sauce with pine nuts, or other nuts, seeds or breadcrumbs of your choice and bake in a hot oven (220C) for 20 minutes.

Serve with grated vegan cheese or nutritional yeast.

To make the basic gnocchi:

300g potatoes, cooked in their skins, peeled and put through a ricer.
300g mashed pumpkin, use butternut or a Crown type, halved and baked in the oven until soft.
160g plain flour, plus extra as needed.
Salt and pepper to taste.

Make sure your vegetables are not too wet. The pumpkin can be placed in a sieve for an hour or two to drain if necessary but should be o.k. if cooked by baking.

Mash the potato and pumpkin together, season then add the 160g flour and mix and knead until a soft paste that will hold its shape is formed. You might need a little more flour if your pumpkin is very wet but try not to use too much, just enough to bring the dough together and make a single ball from it.

Flour a board well - and several plates or boards to take each finished piece. Divide the dough into quarters and roll each piece into a 2 cm rope. Cut each rope into pieces 2cm long, mark with a fork and place, not touching anything else, on a floured board. You'll need to use flour to stop things sticking. As you mark the gnocchi they will flatten a bit under the fork, carefully lift them up and reshape to a cylinder, this will leave a slight hollow on the underside. That sounds dreadfully confusing but I hope you can see what I mean from the picture of the frozen gnocchi above.

When you've made them all they can be cooked by dropping into boiling water, or frozen as described above.

Can be served immediately after boiling if you don't have time to bake them. Needs a sauce of your choice, a simple tomato one works well but it can be as lightly or strongly flavoured with herbs, garlic etc. as you like.

Day 6 - Curry Night

Curry and rice. A joint venture, Mr. Stripey chose, roasted and ground the spices so I don't really know what was in it but suffice to say it was simple, low fat and good and I'm sure there's no need for me to tell anyone how it's done.

Day 5 - Carrot Soup with Mint and Orange

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It is said that soup is one of the food types that takes longest to digest, leaving you feeling fuller longer, so it's always a good idea to start your meal with a bowl of it. Unless of course it's saturated in oil and loaded with salt.

Luckily this recipe is neither.

To make two big bowlfuls you need

15 ml of oil, I used half sesame and half olive
3 large carrots
1 small onion
2 cloves of garlic
2 tsp. finely crumbled dry mint
2 tsp. whole coriander seed, crushed
1/4 tsp. ground white pepper
Zest and juice of one sweet orange
Salt to taste

Slice the carrots and onion very thinly, put into a lidded saucepan with oil. Cover and leave to sweat over a low heat for 10 minutes or so, stirring from time to time so that nothing browns.

Add the crushed garlic, mint, coriander and pepper and stir around, then enough hot water to just cover the carrots. Put in the orange zest and let everything simmer for 20 minutes until the carrots are completely soft.

Use a stick blender to reduce the vegetables to a puree, return to serving temperature and add the juice. Add salt carefully to taste.

Serve in big bowls. Add a swirl of soya yoghurt if you like and enjoy with some crusty bread.

Day 4 - Breakfast Porridge

I don't often put pictures of the cats on this blog - after all they're nasty unhygienic creatures who have no place in a kitchen but try telling them that. On the other hand a picture of a bowl of steaming porridge is no easy task to make look photographically attractive, particularly when said bowlful was consumed several hours ago.

The key to a healthy diet is often claimed to be a good breakfast. This is an excellent breakfast if not particularly original or inventive.

For one substantial serving

50g of porridge oats (this is conveniently one small coffee cup here)
3 times its volume in water
a small handful of dried fruit - I favour some excellent large raisins and chopped unsulphured apricots at the moment. Don't overdo it, dried fruit is high in sugar but still good for you in moderation.

Put all of this into a heavy bottomed pan and allow to heat gently. Keep stirring and when it starts to simmer continue for two or three minutes more. Put the porridge into your serving bowl.

Then add as you fancy some chopped fresh fruit, bananas are good or grapes.

Finally, some completely optional items;

It's traditional to add a pinch of salt to porridge. That's fine but I'm leaving it out this month.
A sprinkle of cinnamon is nice if you like it and good for you apparently.
Two teaspoons of muscovado sugar (that's the very dark stuff from Barbados) is delicious but you might not want to add extra sweetness.
Non dairy milk, soy or nut, poured over particularly with the sugar, makes this brilliant in my opinion.

And that's that. With a cup of tea and a bowl of porridge you'll feel as fat and happy as a snoozing cat all the way until lunchtime.

Day 3 - Restaurant Review

Not doing terribly well at this healthy eating month - or am I? Last night we went to Itadaki Zen, 39 King's Cross Road, King's Cross, WC1X 9BJ, a vegan Japanese restaurant in London claiming to be the only such in Europe. Vegan and Japanese, got to be healthy!

Some of the food we had is shown above, I'm sorry the pictures aren't great but phone pictures taken in haste rarely are.

It's a difficult review to write. We had a lovely time, enjoyed our meal and the staff were helpful and friendly but there were disappointments in lots of small ways and it seems ungrateful somehow to list them.

I think the size of our party of nine might have flustered them a bit. We're a well established group and we've brought more than one kitchen to its knees with our greed and disparate requests.

The menu is ordered in such a way that it's difficult to put together a meal that is harmonious. It's easy to choose a couple of items for a quick lunch but for a full dinner it is a frustrating confusion. The restaurant has tried to overcome this by offering some sets. Most of the people with me chose one or other of these sets but the differences from set to set didn't really amount to much. There was too much duplication to make it feel like a real choice.

I ordered off piste and chose some maki sushi which I felt was a bit dry and lacking in sushi su, an onion pancake called jijimi which was delicious, tofu dengaku, kimchi, miso soup and a bowl of rice (which never came but we got a free pudding so nothing to bitch about). The problem was the order these arrived in, sushi, kimchi, soup, then the pancake, eventually the tofu, it was all a bit disorganised. The kitchen sent down some extra Kimbab which was also a bit dry but a nice thought, making my meal more Korean in the end than Japanese. The others who ordered individually had the same problems.

People ordering the sets fared slightly better as their 'courses' were complete. They also got a tremendous amount of food, making the cost of about £21 per head extremely good value.

Puddings aren't very varied and the only oddity, a sweet potato mochi, was so odd that it caused some hilarity but then, you don't go to a Japanese restaurant for sweets.

The staff were accommodating and brought us a little plate of natto so that the virgins (most of us) could try it. When I got past my fear of the slime I found it quite good, although at the time I described the taste as somewhere between acacia seeds and a dustbin.

The bill for nine came to about £240 to include service and a few bottles of wine. Not bad for London. Take cash if you can.

So it's hard to give marks out of 10 at this stage - we may have to go back and try again.

Day 2 - Salt replacer

Actually I should call this Salt Extender rather than replacer. Gomashio is a traditional Japanese seasoning also used in Zen and macrobiotic cooking. It consists of sesame seeds mixed with a small proportion of salt, usually 8 parts sesame to 1 part salt by weight, and is sprinkled on rice and other dishes. Sesame seeds are an inspired way of extending and improving on salt. They are rich in magnesium and iron, contain fibre, vitamin B1 and vitamin E. They also taste great.

So it's good stuff and ideal for a salt reducing regime. I've always loved it but never tried making it myself before so I went on a trip around the web and found this excellent recipe at Just Bento which suits me because I also favour a grey salt from Brittany and the comments about grinding could have been my own. There's also a version there for making the gomashio on the hob. Makiko says, and I agree, that a 10:1 proportion of sesame to salt is easy to calculate and tastes just as good.

To make a good sized jar of Gomashio, which will keep for a while take 200g of raw (untoasted) sesame seeds and arrange them on an oven tray with a good rim. The rim is important because you need to stir the seeds during processing and don't want them spilling everywhere.

Pop them in the oven with the thermostat set at 150C for 5 to 10 minutes (depends if the oven was hot when they went in) while you prepare a brine with 20g of good quality salt in about 150-200 ml of hot water. Make sure all the salt crystals have dissolved.

Get the tray of seeds out of the oven, they'll be hot and starting to toast (but not burnt!) so use gloves. Drizzle your brine over the sesame using a spoon so that there are no tsunami like events that wash everything away. It will sizzle wonderfully.

Stir everything around until all the seeds are wet then put the tray back into the oven and reduce the heat to about 120C. Leave to dry for about an hour giving everything a stir halfway through.

At the end of the hour, give it all another stir to make sure all the seeds are separate and there are no soggy pockets then turn off the heat and leave the tray in the cooling oven to dry completely. When cold store in an airtight jar.

It's then ready to be sprinkled over rice or beans, used whole or ground down a little in the pestle and mortar for a finer sprinkle. Salty and good for you.

Day 1

Of course, as soon as I try to examine our diet to see where healthy improvements can be made it seems easy to justify nearly every culinary decision and entrenched habit. But I'm still on for the project. I'll start by listing the aims:

1) Reduce alcohol intake to the month to zero. This is for health reasons, to give my system time to regroup and repair without adding additional challenges.

2) Cut down on oils and fats. Actually, as vegans who make most of our own food we don't really get through excessive amounts of fats but it's tempting to eat fried food more often than we should and I have become a little bit generous when putting that first dollop of oil into the pan at the start of the cooking process, so this month is time to be a bit more thoughtful about it.

3) Make sure that the daily five fruit and vegetable target is met. This is an almost entirely arbitrary figure dreamed up by social engineers who want to make healthy eating easier for morons but it does represent a target that will be achievable by swapping fruit for my afternoon tea and toast.

4) Pay more consideration to my salt intake. I'm not afraid of salt but enjoy it to the extent that I wonder if I'm damaging my palate by over salting. I have high blood pressure so salt is generally considered a bad thing, but I'm on a medication which expels salt and so leaves me at risk of a potassium imbalance giving me something of a let out. On the other hand, making nearly all our own food I have much better control over our salt intake than many and by my estimation we are coming in at pretty much the NHS recommendation of 6g daily. This month I hope to reduce that by half or so. This may have benefits for my sense of taste.

5) We don't do many cakes or puddings. Anything we have this month will be the lower fat reduced sugar options just for completeness. However, certain junk foods, chips from the shop, weekly takeaways and so on will be suspended for the period, just to break the habit.

6) Supplements; we rarely use supplements to our diet but for the month a daily low dosage B12 tablet and some other trace minerals seem attractive. Also some cold pressed oil rich in omega 3 for salads.

What the month is not about:

It's not about abstinence for the sake of it. I have a couple of dinner dates and Valentine's day booked for the month and I intend to enjoy those outings, although I'll try to keep the alcohol free bit true and avoid anything excessively rich.

It's not about weight loss. Not trying or intending to lose weight and if I'm hungry I'll eat, but I'll try to eat healthier alternatives.

Orange Salad

This is a simple side salad that can be eaten as a snack to vary the monotony of a fruit diet!

Carefully peel and slice some sweet juicy oranges catching all the juices. Finely slice a red (or yellow) onion and divide into rings. Arrange the orange slices and onion rings attractively in your serving dish. Pour over the juices, season with a little finely ground pepper and decorate with a small spoonful of capers and pomegranate seeds.