Healthy Eating

Name: Pumpkin Soup with Kefir and Poppy Seeds
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 14 min
Total time: 24 min
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients: 1 tbsp olive oil; 2 white onions, peeled, halved; 700g pumpkin or squash, peeled, de-seeded and chopped into cubes; 2 carrots, peeled, chopped; 1 stick celery, washed; 200g/1 cup red lentils; 1 x 400g tin tomatoes or tomato passata; 1 litre vegetable or chicken stock; Sea salt and black pepper; 200ml kefir (cultured milk drink) or use natural yoghurt; 1 tsp poppy seeds per bowl

November 2, 2017

Pumpkin (or Butternut) Soup with Kefir and Poppy Seeds

You can make this soup with fresh pumpkin, or butternut squash. Kefir is a gut-friendly dairy produce, but you can swirl fresh cream or sour cream through this soup, too. If you’re vegan, you can follow exactly the same recipe, but swap the kefir for some vegan/soy yoghurt instead and be sure to use a vegan-friendly, vegetable stock.

Aside from being packed full of fresh veggies, most of the other ingredients you’ll find in the store cupboard – red lentils, stock, a tin of tomatoes or passata and since I had a packet of poppy seeds open from making a Plum and Poppy Seed traybake, I sprinkled some over the finished soup, but the roasted seeds or any other seeds would be nice too.

Pumpkin Soup with Kefir and Poppy Seeds

Prep 10 mins

Cook 14 mins

Total 24 mins

Author Ren Behan

Yield 6 servings

Whip up this simple and healthy seasonal pumpkin soup (or use squash) for the perfect autumnal bowl of comfort for lunch or as a light supper. Add a drizzle of kefir for a dose of healthy probiotic and a sprinkle of poppy seeds for a bit of crunch.

Ingredients

1 tbsp olive oil
2 white onions, peeled, halved
700g pumpkin or squash, peeled, de-seeded and chopped into cubes
2 carrots, peeled, chopped
1 stick celery, washed
200g/1 cup red lentils
1 x 400g tin tomatoes or tomato passata
1 litre vegetable or chicken stock
Sea salt and black pepper
200ml kefir (cultured milk drink) or use natural yoghurt
1 tsp poppy seeds per bowl

Instructions

Take a large 24cm pan or stock pot, add the olive oil and heat. Add the onions and fry until slightly softened and golden brown.
Add the pumpkin, carrots and celery, stir well and continue to cook for 5 minutes.
Add the red lentils, tomatoes/passata and stock to the pan. Ensure everything is covered with stock, if not, add a cupful more of water.
Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 20 minutes until all the vegetables are soft (the carrots will take the longest to cook).
Season well with sea salt and black pepper.
Allow the soup to cool a little and then use a stick blender to blend the soup, or transfer into a jug blender (you may need to blend in two batches)
Serve the soup with a drizzle of kefir and sprinkle over some poppy seeds, or other seeds of your choice.

Beetroot and Kale Soup | Kale and Almond Crumble | Jumpstart2015

Beetroot and Kale Soup with a Kale and Almond Crumble – virtuous!

So, are you really, really fed up of healthy eating now? Have you fallen off the wagon? Or, are you still ‘being good?’

If you started a new healthy eating regime at the beginning of the year, you could be 22 days in, which is amazing, if you’ve stuck to the plan.

Happily, I’m still in the ‘being good’ category. Since the start of the new year, and with the support of some of my fellow bloggers following the #JumpStart 2015 plan, I’m ten pounds down and feeling much lighter and brighter.

…

January 2, 2015

Healthy Pasta Dishes | Guest Blog Event: Pasta Please January 2015

It’s January, which means we’ll all be bombarded with great ideas for eating healthily, dieting and losing weight. Personally, I’ve set myself the task of completing my second Whole 30 Challenge, which means no pasta for me. But I do have a handy food processor, so I’m going to experiment with courgette noodles, instead. That being said, the most weight I ever lost was after my first baby and that was by joining my local Slimming World group and there were plenty of healthy pasta dishes that I could enjoy with that one. So, if I do fall off the Paleo wagon, I’ll be signing back up to my local group! I’m also looking forward to using my Froothie Optimum 9400 for lots of healthy soup recipes and I’ll be joining in with #Jumpstart2015

…

January 30, 2013

Guest Post: Cucina Ceri – Subbing Processed Carbs for Colourful Veg

By Ceri Jones, of Cucina Ceri

Readers of this blog will know that this January, Ren committed to the Whole30 regime, which draws on the Paleo approach to a diet based on whole foods (meat, fish, veg, fruit, nuts and seeds) to enable the body to re-set itself and become less dependent on sugars and processed foods as fuel. Since my blog, Cucina Ceri, is full of Paleo inspired recipes I was delighted when Ren asked me to put together a guest post for Fabulicious Food.

I get my recipe inspiration from just about everywhere – meals out, reading magazines, other blogs, cookbooks and cooking shows on the box – I take my inspiration first and worry about adapting it to my nutritional aspirations later!

I love experimenting in the kitchen, and as a reformed pasta-&-dense-carb-a-holic, I love to find new ways of using my existing pasta recipe repertoire to create tasty new and good for you dishes. My favourite way of doing this is to replace grain and gluten-heavy foods such as pasta, noodles and rice with vegetable alternatives. This also increases my daily intake of vegetables at the same time – perfect!

Here are 5 of my favourite ideas –

1. Using courgettes as ‘spaghetti’ or noodles. I’ve got a piece of equipment called a ‘spiraliser’ but very cheap julienne peeler works just as well. In a matter of minutes a humble courgette can be turned into fabulous ribbon lengths and served alongside favourite pasta sauces such as bolognese, meatballs, carbonara or pesto. My current favourite recipe is Pancetta with Courgette Linguini. For a cuisine way further east than Italy I recently cooked up a tasty Prawn Pad Thai. I’ll be posting this up on Cucina Ceri very soon.

Pancetta with Courgette Linguini

2. Stuffing veg to carry sauces. I am loving using squash, hollowed out, roasted and filled with a pasta sauce of choice. My easy on the eye Squash All’Amatriciana is one of my favourite ever recipes.

Squash All’Amatriciana

3. Using cauliflower as rice. Stick a head of cauliflower through the grating attachment on a food processor, steam or stir fry with some garlic & coconut oil and hey presto you’ve got a pile of highly nutritious cruciferous veg to serve as an accompaniment to a meal. I recently served this alongside my Burmese Pork Curry . Cauliflower rice can also be used instead of bulgar in Tabbouleh.

4. Using thinly sliced aubergines or courgettes instead of lasagna sheets. Certainly no less tasty, than a conventional lasagne I had great fun creating this Faux Lasagna – by layering up beef bolognese, vegetables and creamy pesto sauce.

5. Subbing grain-free flour in gnocchi. This is a recipe I haven’t yet published on the blog as I need to perfect it a little further – a gnocchi made from sweet potato and chestnut flour. I choose sweet potatoes over plain as whilst white pots are a vegetable they are basically a nutritional non-event. Chestnut flour is one of my favourite substitute flours and like the sweet potato has a slightly sweet edge. This gnocchi dish is starchy carb heavy so saved for a special treat. The gnocchi carried both sauces I trialled superbly – Creamy Coconut with Salmon and Spinach, Rocket & Parma Ham.

So there you have it – just a few of my favourite ideas I wanted to share. I would be really interested to know if anyone has any similar recipes or ideas? Thanks so much Ren for inviting me to guest post – and best of luck with the rest of your Whole 30 journey. I am reading with interest!

With many thanks to Ceri Jones for this lovely and informative guest post – brimming with healthy ideas!

January 29, 2011

Happy New Year – “Enough is as good as a feast”

The same thing happens every year, we get through Christmas and a little bit of guilt kicks in for having over-indulged. Whether it was too many mince pies, the Christmas pud, the Brandy Sauce, the cheeseboard, the alcohol, the box of chocs under the tree x 6, the lifetime-on-the-hips Christmas Tiramisu, there is no doubt that all the ‘added extras’ that come along with Christmas seem to make the year end on a heavy note. Thank goodness then, for the New Year, which marks a brand new start and a chance for us to renew our healthy eating vows – for another year.

Watching Mary Poppins with the children over Christmas, I was reminded of a wonderful saying within the film: “Enough is as good as a feast.” Oh, how I love Mary Poppins. The original Supernanny. Sensible, firm but kind, gets the job done but is a lot of fun. How I would love to be able to click my fingers and tidy up mess, or take out a tape measure reading my height as “practically perfect in every way.” I digress. My point is that Mary Poppins is the epitome of self-control and discipline. You wouldn’t catch her sneaking into the fridge late at night to stuff a mouthful of chocolate Christmas tree cake in her mouth.

And so again, I, along with many others, join the millions of people around the world in making my New Year’s resolutions. An attempt to improve ourselves, to better ourselves, to strive to greater goals and ambitions.

Making resolutions is actually a tradition that dates back all the way to 153 BC. The Romans named the first month of the year Janus, after the Roman god of beginnings and the guardian of doors and entrances. Janus was depicted with two faces, one of the front of his head and one on the back, so that one could always look back at the old year and the other could look forward to the new.

Although the date for New Year hasn’t always been on January 1 and is only observed on this date now by those following the modern Gregorian calendar, New Year’s celebrations across every culture, whatever the date, have a common theme: it is time for change.

Will we achieve our goals? According to research by Quirkology men are more likely to succeed when asked to engage in goal setting. Women are more successful when they share their resolutions with friends and family and are encouraged. The biggest pitfall, it seems, is making too many resolutions or trying to achieve too much. Re-visiting past resolutions sets us up for frustration and disappointment, whilst failing to plan ahead and being too spontaneous also sets us up for failure.

A good way forward is to approach an old problem a new way. For example, instead of resolving to lose weight, we could try making a commitment to exercise more. Rather than giving up chocolate or cake, we could resolve to eat more fruit, or to eat fruit every day for breakfast or as a snack.

What about resolutions that benefit others? We could plant a garden and involve our children with our tasks, this way we rely less on commercial produce and clock up less food miles. Or if this is too much, we could try and shop more locally, to help our local economy and local food producers.

We could chose a new charity to support, donate our baked cakes to a local home or hospice, or resolve to fill each and every charity bag popped through out door with clothes we no longer need or want. Slowly, but surely, new (and hopefully healthier) habits will form. Persistence is key. There is no value in excess, as Mary Poppins points out to the children wishing to play for longer.

The aim then, is to change for good, rather than change for a week or two. Since the focus of my blog is food (and it seems it is an occupational hazard to gain weight whilst food blogging) I’m going to have to turn Fabulicious Food into Healthilicious Food in order to succeed whilst reminding myself daily of my new Mary Poppins mantra. Instead of my old thinking, which tended to be: “A little of what you fancy does you good,” my new ‘Mary Poppins’ way of thinking will be that a little less of what I fancy will do me even more good, as will a little more exercise. There. Easy. Ish. Perhaps with a spoonful of sugar?!

What are your goals? What are the secrets of your success? Share your tips with me in the comments box and let’s crack these old habits together!

January 5, 2011

Book Review: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

“Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants”

This is not a new book, published in 2008, but nevertheless it is a good one. I usually read it in January, to help me a long a bit with my healthy start to the year. It reminds me of things that I already know, but often forget. It makes me want to eat healthier food. And that, can only be a good thing!

Michael Pollan, an American writer, opens his book with a few short words of advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.” Sounds simple, and according to his beliefs, it really is. These seven words, are in his view, more or less, “the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”

As well as being crammed with facts and information, In Defence of Food offers the reader an Eater’s Manifesto as well as balanced dietary lessons to help us re-gain a simple but enjoyable relationship with food. Packaged food is out, real food is in. Pollan warns that our industrialised, modern, Western diet is literally killing us.

We are faced with an epidemic of chronic diseases – obesity, diabetes, heart disease and several types of cancer – and as cultural and traditional eating habits fade, the modern, processed diet is taking hold.

Far from banning food, such as meat, Pollan tells us to eat, but not too much. We should also cut out constant snacking, the “fourth daily eating occasion” that we seem to have added to breakfast, lunch and dinner. We should eat at a table and not alone. We should avoid eating in the car (American gas stations now make more money selling food than gasoline, but we should consider what kind of food this is.) We should cook and, if we can, plant a garden. We should pay more for better quality food (as the French do) and eat less of it.

Despite the fact that obesity rates in Europe are rapidly catching up with America, Pollen believes that a traditional diet, whether it is Greek, Italian, French or better still, Asian, is far superior and better for our health.

Pollen says “That food and eating stand in need of a defense might seem counterintuitive at a time when “overnutrition” is emerging as a more serious threat to public health than undernutrition. But I contend that most of what we’re consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we’re consuming it – in the car, in front of the TV, and, increasingly alone – is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.”

Simple lessons, for a better way of life. Food for thought. I read, and re-read In Defense of Food. It is certainly a book that convinces you to start thinking and can help us kick into touch those difficult-to-break habits.

Which books do you enjoy reading to help you kick-start new habits? Leave a comment in the box to let me know.