Good things to add to smoothies that provide nutritious calories

• Adding spoonful of nut butter provides flavour, texture and beneficial fats (I like homemade almond butter best).
• A palmful of oats such as in this rhubarb and ginger thickie provide all of the health benefits of wholegrains and a particularly good helping of soluble fibre. Theoretically any wholegrains that are suitable for eating raw will work in a smoothie (I’d love to hear what you guys have tried out!).  A very easily available choice is wheat bran, a great source of fibre for many people (a little too irritating to the gut for some).
• Avocado blends beautifully and works just fine in a fruity smoothie, providing monounsaturated fats and vitamin E.
• As we talked about last week, milk and yogurt (cows, goats, soy, rice etc) are a great way to add calcium, plus the fat in the milk will help to slow the absorption of the natural sugars in the fruit, reducing the overall GI of the recipe. For a change of texture freeze the yogurt beforehand.
• Hemp oil or ground hemp seeds are one of the best ways to boost any dish with a vegetarian source of omega 3 fatty acids, as well as providing the powerful anti-oxidant, Vitamin E.
• Dried fruit, soaked to soften, provide texture, sweetness, fibre, energy and minerals.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but hopefully you will have found one or two new ideas in there to get you blending again!  I’d love to hear about it via the comments if you have your own favourite smoothie additions.

Any fruit will do
Most fruits can be smoothied. Berries, stone fruits and soft tropical fruits work best; slightly harder, thick skinned fruits like apples and pears are better peeled and lightly cooked to form a compote, like these low sugar apple and plum freezer compotes.

A smoothie can be both seasonal and frugal.  In the winter frozen berries work a treat and there is no reason not to use canned fruit; just go for a fruit tinned in its own juices rather than sugar syrup.

Watch your portion size
Because a smoothie is in liquid form (how many calories can there be in a drink?) and is full of healthy ingredients, its easy to go overboard.  Two portions of fruit (just under 200g or 7oz of fruit) and a small pot of yogurt (about three tablespoons) is plenty for one person.  If you make too much, just put it in your fridge in a lidded container for later.

Back soon with a luscious summer smoothie recipe and tips for clever flavourings.

Spiced chilli hot chocolate is an idea as old as well, hot chocolate! The earliest traces of hot chocolate, found in Mayan tombs in Guatamala dating back to 460 A.D, had been made from a paste ground from cocoa seeds mixed with cornmeal and chillis. I like this spicy hot chocolate as an occasional mid afternoon pick me up when I am struggling to concentrate on something complicated – there’s definitely something in the research from Nottingham University showing that a cocoa rich drink can improve blood flow to the brain. Chilli is also well known for improving blood flow all over your body so this would be equally welcome to warm you up after a bracing winter walk outside.

Sadly chocolate is not the health food that some clever marketing people would like us to believe (or that we would like to believe perhaps?), but for an occasional sweet treat a mug of hot spicy drinking chocolate is not such a bad thing. Two tips to keep it on the healthy side; first, use good quality plain chocolate rather than a sweetened milk chocolate or chocolate powder and second, use semi-skimmed or skimmed milk to keep this on the low fat side. All chocolate is high in sugar and fat (dark chocolate just has a little bit less fat and a little bit more sugar) and so the health gain in choosing dark (plain chocolate) is not really about fat but is because dark chocolate contains more cocoa solids, usually around the 70%. It is the cocoa solids in chocolate that have been associated with having heart health benefits and that contain valuable anti-oxidants.

If you’ve ever heard nutritionists talking about sugary and sweet foods being empty calories they mean that these foods provide calories but bugger all else of nutritional usefulness. Happily this hot chocolate is well away from being empty calories with those 70% cocoa solids and a good helping of bone healthy calcium in the milk. If you don’t drink cows milk just go for whatever alternative you normally use but try to choose one that has been fortified with calcium.

And now to the all important third tip – for a super enjoyable, guilt-free beverage experience make your drink from tasty fairly traded dark chocolate! Rachel who makes and bakes many lovely things over at Rkhooks is gathering together all of our best chocolate recipes to promote the chocolate campaign from Stop the Traffik. The chocolate campaign is there to draw attention to the shocking practice of using trafficked child slave labour to harvest cocoa beans on the Cote D’Ivoire. The chocolate campaign web site has some information about where to buy your traffik-free chocolate from but essentially for a chocolate to be awarded Fairtrade status it must be guaranteed not to have involved any trafficked labour in its production so you can just look out for fairtrade chocolate.

The produce lowest in food miles has to be all of that fabulous fresh stuff so many of you are busy growing in your own back gardens! Lots of people seem to be busy munching through very impressive courgette harvests and there have been some fantastic courgette recipes posted including those from Kalyn, Wendy and Joanna to name just a few. I’m also much enthused by the Royal Horticultural Society’s Grown Your Own Veg site complete with blog, calendar and gardening tips. However, I’m all talk and no trousers because life was too hectic here earlier in the Summer to get round to planting much more than a few herbs. There is no such abundance in our garden, but we are starting to reap the rewards of our lovely fruit trees (oh except the poor pear tree, which the blasted cat has killed by scratching through the bark right the way round the base of the tree).

Least productive in the garden is the fig tree, from which we had two figs across the whole of last Summer. Such a rare treat, these were eaten gratefully and unadorned. But this year we have already had at least ten huge juicy figs, not even counting the four we gave to a neighbour who was waiting patiently when we returned from our holiday to ask politely “did we like figs, and were we planning to eat them?”. We were happy to hand over the current ripe batch, and were rewarded by the promise of a donation from his Muscat grape harvest later in the Summer (not sure if this will be before or after he turns it into homemade wine).

It’s a funny thing having so many figs because frankly it hasn’t been the best Summer here in Oxford (OK, so it has in fact been the worst Summer since records began). But figs work to their own timetable, with the small, hard green fruits on the tree not ripening until the year after their first appearance and I suspect that the bumper harvest owes more to last Summer which was how a Summer ought to behave.

Originally inspired by a recipe for Fig and honey milk shake, every second pair of figs that ripen on our tree are turned into this glorious, turkish delight-scented froth. A little bit more sophisticated than your average smoothie and wonderfully fragrant, I can’t help thinking that this would make a lovely finale to a middle-eastern feast, particularly if it was served in pretty gold-edged Moroccan tea glasses (like the beauties on this Flickr photograph).

On an entirely different note, if you are interested in healthy eating then Kathryn Elliot has recently revamped her Limes and Lycopene blog and very smart it looks too! Throughout August Kathryn is running 31 days to better energy, a daily tip with a fifteen minute task to help you finish the month reinvigorated and raring to go. Having returned from Barcelona with a horrible snotty cold and feeling decidedly bleurgh I will definitely be tuning in!

Breakfast is a meal that I expect to work hard for its money (nutritionally speaking that is!). I’m very attached to the idea that if I start off with a good healthy breakfast then the rest of the day (food and everything else) will magically fall into place. A fruit smoothie for breakfast is a very tempting idea but it doesn’t really do it for me in practice – my stomach starts looking round for its next snack far too soon (I’ve no idea how those people who live on black coffee until lunchtime cope). I’m confident now that it isn’t just me being greedy because one of the top purveyors of smoothies in the UK, Innocent, have come up with a clever solution to exactly this problem: the Breakfast Thickie. Fruit, honey and yogurt blended with a handful of oats to make something substantial enough to call itself a Breakfast. I’d happily buy an Innocent Thickie every day (I can’t even whinge about creating unnecessary packaging as they are in a fully compostable “eco-bottle”) but Innocent only make one flavour at the moment (Raspberry and Blueberry) which although lovely is starting to get a bit dull, not to mention expensive.

Rhubarb is the “in” fruit in the UK at moment (by virtue of being the only fruit actually growing in the country). I don’t think anybody eats rhubarb raw (I could be wrong?) and so my technique for rhubarb is to roast it in a big batch with a sprinkling of sugar and to munch through that gradually during the week. I’m into rhubarb for breakfast at the moment; tart rhubarb plus creamy porridge is fantastic (I’m even considering freezing a few batches ready for the Autumn). But then the weather got a bit warm for porridge hence my first attempt at making a thickie, with roasted rhubarb and little stem ginger for added wake-you-up feistiness.

I’m sure you could try many different fruits and flavourings for a thickie, and the great thing is that all of them will work equally hard. By the time you’ve finished a thickie you will:

• have already had at least one of those five portions of fruit and veg (possibly closer to two)
• have eaten a bone-friendly portion of calcium-rich but low-fat yogurt
• feel happily full until late morning because of those low GI oats, even more so if you use low GI agave nectar instead of honey
• be busily lowering your cholesterol levels, thanks again to those oats

I love rhubarb but for anybody reading who is like my other half and thinks that rhubarb is just a bit tart, you can sweeten the thickie with a bit more honey or a little agave nectar. Agave nectar is an ingredient I was introduced to by Heidi Swanson’s new book, Super Natural Cooking. It’s a little like honey (slightly runnier) but made from the Tequila Agave plant. No bees required so vegan-friendly, if you ever need a vegan alternative to honey for a recipe. It’s a bit of a health-food store ingredient and I would normally just use a dollop of honey but I like the idea of using agave nectar in this recipe because it is low GI like the oats, and so hopefully adds to the ability of the thickie to outlast its smoothie competitors until late morning and beyond! The other way of reducing the impact of the rhubarb is to loosen the texture of the thickie using milk rather than the orange juice suggested in the recipe.