Cooking pasta by the absorption method (risotto style) was all the rage in the food blog world a couple of years back.  A recent revisit has uncovered that it works really well with wholewheat pasta, especially when its combined with the bounties of summer (the sweetest tomatoes, fresh green beans and grassy pea shoots).

The absorption method is a pretty handy way to get a soft, savoury pasta sauce without the calories and fat of your alfredos and carbonaras. The starch released by the pasta is captured in the cooking liquor giving the pasta a silky quality and taking it a step beyond summer’s simpler pasta salads.  The aim here is to cook the pasta just as you would cook a risotto, gently adding liquid and stirring regularly.  The only real potential for error with this technique is if you add the liquid too quickly and on too ferocious a heat, creating a pasta with a soggy outside and hard uncooked centre. This is even more important to watch out for  when you’re using wholewheat pasta but that’s OK, treat this as a chance to slow down for a while and line up a cup of tea or a podcast or a book or just sit and stir.

This year has bought us a bumper crop of cherry tomatoes (red alert and gardeners delight for you garden geeks).  I’ve been making oven dried tomatoes using Wendy’s method which produces something soft and sweet more like a sun blush tomato, not one of those nasty leathery sun dried offerings.

There’s no need to buy pea shoots especially if you don’t grow them. They do have a lovely fresh grassy note but are expensive to buy and not always easy to get hold of.  Any other tender green leaves that you have in the fridge will do such as rocket, baby spinach, watercress.

A word about the stock

There’s a recipe that keeps popping up and I’ve been trying to ignore it, because surely something that simple isn’t going to make a decent dinner?  It’s called pisto, a kind ratatouille that is a regular feature in Spanish home kitchens. Having given in and tried it, I’m now completely sold on the idea.  It’s not the pisto alone that has entranced me, but the traditional serving suggestion; the familiarity of rice with a homely, tangy tomato sauce and topped with a perfect runny egg. Pisto is a new stock item on our list of easy weeknight suppers but don’t let me limit your ideas.  For starters I’m sure this would make a perfect weekend brunch.

As a meal this is environmentally sustainable, nutritionally well balanced and stress free to make. What’s not to like?

It’s so darn easy
This is not an instant dinner (a misleading term if ever there was, as we discussed last week) but it is a forgiving sort of a meal to make, with very little active input required and little that can go wrong. Ximena Maier of Lobstersquad explains the attraction of making pisto “What I like about it is that it has a very relaxed rhythm. You only have to follow the order of ingredients, and throw them in the pan as soon as they´re chopped. There´s no anxiously waiting for something to be just right, no stressful wild chopping while something may burn. Things will happen while they must, and a minute up and down isn´t a big deal.”   In fact if you have a rice cooker then cooking dinner becomes a very leisurely affair indeed. 

The eggs are gently cooked in little dents made in the pisto with the back of a spoon.  This results in all of the gooey loveliness of a poached egg but with none of the scariness of egg poaching for the uninitiated (though there are many reasons why it is worth learning how to poach an egg if you haven’t already).

Nutritional balance
Pisto with brown rice and an egg is the very model of a well balanced meal.  Vegetables predominate the dish and are there in a range of colours which intimates that you are about to eat a good variety of vitamins and antioxidants. Eggs provide low fat protein and are cooked without the addition of any extra fat. The carbohydrate source is wholegrain. The total amount of fat used in the recipe is small and monounsaturated in nature.  And there is synergy between the ingredients too with the brown rice, egg and vegetables combing to give a reasonable hit of iron and the added benefit of vitamin C from the peppers which enables your body to better absorb these vegetarian iron sources.

Flexibility and Flexitarianism
I’m bound to offend some (Spanish) people with my messing about with the basic pisto recipe (then it’s not pisto, right?) but another very pleasing quality about using this as the inspiration for a meal is that you can adjust it a little according to what’s in the fridge.  If you want to make your pisto more seasonal and local you can; as it is mid Winter here I compromised with canned tomatoes in place of the traditional raw but used imported organic peppers.  An official common variation in Spain is to use eggplant (aubergine) instead of courgette but a carrot works just fine too.  And if you’ve got half a bag of spinach or another greeny leafy veg in the fridge then why not chuck some of that in too (I also keep frozen spinach which you can just chuck straight in from the freezer).

Brown rice is my accompaniment of choice but try experimenting with other wholegrains like buckwheat groats or quinoa. 

This is definitely a no meat required dish adding to its sustainable
credentials but the flexitarian among you might enjoy a bit of chorizo sausage for an occasional variation. 

Built in portion control
The sauce, rice and eggs are all introduced separately providing ample portion control opportunities. Looking for a light lunch? Reduce or skip the rice and just have one egg. My husband, who spends his evenings running and weekends cycling up huge hills needs more calories than me so he tends to have the pisto, rice and eggs with some crusty bread on the side.

Cook once, eat again later
Once you’ve made a big batch of the sauce the leftovers will sit happily in the fridge for about a week or freeze giving you a really easy dinner option on some busy weeknight when cooking is shaping up to feel more of a chore than a pleasure.

I’d really encourage you to make extra of pisto sauce ready for another day as it is really handy thing to have in the fridge.  You don’t need to eat it with rice and eggs; how about using it as a pasta sauce or adding a can of chickpeas for a vegetarian stew?  If you want to save some for another day stop just before the stage of adding the green leafy vegetables (which are best added at the last minute) and put aside any sauce that you don’t want to use today.

Other people making pisto
Pisto Manchego With Eggs from Marth Rose Schulman’s New York Times column as raved about last week
Winding down on a friday evening : Pisto from lobstersquad
Serious eat highlight a summery version of pisto to made with grilled vegetables
Not pisto, but I’ve also written about some healthy eating habits I picked up on holiday in Spain

In terms of health, tofu is not a miracle food (as with everything, it has its good and bad points), but it is undoubtedly a very low fat protein source, and all of that pesky processing imbues most brands with a very health concentration of calcium.  A half a block serving of the organic tofu we use contains a whopping 335mg of calcium, around about the same as half a pint of milk.  And soy does seem to have total and LDL cholesterol lowering properties, though you do have eat an awful lot of it to reap the benefits – 25g a day, which Jane Clarke reckons adds up to “a 250ml soya drink plus a 75g tofu portion, a 125g soya yoghurt and soya milk in four cups of tea or coffee”.  What tofu definitely doesn’t have are the abundant quantities of cholesterol-raising saturated fat that you find in pork belly.

The butchers we bought the pork belly from at Easter is worthy of a mention.  Alcock’s Family Butchers in Summertown, Oxford, is a popular place that always has a queue of patient regulars snaking down the street of a Saturday morning.  Alcock’s sell meat that is predominantly but not always organic, meat supplied by The Real Meat Company, whose philosophy echoes something I have written about before – that organic is not automatically the best choice for animal welfare or sustainability (though it is a darn site better than most of the alternatives available).

Last year’s rhubarb fetish recipe
Rhubarb and ginger oat thickie

This recipe is my entry for weekend herb blogging, hosted this week by Susan from The Well Seasoned Cook

Nobody is more surprised than me by my current emotion (well OK, maybe my Mum will be a bit more surprised than I am if she’s reading this).  I’m upset because …. march is the end of the brussels sprout season!

Sprouts are a fabulous winter source of vitamin C and being so readily available locally meant that this winter just seemed like the time to put previous prejudice aside and give them another try.  I’ve always hated brussels sprouts, but a couple of factors have won me round.  First and foremost, sprouts are just tastier than they used to be – growers have been working hard to come up with sweeter tasting varieties (if you don’t believe me, well then that’s all the more reason to give them another try).  Secondly, the blogosphere has sprouted some amazing recipes over the last couple of winters. If you look closely at the recipes they all have one quality in common; the sprouts are at no time be cooked using water. Therein lies the top tip – if you want to learn to love sprouts in all their glory then you need to start by steering well clear of anything boiled or microwaved.
Heidi’s golden crusted spouts recipe dusted with cheese was the deal clincher for me, after which I have progressed swiftly through cheesy pasta sauces and on to virtually undisguised sprouts in healthy stir fries.  Still to come is the ultimate pinnacle of sprout acceptance, the raw sprout (roll on the first frost of winter 2008).

Five recipes to make you love brussels sprouts
Start with Heidi’s golden crusted sprouts and work your way through.  Not a recipe but useful for those who have been willfully avoiding sprouts is Vegan Yum Yum’s article on How to Buy and Prep Brussels Sprouts

• Golden-Crusted Brussels Sprouts Recipe Heidi at 101 cookbook
• Pasta with Hashed Brussels Sprouts and Pine Nuts Molly at orangette
• Brussels sprouts with spiced breadcrumbs recipe by Tom Norrington-Davies (channel 4)
• Roasted Brussels Sprouts Recipe with Balsamic, Parmesan, and Pine Nuts by Kalyn at Kalyn’s Kitchen
• Caramelized strips of tofu served over sauteed shredded brussels sprouts Heidi at 101 cookbooks
• Brussels sprouts and tofu by Yotam Ottolenghin and ably tested by Wendy

My contribution to the sprout lexicon is testament to my new found love of the little chaps; so enamoured have I become that my standby lunch over the winter has been a stir fry of shredded fresh sprouts with chilli, ginger and egg.  Provided that you cook a little extra rice the evening before this dish can be on the table in 10 minutes.

This recipe is my entry for weekend herb blogging, hosted this week by Kel from Green Olive Tree

You’ve probably made a recipe like this yourself – add a bit of olive oil to the pan, fry the garlic, add another drizzle of olive oil and sizzle the meat, add a handful of veggies and a dash of cream or creme-fraiche to finish it off and voila, you have an instant sauce for pasta. Maybe with just a touch more olive oil to loosen it up at the end. This is the recipe I intended to make, but when I reached for the olive oil I was alarmed by the speed with which the bottle seems to be emptying. I’m sure it was full three weeks ago and now there is only about a third left. Sometimes I’m just too engrossed in its wonderful heart healthy monounsaturated fat profile, busy living the Mediterranean diet, that I forget that all of those drizzles are slowly and effortlessly stockpiling calories. So here’s my tip for the day for anybody else who thinks they might have gone a bit too mediterranean – get a tablespoon from your drawer, fill it with olive oil and then empty the oil into the pan that you use the most. It’s quite a good amount, yes? There, you never have to measure olive oil again – you now know what a tablespoon of olive oil looks like and also what 120 kcal of olive oil looks like, give or take a little.

So to the pasta. The whole dish contains just one teaspoon of olive oil per person, with the extra moisture provided by a big glug of vegetable stock. The stock is a great twist – pop the lid on and the broad beans and chicken effectively steam instead of fry. Vegetable stock gives the final sauce a rich savoury flavour and with the mustard it only needs a little touch of creme-fraiche to finish it off (hats off to my supermarket who now sells creme-fraiche that is both half-fat AND organic). Adding a big handful of mint at the end is a vital stage to make the whole meal lively and fresh (it is still supposed to be summer after all).

It nearly didn’t end well. Thoughtfully watching the pan while the chicken and vegetables steamed, the broad beans transformed from vibrant shade of green to a pale sage, wrinkling a little. Hang on, isn’t there something about broad beans skins being really tough?

Nigel Slater and his kitchen diaries came to the rescue (not for the first time); Nigel says ”…remove the skin from any beans bigger than your thumbnail. Tiny beans will have a thin skin that is perfectly edible”. Phew. I just gave the whole thing a glance over at the end and squeezed any slightly larger beans out of their skins. This wasn’t a chore as there were only about two; if all of your beans are on the large side then you might want to parboil them and pop them out of their skins before you start.

This recipe is my contribution to presto pasta nights, hosted as always by Ruth at Once Upon a Feast

You may not know this but I’m a very lucky girl – I’m married to triathlete! There is an informal rule of thumb amongst those who take part which is that if you have done at least one triathlon in the last year then you have earnt the right to call yourself a triathlete; any longer ago than that and you’re pushing it a bit. I think the Blenheim Triathlon a few weeks ago was triathlon number three for this year, so Nik is definitely allowed to use the moniker triathlete and I am therefore allowed to boast proudly about my triathlete husband (though I must admit I am secretly quite relieved that he hasn’t decided to jack in the day job yet).

If you are going to put yourself through such a thing, then there are few more beautiful places to do it than the lake and grounds of Blenheim Palace. The event in question was a sprint distance triathlon; a 750m swim (alongside all of the lake’s regular inhabitants, pike, duck poop etc, yeuch) followed by a 20km bike ride and 5km run through the spectacular but undulating palace grounds. Obviously such exertions require a hearty meal the night before, which is where this courgette, lemon and goats cheese pasta recipe came in. We have had this before many such events and a few long distance bike rides, but it is also the perfect summer pasta recipe (especially if you are not up to anything athletic the next day and can enjoy it with a big glass of chilled white wine). Goats cheese and mint are a perfect complement to one another and the lemon zest adds a wonderful fragrance (often so much nicer than going straight for the juice). The courgette taste is not particularly prominent in this dish because of the long thin pieces and the mint and lemon flavours so you may even be able to get this one past those people who claim not to be keen on them.

This is a much loved, tried and tested dish so I can pass on plenty of little tips regarding the ingredient preparation. Make sure that you chop or julienne the courgette/zucchini as grating it releases too much moisture making the whole thing rather soggy and unwieldy. Grating the lemon zest a little more coarsely than you might normally really adds to the fragrant quality of the dish so use the kind of grater you would grate your cheese with rather than a citrus zester (also, if you find that your lemon isn’t up to much in the fragrance stakes then you can always add a squeeze of juice at the end). Adding the goats cheese at the end after you have dished up makes life much easier as otherwise all that spaghetti tangled together with sticky goats cheese is really difficult to pull apart and dish out (besides, it’s nice when it the cheese is only just melting). Finally, an excellent tip from Jamie Oliver for reducing the amount of fat in the recipe; as the pasta cooks, dip a mug into the pan to reserve an inch or so of the starchy boiling water. You can then use this to ‘loosen’ the recipe at the end instead of using lots of extra olive oil.

This is not an unhealthy dish with its wholewheat pasta and vegetables but if you are watching your weight then you could modify it by reducing the amount of pasta and adding extra courgette. The goats cheese is an excellent calcium source but make sure that you do some label reading to find a lower fat variety and consider cutting the quantity to 30g per person (the soft squidgy sort tends to be lower in fat than the type with the rind).

Notes for triathletes
A good carbo loading recipe contains primarily carbohydrate without too much of each mouthful taken up by fat or protein. The downside of this is that it can be a little dull; endless mouthfuls of pasta, hence the reason for a choosing a recipe like this that has lots of strong flavour/low volume ingredients such as the lemon zest, mint and chilli flakes. A low glycaemic index carb like wholewheat pasta is perfect for the night before an event, while high GI foods such as energy gels are better for providing that burst of energy that you need mid-event (BUPA have a quick intro to using the glycaemic index in sports nutrition).

Although the concept of carbohydrate loading has been around since the 60s there still doesn’t seem to be a consensus as to how and when it should be done and most of the information out there is for cyclists and runners but not triathletes. The best source of information I have found regarding nutrition for triathlons is the Australian Institute of Sport. Their sports nutrition web site is excellent and includes discipline specific factsheets for a huge range of sports and some really good recipes. For triathletes taking part in events that take around one to three hours (such as a sprint or olympic distance triathlon) they recommend reducing food intake slightly during your tapering week (to avoid weight gain during a time of reduced activity levels) and to consume “between 7 – 12g of carbohydrate per kilogram body weight for 24 – 48 hours prior to competition”. The longer the triathlon the longer the duration and quantity of carbohydrate loading. However, you need to use a bit of common sense alongside this information; for most amateur athletes this may be way more than you are used to eating, especially if one of the reasons you enjoy your training is because it helps you to manage your weight. To give you an idea, the wholewheat pasta that I use is fairly typical in composition and contains 62g of carbohydrate per 100g, and so a 75kg triathlete would be looking at consuming around 525g of carbohydrate in the 24 hours before the event, the equivalent of 860g of pasta (dry weight!). Not all of your carbohydrate need come from pasta (there are lower volume sources, particularly carbohydrate drinks) but if you are not customarily eating to fuel the several hours of high intensity training that professional athletes undertake every day of the week then this amount of food could leave you arriving at your event feeling a little less spritely and a little more weighed down than you wanted to be.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. This one is so simple, it is really just a serving suggestion. No really, that’s not just me being modest, it literally is; I found it in that most unlikely of places for a recipe gem, the back of a lettuce packet!

These noodles are food at its most unchallenging. Effortless to make, easy on the mouth and completely lacking in feistiness (not hint of spice to be seen). They are a little bit bland even, but at the same time wonderfully calming. Sometimes that’s what you need after a hard day at work. If you’re feeling really pitiful, you could just eat a big bowl of these then go to bed, or if you’re not quite ready to hide under the duvet yet, have some salmon on the side, and maybe a green veg (It’s not very nutritionally hard-working that lettuce).

My theory is that the calming effect is two-fold in these noodles. Carbohydrates are well known for their sleep-inducing effects and then there is the lettuce which contains a mysterious substance called Lactucarium, which has sedative properties of its own. There is a very short wikipedia entry for Lactucarium and I was also amused to find out that the University of Huddersfield recommend lettuce sandwiches to ease their students insomnia during stressful times. You can’t use just any lettuce for this, it needs to be the untrendy sort with big leaves and crisp white veins, the sort that ooze a little bit of white stuff when you break them (the said lactucarium). Old-fashioned sweet English lettuces work a treat, as do varieties like Cos and Romaine.
(Due to its uncharacteristically herbal nature, this post is my entry for weekend herb blogging, hosted this week by PatL)

Homemade lasagne is fantastic, but I am a lazy cook so for me this statement generally only applies when somebody else makes it. Make a ragu, make a white sauce, layer it all up without running out of one set of ingredients before the others and then cook it all again – and this is without even mentioning the washing up and the possibility of only being able to get the sort of lasagne sheets that you have to precook (life is definitely too short for that last one!).

“Too much faff” is a poor excuse for a foodie not to make something so I have stuck with two more respectable excuses; first and foremost like many people I don’t eat all that much red meat these days, and secondly (and possibly more surprisingly given the state of our kitchen cupboards!) I have never actually owned a lasagne dish. But I have had a recipe in mind for a while, should I ever own a lasagne dish and as santa (Mum and Dad) was very kind this year I have just had the opportunity to give it a go. The idea for the recipe is something I saw on UKTV food some time ago, with a few things added here and there. Here’s how easy it is: chop and fry some veg, add a tin of tomatoes and a few other bits and bobs, layer up with precooked lasagne sheets and blob some mozzarella about in lieu of a white sauce.

As well as the easiness/low washing up quota of the recipe, I was attracted to it for it’s potential as a healthier alternative to a normal beef ragu-style lasagne (by which I’m thinking of this kind of thing from Delia Smith) and so I thought I would contribute it to the Heart of the Matter event on heart-healthy pasta dishes. I’m not suggesting that this would be the way to go if you need a very low-fat diet or are trying to lose weight (if either of these are the case the lasagne food group is just not really the place to be hanging around). But for those of us who are just trying to make the things we eat every day a bit healthier then this recipe has a lot going for it, especially if you can team it with a salad and skip the garlic bread.
By missing out the mince and bacon/pancetta and going for a tasty veggie sauce a whole heap of saturated fat gets left out (that’s the one that we think raises your bad cholesterol, gradually furring up your arteries). Mozzarella, you may be surprised to learn, is actually one of the lower fat cheeses, so is a healthier alternative to those lasagne you see with a hard cheese, cream and butter based white sauce (which can be a bit rich as well). And all that lovely fennel, those tomatoes and the onion? Between them a serving of this lasagne adds up to about three of those recommended five-a-day portions of fruit and veg! Fennel isn’t something they teach you about in nutrition skool (it’s not really considered one of your everyday veg in Britain) so I was keen to read up on it a bit; apparently it has a good amount of vitamin C and folate in it, as well as potassium like most fruits and vegetables. Sodium (from salt) and potassium have a yin and yang relationship when it comes to hypertension (high blood pressure), with a good intake of potassium thought to help counteract some of the negative effects of too much salt (if you want to know more there is a good article about hypertension on the British Nutrition Foundation website).

And to think that you can have all of this goodness with a satisfying, chewy, golden bit on the top and round the edges which is the best part of most lasagnes anyway! Oh and it doesn’t collapse all over the plate and drown the salad when you serve it but stays in a nice square (I was going to say that it doesn’t ‘flob all over the plate’, flob being a [colloquial] British word that means sort of collapsing and overflowing, usually used in the context of spare tyres round people’s middles, but according to some British to American translation sites they think it means to spit so we’ll stick with collapse to save confusion).

Fresh oregano is a tasty addition but is not so vital that it can’t wait for the summer if the alternative is to air-freight it in from somewhere far away. You can happily assemble the whole dish an hour or two before you want to cook it if that will make life easier for you as that softens up the pasta sheets even more.

I’m not going to over exaggerate and say that this recipe is one of those that will convert meat-eaters to vegetable lovin’ but it is very tasty and a darn sight easier to make than most lasagne. We had ours with a green salad that had some yellow pepper and a few roasted seeds in it for a bit of crunch in contrast to the lasagne and also some walnut and honey bread on the side.

This risotto is a rustic, weeknight supper kind of a dish, not for an elegant dinner or to impress somebody with your culinary skills. But it isn’t quite as unsophisticated as it looks; alongside the butternut squash and sprigs of rosemary it has a few hidden secrets, more of which later.

As a baked risotto this is definitely not an authentic recipe, but it is the only sort that you can bung in the oven and ignore while you sit on the sofa finishing off those last bits of Easter egg. Personally I think I have reached the stage of being pretty much done with chocolate for the six weeks or so. First there were those chocolate kiwiberries, then a bit of neat chocolate (a sample of all three colour varieties) and last night we rounded it all off by making Bill Granger’s Molten Chocolate Puddings. If you too are so over all that chocolate then this is the perfect antidote; simple, wholesome and very savoury.

Anyway, back to those hidden secrets. Nearly invisible from the photo but very strong on flavour are a few dried porcini mushrooms and hint of truffle oil. And if you look really closely, you might just be able to see that this is a risotto made with brown rice. What on earth was I thinking I hear you ask? Well two things really. First, brown rice has that great nutty flavour which is fabulous with those strong flavours like the rosemary and the porcini mushrooms. Second, brown rice is a wholegrain, and white rice isn’t.

It is a bit confusing this wholegrain business but in the most basic sense wholegrains are foods made from the whole grain. For example, whole grain cereal flakes are made by taking entire grains (starchy endosperm, germ and bran and all – see wikipedia for a picture) and squashing them very hard to make big flat flakes. In the case of rice, brown rice is the whole grain version and white rice has been milled or ‘polished’, removing some of the nutritious outer coating. Not polishing the rice keeps the bran on the outside, making the rice much higher in fibre, and keeps the part of the grain that has all of those lovely B vitamins in it (you need those for lots of different things but largely to release energy from the food you eat so that your body can use it). Oh and it leaves the rice with much more flavour, did I mention that?

This recipe is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this time by Anh of Food Lover’s Journey. If a risotto doesn’t float your boat to recover from some of those seasonal chocolate excess then I’m sure there will be plenty of other ideas in the round-up, or if not I point you towards the chocolate offsetting calculator, as thoughtfully recommended to me by Nick over at The Tracing Paper.

How do you sum up a Laksa for somebody who hasn’t tried it before? On the one hand it ticks lots of boxes that somehow bring to mind healthy thoughts: spicy; fresh-flavours; crunchy veg and soup. On the other hand it has that essential comfort-food ingredient carbohydrate (in the form of noodles), and is bathed in luscious, creamy coconut milk.

There is an interesting wikipedia page on laksa for those who like to know more about culinary traditions and history; apparently there are actually two types of laksa, curry laksa and assam laksa. I must admit that my recipe is a complete culinary hybrid with the coconut milk base of curry laksa and the sour notes of an assam laksa. The main inspiration for my recipe is in Jo Pratt’s lovely new (and surprisingly pink and girly) book, In the Mood for Food, with a few twists of my own inspired by health and storecupboard. It comes out just creamy enough to feel like a treat and has a great mix of textures. Sometimes I think it is just the small things that really make a difference, for example I’ve followed Jo’s tip to slice the prawns in half lengthways which means that you get a bit of prawn in nearly every mouthful.

Noodle soup dishes like Laksa and Miso soups are fantastic places to use up bits of leftover veg from the fridge (within reason, I suspect parsnip wouldn’t go well here). The original recipe had a couple of spring onions in it per person but given that all you have to do is chop them up and throw them in it’s a good opportunity to eat a bit more veg. You can put in as much or as little as you want but for this dish to count as one of your ‘five a day’ you want to include at least 80g of veg per person.

Something that this post made me think about that I’ve never really considered before is whether or not coconut counts towards your fruit and veg quota. The whole ‘what counts’ thing is essentially based on scientific consensus so there isn’t a definitive answer, but my hunch is that counting coconut flesh or coconut milk as a portion would be considered counter-productive because of its very high saturated fat content. There isn’t an official fruit and veg portions expert group to give a verdict on the matter but I did see that Sam, the Food Standards Agency’s nutritionist agrees with me on this (coconut apparently is considered more akin to a nut than a fruit). In this laksa the effects of the saturated fat in the coconut milk are tempered by diluting it with stock and adding some richness back in the form of peanut butter. The final result is not low-fat but the balance of fats in the dish are improved by these two adjustments. Nuts are full of monounsatured fats and replacing saturated fat with these monounsaturates can help lower LDL (bad) cholesterol levels.

This laksa is prawn-based but feel free to change this around, perhaps swopping for some tofu or cooked chicken. Shopping for seafood and prawns in particular seems to be an ethical minefield these days. The trawling method of catching prawns causes damage to the sea bed and causes a shocking amount of extra sea life to be trawled up with the prawns then discarded. Sadly the alternative, prawn farming (generally happening in developing countries such as Honduras, Indonesia and Guatemala), is causing the destruction of huge tracts of mangrove forest (a vital part of the earth’s ecosystem) and is generally reliant on pesticides and antibiotics. In reality the situation is even more complicated than this when you try to take into account all of the human, health and environmental concerns (it takes me ages to decide which prawns to buy in the supermarket!). In terms of sensible suggestions for what to buy in the UK Rose Prince in her Savvy Shopper column suggests looking out for North Atlantic prawns or for those produced as part of the Ethical Trade Initiative.

Enough of the serious stuff. For me this recipe is a perfect supper for staying in at the weekend and watching a movie. Beware though, for a TV dinner this is supremely messy to eat (if you are as inept with chopsticks as I am you’ll miss half the movie chasing the noodles). It’s not cheating to have a spoon to hand for the soupy bits at the end.