If there’s one thing guaranteed to get me back in the kitchen it’s a brand spanking newly turned Autumn. All those lovely warm, cosy soups, stews and roasts.  And this seasons vegetables are just the best; pumpkins, squash, carrots, parsnips, onions, leeks, beetroot, celeriac. All the real sweeties and perfect for roasting. 

People tell themselves funny stories when they’re faced with the everyday work of eating well. One of my favourites of that I hear often is this one: “it’s so easy to eat well in the summer – salads are so healthy”.  Roasted vegetables are the perfect ‘salad’ for Autumn and Winter.  Yes, there is ten minutes of chopping involved, but that’s pretty much it. Same as a salad. 

A tub of roasted vegetables have become of a staple in our fridge again this month.  These are my three favourite ways to prepare roasted autumn vegetables.

Three easy flavour additions for roasted vegetables
(take it as read that all three involve copious armfuls of veg, olive oil and a good grind of pepper)

• scatter with finely chopped red chillis and tuck very thin, deseeded slices of lemon among the veg (my current obsession, from Sarah Raven’s Food for Friends and Family book)

• chuck in a few sprigs of rosemary and a handful of garlic cloves (separated but unpeeled).  Once cooked, squeeze the garlic straight from their skins into the veg

• coat with maple syrup and generous amounts of grated ginger (as inspired by Eat Me, Delicious)

The trick to successful vegetable roasting is similar to that for drama-free stir-frying.  Cut your different veggetables to different sizes according to how long they will take to cook; smaller pieces for those that take longer to roast. It’s also helpful to give them a stir occasionally during cooking to avoid the tops of the vegetable pieces becoming overly charred.

It’s always worth making a big batch of roasted veggies.  Once you’ve got ‘em, there are endless ways to use them.

• add a protein source such as meat, fish or tofu for an easy meal
• cook up a wholegrain to serve along side and top with a small amount of feta, chopped nuts or a poached egg
• Add vegetable stock or hot water and blitz to a soup
• Stir through wholemeal pasta, add a handful of spinach and top with a little grated cheese

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

Making a quick lunch from your larder needn’t be a big deal.  As a food fanatic it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-thinking your next meal, deliberating what to make for so long that eventually you are so hungry you’ll eat anything.  Sometimes it’s good to remember that you are just getting yourself something to eat, grab a few nutritious ingredients and get on with it.

Everybody has (or can plan to have) some combination of these ingredients in stock and use them to knock up a quick lunch. Unlike most stir-fries, this is a true one-pan meal because it doesn’t require you to cook a separate grain (thanks goes to Nigella Lawson for the nifty idea of using a can of drained beans instead of cooking rice or noodles). With the step of boiling water neatly side-stepped, your lunch really can be ready in ten minutes.

This recipe is just a template, a broad list of foods into which you can substitute whatever you have available.  The recipe given is a template from which you can experiment and find your own favourite combination:

Frozen meat substitute

Quorn, seitain, tofu, vegetarian “stir fry strips”, “chicken style pieces”

All of these ingredients are a good source of protein, lower in saturated fat than most meats and can be cooked straight from the freezer.

Canned legumes

Chickpeas (garbanzo), butter beans, red kidney beans, cannellini beans, flageolet beans, borlotti beans, mixed pulses.

Legumes provide fibre, carbohydrate and protein as well as providing a useful vegetarian source of iron. Contributes towards your five a day.

A flavoursome paste

Thai curry pastes, indian curry pastes, sun dried tomato paste, pesto, tapenade

These ingredients can be high in fat but a small amount can provide heaps of flavour.

Fresh green leaves

Baby spinach, kale, rocket, green cabbages, watercress, chard, spring greens
Rich in vitamins, minerals and fibre, counts towards your five a day.

A crunchy, quick cooking vegetable

Bell pepper, courgette (zucchini)
Rich in vitamins, minerals and fibre, counts towards your five a day.

A cooking oil

Olive oil, rapeseed (vegetable) oil

These oils are high in monounsaturated fats, thought to be beneficial for heart health.

Between the beans, green leafy veg and peppers a portion of this stir-fry provides at least two of your five a day.

Instead of the thai flavours in the recipe below, how about making an indian version with chickpeas, garam masala curry paste and spinach, or a more Italian affair with borlotti beans, tapenade and kale?

Other storecupboard customisations on Mostly Eating
A ‘mix and match’ recipe for a wholegrain lunchtime salad
How to make a healthier muffin
Easy ingredients to make your smoothies nutritious and delicious

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.

Last week was all about those ingredients that sound like they are going to be wholegrains but turn out not to be.  This week is a little of the opposite – I have been cooking with cous cous.  Now those clever foodie types amongst you will know that cous cous isn’t really a grain at all, despite it’s teeny tiny appearance, but that it is actually little tiny pieces of pasta.  But surprisingly perhaps, you can get still get wholegrain cous cous; simply cous cous made from wholewheat flour.

The cous cous, sumac, pepper and date salad featured here is a very simple recipe.  Everybody makes a salad like this every now and then – perfect as a side dish or as a packed lunch to take to work.  Every time I make it this salad it is slightly different, however the ideas behind it are always the same.  I have five broad categories of ingredient in mind to make sure that my salad provides a good range of nutrients:

A wholegrain – choose from quinoa, brown rice, buckwheat, wholegrain spelt, wholewheat cous cous and millet or whatever else you fancy.  Wholegrains are higher in vitamins and minerals than their refined equivalents and full of fibre.  People often find that wholegrains are more filling than refined carbohydrates, so a wholegrain salad is perfect for keeping you energetic and wide awake well into the afternoon.

Fresh vegetables – any chopped fresh or lightly blanched vegetables such as peppers, green beans, radish, tomato, grated carrot, courgette, spring onion, red onion, cucumber or sweetcorn.  All of these will count towards your five a day as well as providing vitamins, potassium and fibre.  I like to include something that I know will give me a decent amount of vitamin C – usually red or yellow peppers.  You can of course use leftover roasted vegetables, in which case how about complementing them with some chopped fresh fruit so that you still get plenty of Vitamin C?

Dried fruit – dates, apricots, figs, sour cherries etc will all add an appealing sweet note to your salad.  Most dried fruits are very high in fibre and usually rich in minerals (particularly iron and sometimes also calcium).

Nuts or seeds – these provide healthy fats, more fibre and a little bit of protein. Most importantly they add bags of texture and flavour.

Flavour enhancers – a little something to boost the flavour.  I used sumac, which adds a lovely tart note against the sweet dried dates (not to mention an exotic pink hue!).  But pretty much anything goes; lemon juice, black pepper, fresh or dried herbs, chilli sauce, spices, seasoning mixes. The idea is to boost the flavour of your lunch without needing to add large amounts of calories or salt.

All of these ingredients are nutritious and tasty in their own right but I find that having this mental “tick list” of foods to include makes sure that my lunch is always well balanced and interesting – the wider the range of ingredients you add the more colour and different textures your salad will have, as well as plenty of nutritional variety. There are other advantages to following this plan; by eating your dried fruit and wholegrains alongside a vitamin C rich vegetable, your body will be much more able to absorb the iron from the dried fruit and grains.  This type of cooking is also immensely frugal and planet friendly; with only a basic outline of the recipe defined there is ample scope for seasonal adaptation, fridge clearance and using up those odds and ends of dried fruit and grains in the cupboard.

There is a moderate amount of protein in this kind of salad from the wholegrain and the nuts; probably enough for most people if you are having a good source of protein at your main meal.  If you know that the rest of your day might be a bit lacking in protein then go for the wholegrains that are higher in protein (particularly quinoa, spelt and rice) or consider adding a helping of fish, lean meat, cheese, tofu or beans.

A short aside
Kathryn Elliott over at Limes and Lycopene is running a fantastic series of posts daily through August called 31 Days to a better diet.  Do check it out if you haven’t done so already; two of my favourites so far include this post about keeping convenient fruit and vegetables handy and this one about trying out one of those new ingredients that we all have tucked away at the back of our cupboards but have never used.  

Related recipes on Mostly Eating
How to interpret wholegrain label jargon and a summer spelt recipe
Mackerel, Pepper and Bulgur Wheat Salad
Instant gratification – tuna, bean and watercress salad
Warm beetroot, sumac and sweet potato salad
An earthy fig, chicken and mushroom salad

Frosting and icing
Most of the time my muffins remain topless, but just occasionally a bit of decoration is called for.  A quick, if slightly rustic looking topping is a very thin glaze of icing sugar flavoured with lemon, lime or orange juice.  This isn’t going to add many extra calories at all, though your dentist may not approve.   A far plusher topping is a frosting based on flavoured, low-fat cream cheese.  I frost or ice half of my muffins to share and leave half unadorned to eat later in the week or stash away in the freezer.  Any unfrosted homemade fruity muffins make a great “grab and go” portable breakfast, just take one out of the freezer the night before and it will be ready to eat first thing.

These tweaks should be suitable for experimenting on any muffin recipe of your choice.  I have also put all of the ideas together in one recipe for mango, lime and ginger muffins with a lime cream cheese frosting.

(I couldn’t resist just one picture from my trip to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show on Friday.  There are many more on my Flickr photostream if any of you are horticulturally minded!).

Elsewhere on Mostly Eating
More inspiration for healthy baking, this time with vegetables – Butternut squash, oat and ginger cake bites
Five clever ideas for healthy recipe substitutions includes two baking tips

Muffins galore!
Muffin recipes elsewhere that use similar ideas
Wendy’s Moist Bran Muffins
Wholewheat Apple Muffins from Smitten Kitchen
Jamie Oliver’s Butternut Squash Muffins with a frosty top
Lemon Ginger Muffins from Elise
Kathryn’s Pear, Maple and Walnut Muffins

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

Grills and barbecues often turn out not to be the most balanced of meals, majoring in meat and then some more meat, maybe with a bit bread on the side. They can be a bit dull too, without any vegetables to add crunch and colour except a leaf of lettuce or two as an afterthought. A warm salad is surely the way to go – lean meat with grilled vegetables and ripe fruit, all of the juices melding together and forming their own dressing. The salad I made uses organic chicken breast, earthy field mushrooms and more of those beautiful figs from my garden but you could just treat this recipe as a basic formula. How does skinless duck breast, asparagus and cherries, or turkey, red onion and apricot sound?

The possibilities are endless as nearly all vegetables can be grilled successfully but you do need to toss them in a little tiny bit of oil to stop them sticking to the pan or rack. To keep it healthy I used olive oil with its high monounsaturated fat content and got my fingers into the bowl to spread the oil across the vegetables so that I didn’t have to use as much. Asparagus, peppers, mushrooms, fennel, squash, aubergine, potato, onion, sweet corn, courgette, sweet potato, parsnip, spring onion and tomato will all give good results. National Geographic’s Green Guide has a great article on how best to prepare each different vegetable for grilling and gives two particularly good tips. The first is to cook thin and watery veg like asparagus, tomatoes and spring onions whole. The second tip, to avoid blackened and charred offerings is to grill the vegetables for just long enough to give them those attractive golden grill marks and then to put them into a bowl with cling film over the top, letting them finish cooking in their own steam.

I haven’t grilled my fruit to maximise those vitamins that are lost during heating and to have that nice hot/cold contrast going on but you could also grill the fruit if you wanted. My recipe uses good quality dried mint in an effort to cut down those air-freight food miles I was talking about the other day but you could use finely chopped fresh mint if you have it.

You will have effortlessly eaten two of your five-a-day by the time you have finished tucking in to this, as well missing all that saturated fat that would have been in a sausage or a burger. This must make this a suitable recipe to add to Ilva and Joanna’s Heart of the Matter collection of heart healthy grill recipes!

This salad is a regular fixture in our house for workday lunches. It tastes fabulous and provides a neat package of heart healthy ingredients: omega 3 rich oily fish, fresh vegetables and a wholegrain in the form of bulgur wheat.

There is just one area of contention in this recipe – it contains a green pepper! Personally I think green peppers are much maligned and love them in certain dishes (especially in this recipe and in a stir fry) but I know some people aren’t keen on them so feel free to substitute with a different colour (yellow looks good). Bulgur wheat is a low GI carbohydrate and so ideal for a lunchtime recipe – its slow energy release is tailored to prevent you from nodding off or reaching for the cookies mid-afternoon (my extensive desk-based trials show that this works approximately 95% of the time!). If you haven’t tried it yet bulgur wheat is super simple to cook, a bit like a sturdier cousin to cous cous; much less temperamental and with a bit more about it. In this recipe the bulgur wheat is made extra delicious by soaking the grains in stock – I’d definitely suggest trying this way of cooking it just once, even if you don’t fancy trying the whole recipe.

Oily fish and heart health
Back to the main ingredient, the mackerel. Did you know that we still don’t know exactly why the omega 3 fatty acids in oily fish are good for your heart? Some of the benefit is thought to be due to its effect in lowering triglyceride levels but increasingly it seems that one of the main ways that oily fish works is by correcting arrhythmias, abnormalities in the natural rhythm of your heart.
Different places recommend different amounts of oily fish and for different people. The Food Standards Agency in the UK recommends that most people have at least two portions of fish per week, at least one of which should be oily and the American Heart Association simply recommends fish twice a week. For people who have already suffered a myocardial infarction (a heart attack), the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the UK, quaintly known as NICE, have recently published a recommendation (in May 2007) for doctors to advise these particular patients to have two to four portions of oily fish per week. While this may all sound like a big list of numbers and recommendations I think the important conclusion is that despite a little bit of adverse publicity a couple of years ago about oily fish and its impact on heart health, most groups are now recommending eating oily fish more than ever.

Other “oily” lunch ideas
A couple of other suggestions for oily fish lunches are tinned sardines in tomato sauce on hot toasted granary bread (with lots of black pepper) or a sandwich filled with tinned salmon that has been mixed with low-fat creme fraiche and horseradish sauce (watercress or rocket with this one). If you are really not a fan of the usual suspect oily fishies (the Food Standard Agency provide a good list of oily and non-oily fish), I recently wrote about certain types of tinned tuna which contain a little bit of omega 3 fat. Tinned ventresca tuna in oil is nowhere near as rich a source of omega 3 as, for example, Mackerel, but is a definite improvement on the staple skipjack tuna in brine.

With all that good stuff in it this recipe seems a perfect contribution for Ilva and Joanna’s Heart of the Matter round-up of heart healthy waterlife recipes.