Live For Food

If you use the traditional small glass hand held lemon squeezer pictured above here is a useful tip.

When using the juicer stand it on a small saucer.

Otherwise, after your first squeeze, you tip the juice into something and resume squeezing, and a drip of juice always runs off the spout down the outside and ends up forming a sticky circle underneath the juicer.

A few minutes later the whole surface you are resting on feels sticky as the juicer is moved around.

Standing the juicer on a saucer contains the drips and you end up with just a sticky saucer instead of an entire sticky work surface.

Today I’ve tried out a fruity pudding.  A lot of the supermarkets have blueberries on offer at the moment so I thought it would be a good one to try.

Ingredients:
50g caster sugar
50g soft butter, plus extra for greasing
1 large egg
50g self-raising flour
50g dessicated coconut, plus 2 tsp
50g creme fraiche, plus extra to serve
Grated rind and juice of 1 lemon
180g blueberries

Method

1 Whisk the mixture
Turn oven to fan 160C / conventional 180C / gas 4. Beat the sugar and butter until pale and creamy, then beat in the egg. Stir in the flour, 50g coconut, the creme fraiche and the lemon rind.

2 Bake and serve
Put most of the blueberries in a greased baking dish and squeeze over the juice from half the lemon. Spoon over the cake mixture and scatter over the remaining blueberries and 2 tsp coconut. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until golden, risen and cooked. Serve with extra creme fraiche.

Notes:
Serves 4
Takes 15 minutes plus 40 minutes in the oven
350 kcals, 26g fat per person
Not suitable for freezing

Copyright BBC Easy Cook Magazine, Immediate Media Limited
Reproduced with permission

Verdict

For once I made this recipe without making any tweaks to it!  It was a tasty pudding. Blueberries don’t taste the same once they are cooked – they just taste to me like a generic fruit, the blueberriness seems to disappear, but they do make a good pudding. The lemon flavour came over really clearly making a nice zesty fruit base to go with the cakey topping.

It wasn’t a particularly sweet pudding, but that didn’t bother me particularly. If you like things sweet I would suggest serving it with custard or ice-cream instead of creme fraiche. Whilst the fruit was summery, the cake topping makes it a fairly substantial pudding, so probably a good pudding to follow a light salad, rather than a massive summer barbecue.

Here in the UK a mini heatwave has descended. If you make lunch to take to work each day your normal sandwich may not seem very inviting in the hot weather.

The obvious choice for a summer lunch is salad, but a couple of days of chopping stuff up in the evenings only to eat limp lettuce leaves and warm dressing by lunchtime the next day can put you right off.

So how can you take an interesting salad to work and have it in a fit state to eat by the time lunch comes round?

Preparation

Get a decent size insulated lunchbag to carry your food in. Supermarkets sell some and so does Amazon. You may need to search under “children” simply because lunch bags are marketed at this section of the population – but do double check measurements if shopping online to make sure it’s big enough.

If you don’t have access to a fridge at work get some mini icepacks to put in your lunchbag. Lots of tiny ones is best – I have three. Again, Amazon or the supermarkets is a good place to start looking for them. In the supermarket you may need to look in the freezer equipment section or the picnic section rather than the lunch section.

Get some Ziplock freezer bags or small plastic tubs. Once every three or four days have a salad chopping up session. Store each type of vegetable in a separate bag or tub in the fridge.

When you come to make your salad you have then already done the difficult bit and can just tip all veggies you want straight into your lunch box.

You can do exactly the same for other salad items – pasta, couscous, hard boiled eggs. Think about how you can prepare three or four days at once to make life easy.

So, what can you put in your salad?

Vegetables

• Lettuce – iceberg, romaine or round.
• Pre-prepared lettuce or salad bags. These give you a variety of lettuce you may not be able to get any other way. Keep an eye open for the cheapest options, offers, and the budget ranges. It doesn’t matter if the contents aren’t that exciting because you will be adding more to it.
• Cucumber
• Celery
• Bell peppers
• Sweetcorn
• Sliced mushroom
• Avocado – a good choice for adding healthy fats to lunch. Although don’t chop it up in advance or it will go brown. Take a sharp knife with you.
• Grated carrot
• Chopped green beans
• Mange tout
• Sliced broccoli stem
• Olives
• Cherry tomatoes, baby plum tomatoes or pomodorino tomatoes. I wouldn’t advise pre-slicing tomatoes, as they tend to go soggy.  That’s why the cherry-style is best.

Carbohydrates (optional)

• Pasta
• Couscous
• Rice
• Bulgar wheat
• Croutons

Protein

• Chopped chicken – leftover from a roast, or try flavored slices from the supermarket, or grill breast pieces at home with a sprinkled on topping like barbecue or chargrill.
• Sliced ham or beef
• Smoked salmon
• Prawns
• Hard boiled eggs

Toppings

• Parmesan shavings
• Bacon bits
• Sunflower seeds
• Linseeds
• Mixed seeds
• Raisins
• Feta cheese cubes

Dressings – you may find it easiest to buy these in bottles from the supermarket – check the fresh section as well as the cupboard staples

• Vinaigrette
• Mango dressing
• Blue cheese dressing
• Caesar salad dressing
• Balsamic dressing
• Honey and mustard dressing

Hopefully that is a bit of inspiration towards preparing a summer salad. Let’s hope the summer hangs around a bit longer so we can put it into practice!

• Out of sight out of mind – keep unhealthy snacks right at the back of a cupboard

• Plan your daily snacks – don’t snack on impulse

• If your other family members want snacks – buy ones that they like and you don’t like

• Don’t eat from the packet – arrange your snack nicely on a plate

• Don’t walk into a supermarket unless you have a shopping list

• Don’t do your food shopping on an empty stomach

• Find a hobby that keeps your fingers busy – some kind of sewing or craft

• Keep a bag of satsumas or clementines in the house or your workplace – then you never have an excuse for an unhealthy snack

• Take food from home to work each day so you don’t have to visit the shops at lunchtime

• Try not to choose sugary snacks – they are more likely to make you want more and more snacks, and they are bad for your teeth

Ingredients:
2 tbsp olive oil
8 chicken pieces (a mixture of thighs and legs work well)
6 rashers streaky bacon, chopped
2 onions, sliced
2 rosemary sprigs
Two 400g cans plum tomatoes
2 tbsp red or white wine vinegar
1 tbsp sugar
500ml chicken stock

Method:

1 Brown the chicken
Heat the oil in a large casserole dish. Brown the chicken, a few pieces at a time, until the skin is golden on all sides. As each piece is done, lift out onto a plate. Turn the heat down and add the bacon. Cook until the bacon is crispy. Lift out with a slotted spoon and add to the chicken pieces. Add the onions and rosemary to the casserole and fry for 5-10 minutes until the onions are soft. Then return the chicken and bacon to the pan, along with the tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, stock and seasoning.

2 Simmer
Bring to a simmer, cover and cook for 40-50 minutes, until the chicken is tender.

Serve
With mash, pasta or rice.

Notes:
Serves 6
Takes 20 minutes plus 1 hour cooking time
806 kcals 54g fat
Suitable for freezing

Copyright BBC Easy Cook Magazine, Immediate Media Limited
Reproduced with permission

My own substitution and tweaks:

I halved the recipe and used it to feed 2 people. I only used half an onion, and I used chicken thigh fillets which were skinless and boneless. This reduces the calorie count.

Verdict

Very tasty! The vinegar and sugar in the sauce blended well with the tomatoes to give it a distinct flavour of its own. The chicken was lovely and tender.

Definitely one I will be doing again. There is nothing I would change next time. It did make a lot of sauce but then my chicken thighs were quite small – if I had used legs it would have been fine.