Day Three
Cream of Broccoli Soup
Heat the broth and simmer the broccoli for 10 minutes. Stir in the chives and Tabasco and heath through. Liquidise the result and then stir in the cream. Run the liquidiser again until you have a creamy soup. Warm through before serving.
Day Two
Chinese Egg Drop Soup
If you are preparing this ahead, let the broth cool then add in all the above ingredients and chill. When ready to serve, heat the soup up quickly, then beat the egg and stir it in rapidly so it leaves trails of cooked egg. Serve immediately.
As a part of my quest to eat healthy and lose weight, I’ve committed to two course meals every evening. Even when we’re just eating at the computer, I serve a small starter.
Photo By Giovanni JL
There’s a few reasons for this. One is that it seems luxurious, I feel posh and maybe even a little bit spoilt. I’m always looking to fend off feelings of deprivation (WAH! Why can’t I have a Big Mac?) and this is one of my little tricks to keep me feeling happy about the diet.
There are lots of articles about eating slower, savouring each mouthful, in order to ensure you don’t keep eating after you are full. I think that separate courses, with a quick break in between, helps us to eat slower while tricking us into feeling like we are eating more – there’s a little bit of a break between the courses. It also keeps the main meal from looking pitiful, those initial hunger pangs have already dealt with and so there is less of an urge to overfill the plate with food.
The trick is to keep it simple — it’s not like I have time to do Cordon Bleu cooking on a week night! So I plan out a set of soups at the weekend, ready for serving during the week.
Soup isn’t hard to make, freezes like a dream, and it most of them don’t need any faffing on the night – just heat and serve! The trick is to start with one base and add in flavours and textures to keep them each nicely separate.
I make my own chicken broth and I do recommend it for the very best flavour (luxurious, remember?) but if you must use pre-made stock, then I would take the time to boil some vegetables and herbs in with it for a touch more flavour (and then strain).
Now you need to make sure you have plenty of containers to store it in: I chill soup for the next couple of days and freeze anything that I’m planning to serve more than three days away.
You can get really clever and do double batches, chilling one for later in the week and freezing one for later in the month! But I’m rarely that organised.
Now, how to keep that soup from seeming the same everyday? No problem. This week I’ll be offering you five different soup ideas with a basic list of ingredients to add for each. All of these are healthy but you can feel free to drop items that aren’t allowed on your diet, be inventive!
Then check the simple instructions and you have a new soup! The main time hit is the chopping so I try to do a bunch at once on a Sunday afternoon which limits the amount of fiddly work and, more importantly, the washing up!
This week we’ll do a 5-day menu of soups starting from an admittedly very large batch of chicken stock. The vegetable soups can equally be made with vegetable broth — the main thing is to remember that the stock is a critical flavour, not just a sideline and thus it needs to be of good quality. You have to really like the taste of stock cubes and salt if you want to try to use Oxo.
Day One:
Mexican Chicken Soup
Mix all the ingredients and add to the pot of boiling broth. Simmer until the chicken is cooked through. This can be chilled or frozen, just reheat. Serve.
You can blame Fox Mulder for my penchant for sunflower seeds. Where Popeye failed in introducing me to healthy food (no matter how you disguise it, spinach is spinach is spinach) Mulder succeeded (literally) in tempting me into the art of nutritious nibbling.
Some lovely facts about sunflower seeds:
It would seem that during times of stress the levels of these nutrients plummet, indicating that the good old sunflower seed can reduce my stress levels (and yours too obviously) allowing me to be calm and composed should Duchovny call at my door.
Sunflower seeds are easy to purchase. Tesco for example sell 100g bags for 33p and 300g bags for 89p. Holland and Barrett sell a 250g bag of organic sunflower seeds for £1.79.
I find they are a great substitute for the chocolate/crisps snack-attacks. They are great for keeping by the side of the computer allowing me to nibble away in a guilt free fashion. They are also the type of snack that can help those trying to give up smoking, whilst at the same time attempting to avoid the nasty weight gain that comes with the quitting. If it’s the hand/mouth thing that tempts you back to the old ciggies then try this out – get healthy whilst getting healthy!
Here’s a recipe for you
Stuffed Peppers
I’m not on a diet, but I do have a major weakness – junk food. I tend to snack on junk between meals, and I need to stop! I decided that breakfast was the key to kicking the junk habit, but I’ve never been much of a breakfast person.
So rather than having cereal with half a truck of added salt and sugar – or killing myself with a fry-up every morning – I’ve started making myself a rather delicious fruit smoothie.
Ingredients
Method
Blend all the ingredients together until smooth. Serve in a pint glass and consume immediately whilst making “mmmmm yumm” noises.
Obviously you can vary the ingredients to taste and depending on what you have available. Summer fruits are a bit hard to come by in Darkest Finchley at the moment, so this morning I used a nice raspberry yoghurt instead.
This cheesy cauliflower soup is great for a low-carb diet, although it isn’t low calorie due to the cream. It’s a good filler and excellent comfort food on a cold winters day. It doesn’t take that much time in the kitchen and you can feel virtuous for having eat so much cauliflower — believed to help ward off cancer! And the best bit is you can make it ahead, just reheat it slowly, stirring well.
Ingredients
)Method
In a large heavy-bottomed pot, fry the bacon at low heat until the fat begins to render. Add the onion and the celery and cook at low to medium heat until the onion is soft, about 10 minutes. Crumble a chicken stock cube into the pot and stir. Add in the cauliflower, stir well, then add water until the vegetables are just covered. Cover and simmer until cauliflower is tender, about 20 minutes. Remove the Parmesan rind.
Liquidise the soup, in batches if need be, and return to the pan. A few small chunks are okay, they add interest. Add the cream and bring the soup back to a simmer. If it’s overly thick, add more water, otherwise season lightly with salt and white pepper. You can add grated parmesan as well if you like.
Serve the soup piping hot, sprinkling a large pinch of bright red chile powder over the top of each bowl.
We’d love to show you a picture of the finished product… unfortunately we’ve eaten it already. Sorry.