Posted by Sylvia on June 22nd, 2007 — Posted in Recipes
Part of eating a more healthy diet is eating seasonally but it can be easy to fall into a rut. My family can be more open minded to eating their veg when they are prepared with a bit of imagination rather than boiled and dumped at the side of the plate. On this occasion, I had courgettes / zucchini in mind when I started looking for new recipes to try.
I stumbled on Almost Turkish and found a wonderful assortment of fast and interesting meals. Burcu posts traditional and modern dishes with mouth-watering photographs, including the jackpot for our own dinner: her mother’s recipe for baked zucchini (courgette).
It may sound silly to base a meal around a side-dish but that’s exactly what I did. It was easy though, spoilt for choice on Burcu’s site. I opted for the traditional meatballs that Burcu has recreated as remembered from her hometown of Tekirdağ. These are made with a mixture of lamb and beef and mirror the pepper and mint flavour of the vegetables. The recipe as given would feed four with ease, I froze half for a future fast meal.
Unfortunately I was low on dried mint, so I used it on the zucchini and used fresh mint for the meatballs, a slight change which did not harm the flavour at all. I wouldn’t recommend trying fresh mint on the vegetables though as they would not stand up to the cooking time.
The turkish meatballs were really nice — however, I would cut the chile seeds right down if you are serving to young children. My partner thought they were fine but turned down my offer of extra chile sauce on the side. The zucchini was lovely, soft and spicy with the flavour of the mint really coming through. I took Burcu’s advice and added a bit of garlic to the yogurt.
We had a roasted pepper salad with some chopped up preserved lemons as a side dish. The sweet flavour balanced well with the rest of the meal – and the lemon was perfect. If I hadn’t used the preserved lemons then I think I would have used lemon juice in some way, as a salad dressing or mixed into the yogurt perhaps. The flavour really complimented the rest of the meal.
As a side-note, I made a small batch of these without the breadcrumbs/semolina in order to offer a low-carb meal. I would cut down the egg a bit and you need to take care when forming and serving the meatballs but the result still got positive reviews.
Almost Turkish has a wide variety of interesting (and simple) dishes to try, with an emphasis on vegetables. If you want to try to add a bit of unexpected spice to your meals, I certainly recommend giving her blog a browse.
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Posted by Dom on June 20th, 2007 — Posted in News
Science Daily is reporting the results of a study which suggest people on very low-carb diets are putting themselves at risk because of a reduction in butyrate (a fatty acid) in the gut.
Butyrate is used as a form of energy by the bacteria in the gut, and reduced levels can lead to increased risk of colon & bowel cancers.
Our usual advice applies here. Always see your doctor or a dietitian before starting any diet, and if you are feeling any ill effect, see them again.
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Posted by Sylvia on June 14th, 2007 — Posted in Tips
Sometimes getting more veg into your diet is just a case of thinking about your food from a different perspective.
This Japanese-inspired meal started with a bowl of chicken broth, quick and easy to heat up and serve. If you live in the city, you could probably easily pick up noodles to make it a bit heartier.
The main course is that old standby: cold roast beef (I like mine really rare, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t serve it well-done if that’s your preference). Instead of mustard though, serve it sliced thin with a bowl of soy sauce for dipping in. Add in a touch of wasabi (Japanese horseradish) for authenticity, or simply a bit of crushed garlic. I tossed in a few chile seeds for heat.
Then, clockwise and up from the soy sauce, we have avocado with pickled ginger, tinned palm hearts, sliced raw fennel and a spicy italian pickled chile pepper. A variety of flavours and textures and bite, combining into one very healthy meal. And the best thing? As we had the roast beef already from the night before, the entire two-course meal took me 10 minutes to prepare.
My other half only had one gripe: it’s a lot harder to eat avocado with chopsticks than you might think. Next time, I’ll add a few more minutes to the prep time and stab ‘em with toothpicks.
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Posted by Sylvia on June 4th, 2007 — Posted in Tips
June! The sun is shining and the season for sweet-but-tart delicious tastes has begun.
This is the time to indulge your sweet tooth. Fresh fruit starts to appear in June and July: a veritable feast of flavour! Strawberries with real summer flavour have finally arrived and you should start to see grapes, apricots, melons and nectarines.
Personally, I am looking forward to my very favourite dessert, fresh raspberries with cream: perfection. But if you aren’t familiar with gooseberries,you should definitely try this 15th century recipe for gooseberry fool. There’s no point in trying to improve upon perfection.
This is your last chance for seasonal asparagus but you’ll find summer vegetables at their prime. Perk up your salads with young and crunchy raw veg: baby carrots and thin-sliced fennel and spring onion and sliced radish with salt. Try updating your salads with different types of lettuce and young spinach and watercress. It is also a good time to explore the versatility of courgettes / zucchini, a type of small marrow that soaks up flavour, making it perfect for eating with herbs and butter. The smaller they are, the more flavour they tend to have. Broad beans are at their best now too, still young and soft enough that you can serve them steamed.
Need more inspiration? Things to Try Eating (Seasonal Food) is a great diagram by Andrew Fox showing seasonal food throughout the year – go large!
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Posted by Dom on May 10th, 2007 — Posted in News
The health benefits of chocolate are well known – in particular, dark chocolate has already been credited with helping fight heart disease, skin cancer, high blood pressure and many other ailments.
Hershey’s are the latest to capitalise on this with a new range called Hershey’s Goodness. What’s interesting about this is that two of the three products in the range are milk chocolates. One is a whole bean milk chocolate and the other has added natural flavanol antioxidants.
Are Hershey’s jumping on a health bandwagon? Possibly – but our sister site Chocablog will be reviewing all the ‘Goodness’ range shortly.
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