Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts

Wednesday 20 May 2020

Sweet and sour

The first time I ever sampled sourdough, I was at a business lunch with a contact in New York during the late 1990s. Mid-conversation, sitting in the chichi restaurant, I remember picking up my diamond-shaped bread roll and taking a nibble. My goodness, I thought to myself, that bread has gone off! 

A loaf of sourdough bread on a table in a garden
Sourdough: 'bread with an old soul'
Picture credit: Will Lam
Perhaps I didn't hide my grimace well enough because my companion smiled and told me that 'sourdough' was a New York speciality. I felt a pang for the French-style bread I might have been given in a London restaurant back home...

Tuesday 18 September 2018

The power of chocolate buttons

Hermaphrodite Mum
Three kids and a single mum

Little One stamps the pavement outside our house with her new Startrite shoe. "Don't wanna go to school," she wails. "Got no friends."

"School sucks," agrees her older brother, "but you have to go, otherwise the police will come and arrest Mum." 

Sign saying: All you need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt

I glance across at him to see if he genuinely believes what he's just said. It appears he does. Wow! Those white lies I used to tell him have still got some mileage. 

Tuesday 5 December 2017

How to boost your brain power

Book Review

These days a working knowledge of nutrition has become part of a parent's job description. I'm forever persuading my kids to eat pro-biotic yoghurt, oily fish and crispy kale, with varying degrees of success. If you want to be healthy... I tell them nine times a day. But imagine if you could eat your way to feeling happier, less stressed and more motivated?

4 weeks to optimise your mood, memory and brain health
The Brain Boost Diet Plan by Christine Bailey is the latest lifestyle-come-recipe book to promise us good health by cutting out gluten and refined sugar. The book is based on the premise that with the right diet, it takes four weeks to optimise your mood, memory and brain health. 

But before you roll your eyes and mutter - not another one - this book is worth a peek. Grounded in nutritional science, it contains a four-step programme to cleanse and revitalise your brain, with lots of tasty recipes that are relatively easy to prepare. It is also well-laid out with plenty of charts, infographics and glossy photographs.

Thursday 23 November 2017

Top tips for working from home

I blame Facebook. For all those wasted hours. Every morning, I settle down in front of my computer, flex my fingers above the keyboard and mentally gear up for a day of writing. But first there is the ritual - that niggling urge to kill a bit of time. Of course, I kid myself that I am just warming up the cogs in my brain before knuckling down. This means checking my blog stats, my book sales, the news headlines and then allowing myself a little peep at Facebook... 

Candle, tea and treat to help me work happily from home
Working wonders: a special candle
and a healthy treat from Eat Real Food
Half an hour later, I'm abreast of who's flown off to Copenhagen for a business trip, which child scored a gymnastics medal at the weekend and who consumed a giant mussel on holiday but my word documents remain unopened.

Thursday 3 November 2016

Hotel living

For 51 weeks of the year, I rule over my children's diet with a rod of iron. Not too much sugar, oily fish twice a week, live yoghurt and five fruit-and-veg-a-day. For one week of the year, we stay in a hotel and eat buffet breakfast. 

During our recent stay in Gran Canaria, my son began his day with sausages, bacon, waffles, chocolate sauce and whipped cream (all on the same plate). This was followed by pastries, a churro doughnut, a croissant, more chocolate sauce and a little experimentation with the cereal dispensers. "We have to get our money's worth," he told me as he skipped off for thirds.

Hotel swimming pool in Gran Canaria
People-watching by the pool
At the dinner buffet, he would follow each plate of savouries with a sweet to ensure that he didn't run out of space for his dessert(s). Thanks to such due diligence, he managed four courses on most nights.

Wednesday 14 October 2015

Teenage fuel

My 11-year old daughter was bemoaning the fact that she was too tall the other day. Having just started secondary school, she was embarrassed that she was towering above many of the older girls. In an attempt to comfort her, I started to tell her that our culture prized superlatively tall women in the form of supermodels... then I stopped. Where was I heading with this? Was I encouraging her to aspire to being bony and underfed? Heaven forbid!

Teenage girls with fruit for eyes
Having fun with food...
©  | Dreamstime.com
As mothers, we are advised not to comment on our own weight or even focus too much on the way our daughters look. Our girls and boys are growing up in a society where the pressure to look attractive/desirable is almost overwhelming. According to a recent government survey, two-thirds of British teenage girls consider themselves too fat. No wonder then that admissions to UK hospitals for teenagers with eating disorders have almost doubled in the past three years. To add to the complexity of the problem, obesity in children is also on the rise.

Monday 15 June 2015

Food, glorious food!

Food has never been more high profile. What with Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Day, the rise of the Insta-foodies, worries over school dinners and the obesity scare, food has become the latest Holy Grail. To some extent, we are all defined by our diet. Over the years, I have evolved from eating pasta sauce in a jar during my student days, to posh ready meals, Annabel Karmel - when the kids came along - and then onto buckwheat, avocado and brown rice. In the course of that journey, I have become increasingly interested in how diet affects our health... and learnt of course how to pronounce quinoa! 

Alex, working mum, and Emma Wildgoose, owner of Eat Real Food
On a food journey: Alex and Emma
Following my previous post about the dangers of processed sugar, I spent a few hours last week talking to Alex, a working mum who has spent several months overhauling her diet with help from Emma Wildgoose, a nutritional advisor and owner of Eat Real Food. Six months ago, at the start of their collaboration, Alex was feeling overweight, plagued by irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and concerned about various health issues. "I was very aware that my whole diet and eating habits were totally messed up," she says candidly. 

During an interview with both of them, Emma recalls how Alex initially felt quite defensive about trying to lose weight. "She kept saying, 'If it doesn't happen, it doesn't matter.'" Nodding her head, Alex admits that she didn't really believe it would work. Six months later, such scepticism has turned to excitement after she lost nearly two stone (11 kilos). "What I love best about losing weight is that I've got my neck back," Alex says gleefully, running her hands over her throat. "No more double chin!"

Monday 1 June 2015

Bitter sweet

Last Sunday I spent half an hour rifling through the contents of my larder cupboard and checking the sugar count in our cereals, sauces and tins. For months I have been reading about the damaging effects of processed sugar - sweet poison as one food campaigner calls it - but only recently have I started to take notice. Ransacking the cupboard brought home to me just how much sugar has been added to our food without us realising - if sugar is in the top three on the list of ingredients, there's probably too much of it.

Emma Wildgoose, owner of Eat Real Food
Emma's wants to pack nutrients into baking!
I partly owe my Damascene conversion to a friend who has recently studied to be a nutritional advisor and now runs her own business offering advice and cookery lessons. Emma Wildgoose, owner of Eat Real Food, is on a campaign to bring nutrients back into food, which means that she avoids using processed sugar and white flour in the recipes she designs. "In combination, these two ingredients have a catastrophic effect on blood sugar levels," she says. Her mission is also to "get children unhinged from sugar and pack into baking as many nutrients as possible".