Category Archives: Food

Wild garlic pesto, two ways

I was recently given two very large bags of wild garlic foraged from London by recent-Airbnb-guest-turned-friend-and-colleague Kanna Ingleson. Wild garlic is a leafy herb that tastes and smells much like garlic and grows wild in woodland across the UK. It’s a forager’s favourite but is oddly hard to find in my local area in Wiltshire. Thankfully, there are hard-foraging people like Kanna in this world and I like the slice of irony that found the big bad City saving my wild garlic day here in the countryside (let’s take a moment now to give it up to London for rocking the green space).

There is lots to be done with wild garlic: soup, frittatas, risotto, ravioli… and being so akin to garlic, wild garlic can easily be used in any recipe where garlic is called for. Add a few chopped leaves to a salad, stir the greens in with pasta, add to soups, stews, you name it. Yes, options abound, but even so, to eat all of this wild garlic within the couple of weeks it would survive in the fridge would not have done my breath (or my social life) any favours. So the question turned to storage. I did freeze some of the leaves, but decided to turn a fair bunch of it into pesto, too.

The first pesto was a no-brainer: walnut and wild garlic pesto adapted from this parsley pesto recipe that I love. I’ve made it before and it’s perhaps my favourite pesto (be it with wild garlic, parsley or any combination of herbs) because it is most versatile – I love it as a topping for pizza, swirled into soup or blobbed on toasted sourdough with sautéed mushrooms and arugula.

The second pesto is a sun-dried tomato and wild garlic pesto adapted from this recipe for sun-dried tomato and basil pesto. I omitted the garlic and parmesan, substituted wild garlic for basil and added lemon and more pine nuts. Kanna also gave me the idea of adding lemon zest and chilli, so that went in there too. Props to my friend Sam from Shipton Mill who knows a thing or two about delivery devices for good bread and was on hand to help bring the pesto together. We ended up eating a fair bit of it as an appetizer with Turkish flatbread, hot off the grill.

(Hefty tip for UK fans of sun-dried tomatoes: you can buy them in bulk on Amazon: £11.55 for a kilo, and they’re organic!)

If I have one struggle with pesto, it’s this: getting the consistency right. I like mine chunky, but it’s easy to over-process the nuts, creating more of a pesto paste, which is fine, but I like some texture. The easiest way I found to achieve this is by putting the nuts in towards the end of the pulsing process, or leaving them out altogether and hand-processing the nuts with a mortar and pestle. It all depends on what your up for, and how much you can be bothered.

You’ll also notice that both of these wild garlic pestos are vegan – and you totally won’t miss the cheese.

The wild garlic pesto keeps well in the fridge for a few weeks, as long as you keep it covered with a good layer of olive oil. Or do as I do and store it in the freezer (I freeze the pesto in ice cube trays).

Here’s some more wild garlic stuff you might like:

Wild garlic and potato frittata, one of my earlier wild garlic discoveries [smarterfitter.com]
Last year’s wild garlic forage in the Forest of Dean with Gloria Nicol [flickr.com]
Gloria’s delicious wild garlic pesto, made with the traditional way with parmesan and pine nuts [laundryetc.co.uk]
Why wild garlic is good for you [guardian.co.uk]
Wild garlic recipes from Rachel Demuth, including her neat wild garlic malfatti, sort of like a gnocchi made with ricotta [vegetariancookeryschool.com]
How to have wild garlic all year round, Kavey’s super simple method of preserving wild garlic by blitzing it with oil and freezing it [kaveyeats.com]

5.0 from 1 reviews

Wild Garlic & Walnut Pesto

Ingredients

100g walnuts, toasted
50g wild garlic, washed and dried
About 150ml good olive oil (or extra-virgin rapeseed oil)
Zest and juice of ½ lemon
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

Put the walnuts into a food processor and process until finely chopped but still with some granular texture.
Add the wild garlic and blitz again to chop the leaves, then begin trickling in the oil while the processor runs. Stop when you have a sloppy purée.
Taste, season as necessary with lemon juice, salt and pepper.
Store in the fridge – if you completely cover the surface of the pesto with oil so all air is excluded, it should keep for a couple of weeks. Or freeze it!

5.0 from 1 reviews

Wild Garlic & Sundried Tomato Pesto

Ingredients

150 g sun-dried tomatoes, soaked in boiling water
100g wild garlic, washed and dried
½ cup pine nuts, toasted
zest and juice of one lemon
2 tsp red chilli flakes  (optional)
1 cup olive oil
salt and pepper

Instructions

Combine sun-dried tomatoes, and a bit of the oil in a food processor and pulse until the sun-dried tomatoes are roughly chopped (adding more olive oil as necessary).
Add the pine nuts and pulse until those are roughly chopped, too.
Add the wild garlic and pulse until it approaches the consistency you like for pesto (I like mine chunky).
Add the lemon and a few good grinds of black pepper, pulse a few times, then taste. Add more lemon, salt, or pepper as you see fit.

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Vegetable “Noodles”

A few people have been asking about the “noodle” dishes I’ve been Instagramming and which feature prominently in my food ideas for intermittent fasting. The basic idea is this: take any noodle or soup recipe for which you’d use pasta noodles and use julienned vegetables instead. You get the twirl-with-a-fork pleasure of pasta with fewer calories, more nutrients and, some might argue, better flavour, especially when you use really good vegetables. Soup in particular is very handy when fasting as liquid is very filling but low calorie.

My essential tool for the job is the julienne vegetable peeler pictured below. My mom gave this to me years ago and I have no idea of the brand, but an Amazon search for julienne peeler will turn up a few options (this Kuhn Rikon Julienne Peeler looks pretty flash).

The vegetables I julienne most frequently are carrots and zucchini, and occasional parsnips. Occasionally some swede (rutabaga) will come along for the ride.

Vegetable “Noodle” Soups

Here I tend to err on the Asian side. The two soups I make most regularly are Miso “Noodle” Soup and Vegetarian Pho; both are extremely quick and easy to make and basically work like this:

Make a delicious stock
Add some vegetables if you’d like: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, bell peppers, mushrooms, potato, pumpkin (be sure to be sensitive to cooking times and add those long-to-cook veggies ahead of the rest)
Add your vegetable noodles
Serve with your favourite garnishes

Miso soup can be as simple as mixing miso and water, then adding soy sauce and sesame oil to taste. I usually opt for white miso and follow this recipe as a guide: Basic Miso Soup.

Vegetarian Pho requires a bit more work, so I make the broth ahead and freeze it. This recipe on the New York Times is my go-to: Simple Vegetarian Pho Broth.

In both cases, I heat up the stock to a simmer, then add my vegetables, and try to be sensitive to their cooking times. (Broccoli cooks faster than cauliflower so I’d add the cauliflower ahead of the broccoli.) I like my vegetables crisp, so the vegetable “noodles” always go in last and only get a minute or two, otherwise they go floppy and their flavours disappear into the rest of the soup. If using leafy vegetables like spinach, I’d also add this with the “noodles”.

My favourite garnishes: spring onions, firm tofu (fried or raw), fresh herbs (mint, basil and cilantro are good), sliced fresh chilli, Sriracha sauce (who doesn’t love Sriracha?).

Vegetable “Noodle” Salad Bowls

As with noodle soups, noodle salads can also be adapted to use vegetable “noodles”. I absolutely adore this Noodle Salad with Lemongrass Dressing, pictured below, made with vegetable “noodles” instead of rice noodles.

Vegetable “Noodle” Pasta

I got the idea from this zucchini pasta recipe. You can make it with a vegetable peeler rather than a julienne peeler, making for “noodles” that are almost fettuccine like. The original recipe uses the zucchini raw, but I like to cook it for just a moment, with a few added carrots because I love them. And as with many foods in life, I like this one topped with a poached egg:

Other Vegetable “Noodle” Ideas

One of my favourite comfort foods: take thinly sliced onions and cabbage and sautee slowly until absolutely sweet and soft. Add carrots and cook for a little longer. Season with salt and pepper. Serve topped with a poached egg and garnished with smoked paprika. A little avocado on the side doesn’t go amiss.

Another great candidate is pad thai, and I’m somewhat addicted to Rachel Demuth’s Vegetarian Pad Thai recipe (alas, I’ve always devoured it greedily before getting around to taking a picture that doesn’t suck – if you don’t mind a sucky picture, then look at this one).

Some of you may be looking for Calorie counts on these recipes but I’m afraid that despite my mathematics degree, I haven’t done the math (my mode of fasting avoids calorie counting if possible). From time to time I clock the numbers and can say that the soups tend to be very low calorie (200-300) depending on how you garnish them. Other dishes can tend more towards the 400-500 calorie range. It all depends on what you add to it. But a really useful tool I find for quickly adding up calories is CalorieCount’s Recipe Analyzer.

Alright, hit me with some more vegetable “noodle” ideas. Why haven’t I made “spaghetti” and “meatballs” yet? Maybe that would be just a bit TOO much food pretending to be other food that it’s not. And perhaps that’s why most of these dishes aren’t very Italiany. Regardless, I’m open to suggestions, and the julienne peeler is open for business!

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Dolcetti Gelato

Ever since my sister introduced me to home coffee roasting and Rave Coffee‘s green coffee beans, I’ve been going to them ever seen for all my coffee needs, particularly fresh roasted beans when I’m not roasting my own, and the occasional Perfect Flat White. Rave Coffee is in an unlikely place, slightly hidden amongst a row of small businesses in the Cirencester industrial estate. In recent weeks, I’ve noticed another unlikely suspect appear in this same row of shops: a gelateria called Dolcetti. The doors have always been closed, but today, they were open, so I decided to go in.

Thh first thing I saw when I walked through Dolcetti’s mysterious doors was a big window looking into the room where the gelato is made (read: ice cream maker envy on overdrive). I then made my way to the ice cream case. I was in between errands, so gelato wasn’t really a practical purchase, but the owner, Rob Gibson, happily told me all about his new business and let me (or rather, insisted that I) try almost every flavour in the case.

Rob is serious about gelato, and even in these early days he’s done an impressive job at creating a niche, high-end product that defies the “local” cliche by doing it like he really means it. All of the dairy comes from a private farm up the road, and there’s even a “Rave Mocha” flavour using Rave Coffee from next door. Best of all, this is a dream realised (a dream Rob’s had for the last 20 years) and the enthusiasm shows, both in his words, and in his inventive flavours like “cherry yogurt” and “Swiss”, a combo of pecans and white chocolate. He also let me try his rum raisin gelato, made extra special by soaking the raisins for weeks in a very high quality rum (he wouldn’t say WHICH type of rum – “I won’t give away all my secrets” – gotta respect that!).

As a sorbet enthusiast, I was particularly inspired by the raspberry sorbet which had the most amazing colour and I loved that he kept the seeds from the berries in the sorbet. Also special was the lemon sorbet, crystal white and with the cleanest flavour. “Sicilian lemons”, Rob tells me: figures.

Dolcetti, Stirling Works, Love Lane, Cirencester GL7 1YG
tel. 01285 641333 / info@dolcetti.net

[Update: While at Dolcetti, I gave Rob my card and urged him to get on Twitter and Facebook (as you do when you do what I do). Yesterday I received this uber nice message from him: "Many thanks for all your tweets and fantastic photos. You were a breath of fresh air and just what I needed to get the twitter account open. My wife has been pushing me, but with so many other things to do, I have just not been able to get to this important part of marketing. I have however due to your visit now got going, and look forward to seeing what happens." So please give them a follow: @GelatoDolcetti.]

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Mushrooms on Toast with “Limon Tuzu”

Last week I received a mysterious parcel. The box read “alternating pressure pump”, but inside was neither pressure pump, bicycle pump nor breast pump. Instead, this was box recycling at its best: what once held a pressure pump now bore a wonder of delights from my friend Tim Clinch, that rad peep photographer I met in Gascony last summer and who runs stellar food photography workshops in beautiful places like France, Bulgaria and Spain.

A few weeks ago I sent Tim a sample of the life-changing salsa macha, along with some dried chillies so he can make his own. In return, he sent me some of his homemade “oh fukkah it’s really good” dukkah along with an array of Turkish delights like date syrup, the best sumac ever (so far), dried gooseberries, a curious “raisin sausage” and this “limon tuzu”, aka lemon salt. Foodie pen pals are the best pen pals, don’t you think?

I’ve been having fun experimenting with the dukkah and spices (I’m saving the “sausage” for a special occasion). The dukkah is quickly becoming one of those “good with everything” sort of foods (much like salsa macha, and Chicago-style giardiniera since we’re on the subject). Today, it was time to tap the tuzu.

It was a spontaneous act, adding the lemon salt to the mushrooms. I was in a hunger-induced, post-swim, post-dog-walk panic, hastily frying the mushrooms, toasting the toast and barely finding the will to wash the rocket. It was time to salt the shrooms and I saw the tuzu before the sea salt, so in it went, and it totally transformed this fairly common breakfast into something totally tart, fresh and “fukkah yeah awesome”. A bit of thyme would have been great in here, but I couldn’t be bothered going outside so settled for a pinch of za’atar, which actually worked a treat.

In one sentence, here’s how it all came together: sautéed mushrooms with lemon salt and black pepper, served on sourdough toast with avocado, rocket and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar.

It took maybe 10 minutes to make, and I had to fight myself not to devour it in the same short amount of time.

My next mission is to photograph the dukkah as well as Tim photographed my chillies (see his blog – seriously, Tim, I will pay you for a print). Maybe Tim can help on this front, too… in fact, I know he can. And besides, I’ve always wanted to go to Bulgaria (I hear they have good cheese…and great photographers).

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Tamales with Butternut Squash & Goats Cheese

A couple weeks ago I wrote about making salsa macha with guajillo and chipotle chillies, a happy result of my having won a goodie bag from Cool Chile Company, which included masa harina among its dried chilli bonanza. Around the same time, I had an email from my friend, Patrick, suggesting he and our crew gather at Orchard Cottage for a Good Friday Easter feast.

The wheels began turning on a bit of Shaw family history: when I was younger, my Aunt Sue always hosted Easter with her husband Augie, whose family is from Mexico. The parties were some of the best of childhood memory because they brought together a weird combination of Lithuanian, Polish and Mexican tradition, including piñata-bashing to go with the requisite Easter egg hunt. Though we didn’t have tamales at our Easter parties, Sue often talked about her holiday tamale-making adventures with Augie’s side of the family, and on a few occasions she even gave me some leftover tamales to take home.

Sue probably didn’t realise how much I coveted these tamales, and they’ve always led to a weird longing for a tamale-making party of my own. So with life’s recent masa harina injection paired with Patrick’s Easter party suggestion, I decided to start my own tamale-inspired holiday tradition.

Tamales are usually made with lard and filled with meat like carnitas. I decided to take inspiration from last year’s Mexican Supperclub at The Vegetarian Cookery School, where I had some of the best Mexican food of my life – which is saying a lot given that I used to live in Austin, Texas! Among the dishes were Tamales Rellenos de Calabacin, aka tamales with butternut squash and feta, which she served with the most delicious mole sauce.

We ended up making two fillings: (1) butternut squash with goats cheese and (2) grilled red pepper, red onion, sweetcorn and feta. The tamales were surprisingly easy to make. The masa harina mixture is a simple dough of masa harina, butter (instead of lard), salt, baking powder, milk and vegetable stock.

The most fiddly part was rolling the individual tamales, but even this didn’t take very long, especially when you involve other people in the rolling. There are several schools of thought on rolling tamales – Jo and Rachel at The Vegetarian Cookery School seem to have a knack for making them extra pretty. I ended up using the technique shown in this allrecipes.com video, just because it made the most sense to me.

To serve with the tamales, I made mole poblano sauce – an epic adventure and worthy of a blog post in its own right (someday maybe?). I made it a few days ahead, with yet more of those Cool Chile Company chillies, using Thomasina Miers recipe from Mexican Food Made Simple (thanks to Charlotte Pike from Go Free for introducing me to that one).

Mole poblano is incredible stuff, containing about 20 ingredients, including dried mulatto, pasilla and ancho chillies, plantain, almonds, sesame seeds, prunes, raisins and not as much chocolate as you’d think. The result is an amazingly rich, deep, sorta sweet, sorta smoky sauce. I can’t imagine a better sauce for the butternut squash tamales. The richness of the chilli chocolate sauce seems ideal for the sweetness of the squash and corn masa, all rounded off by creamy goat cheese.

The tamales – in fact, the whole meal – totally rocked our respective worlds. We rounded out the meal with refried black beans, tortillas, salsa, guacamole, slow roast fennel with salsa macha, salad with lime dressing and for dessert: chocolate cake AND brownies with “a trio of ice creams” (including the much adored avocado ice cream). All that was missing was a piñata.

5.0 from 2 reviews

Vegetarian Tamales

Author: Rachel Demuth

Recipe type: Main

Cuisine: Mexican

Prep time: 1 hour

Cook time: 1 hour

Total time: 2 hours

Serves: 8

The number of tamales you get will depend on how big you make your tamales. I erred on the small side, which made about 16 tamales.

Ingredients

16 dried corn husks

For the masa

200g masa harina
50g butter, softened
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
50ml milk
100ml vegetable stock

For the filling

100g goat cheese
1 butternut squash, peeled and diced into small cubes
1 chopped fresh red chilli
4 cloves garlic, whole with the skin on
A few sprigs of thyme
Chopped coriander
Juice of half a lime
Olive oil

Instructions

Roast the squash in a hot oven (180C / 350F) with the garlic, chilli, thyme, and olive oil until it is soft. This should take about 30-40 minutes. When cooked, remove the garlic from its skin, mush it up with the spatula and stir it through the squash. Add salt and pepper to taste and stir through some chopped coriander and lime juice.
Soak the corn husks in hot water for 30 minutes. When they are soft rinse them under running water as you separate them. Lay them flat on a plate and keep them covered with a damp cloth.
To prepare the masa, beat the softened butter in a mixing bowl, until soft and fluffy.
Mix the masa harina with the salt and baking powder.
Beat some of the dry mixture into the butter and then add a little milk then some more dry mix, then some stock until everything is combined.
The masa should be the consistency of scone dough, soft and pliable, if too dry and a little more milk, if too wet a little more masa harina.
To assemble the tamales, lay a husk on the table with the fat end away from you. Place a sausage of masa (30g) in the middle of the husk, starting at 1cm from the fat end press the masa down leaving a border down each side, big enough so that the husk can wrap over the filling. Press the masa down to about ⅔rds down the husk and flatten the sausage.
Top the masa with a little bit of roasted squash and smear on some goat cheese. Roll the corn husk with one end open and the other end like a burrito so that the filling gets sealed by the masa (this video is helpful).
Tear a thin strip off a long husk and tie around the open end of the tamale to seal it all together.
Steam the tamales in a vegetables steamer for 45- 60 minutes. You can tell when they are done because the masa will be soft and sponge like.
Serve them as soon as possible with mole and salsa.

Baking with Nimo: Assyrian “Eight Day” Bread

Last January my mother introduced me to her friend, Nimo, an Assyrian woman who’s managed that rare thing in America: to migrate to the states without losing her cultural food tradition. My mom’s been raving to me about Nimo for years, often sending me photos and scribbles from their cooking sessions, making such things as tabbouleh, lentil dumplings, Turkish bread, and stuffed aubergine. Given my propensity for Middle Eastern cuisine, it was no wonder why I “had to meet this woman”.

Assyria is an ancient territory that dissolved in the mid-seventh century and is now part of several nations including northern Iraq, part of southeast Turkey and northeast Syria. Though Nimo now lives in Chicago, her roots are firmly in her heritage, and this especially applies to her cooking. Nimo bakes from her tradition, using the recipes that her grandmother taught her how to make, rarely measuring anything and often not knowing the English words to describe them, which made follow-up research a tad challenging, but also hugely educational.

One such dish that Nimo taught us is what she called “eight day bread”, a sweet, egg-enriched braided bread that is eaten across the countries of the former Ottoman empire and in Greece and Armenia has specific associations with Easter. In Armenia it’s called “choereg” and in Greece it’s called ”tsoureki” or “lampropsomo”, derived from the Greek words for “Easter” and “bread” and refers to the light Christians believe is given by Christ’s resurrection.

There are many varieties of these festive breads, but what gives it its distinctive flavour and aroma is mahleb, an aromatic spice made from the seeds of a type of cherry. When ground to a powder, mahleb produces a flavour that’s much like a combination of bitter almond and cherry. The spice has several associations with Easter, not only in Greece, but also in Cyprus where it’s a used in a special Easter cheese-filled pastry called flaouna.

I’m still trying to navigate the landscape of Nimo’s food stories. Her food crosses several cultural landscapes and her methods are not recipes, but simple truths about cooking ingrained in her brain by tradition and repetition. The worktop must be clean. The ingredients must be good. The cooking must be done with care and respect. And the food must be enjoyed slowly and mindfully.

As to “eight day bread”, “Choereg”, “Tsoureki”, or whatever you wish to call it, I enjoy it best sliced and toasted with butter, during Easter time, or any time of the year.

5.0 from 1 reviews

Baking with Nimo: Assyrian “Eight Day” Bread

Ingredients

6 cups flour
1 cup butter, melted
1 cup milk, warmed
½ cup sugar
3 eggs
1½ teaspoons salt
2¼ teaspoons yeast
½ teaspoon mahleb, ground seeds
1 egg yolk
sesame seeds or sliced almond, for topping (optional)

Instructions

Dissolve yeast in warm milk, then add the sugar and melted butter.
Beat the eggs eggs and add to the milk mixture, along with salt and ground mahleb.
Add flour gradually, one cup at a time until dough comes away from sides of bowl. Knead 10 minutes until soft, shiny and no longer sticky.
Place dough in oiled bowl. Turn the dough ball in the bowl to coat the outside with oil. Cover the bowl and put in a warm place to rise until doubled.
Divide the dough into two or three balls. Divide each ball into three and roll out with your hands to three long ropes.
Pinch all three ends together and braid loosely. Pinch ends and tuck under.
Cover and allow to rise again until doubled.
Preheat the oven to 400 F / 200 C. Brush the braids with beaten egg and sprinkle with sesame seeds or sliced almonds.
Bake for 20 minutes or until nicely golden brown all over.

This post first appeared on Great British Chefs blog.

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Intermittent Fasting Takes Over the UK

If you live in Britain then you’ve likely heard of the 5:2 diet, aka ‘The Fast Diet’, popularised by Dr. Michael Mosley in the BBC Horizon episode, Eat, Fast and Live Longer. Since the programme first aired in August 2012, thousands of people have latched on to his method of Intermittent Fasting for weight loss. Celebrities like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have climbed on board and now there’s a book on the subject, the fast diet, co-authored by Mosley and food and fashion writer Mimi Spencer.

Intermittent fasting is nothing new, and it’s a subject I’ve been interested in for the last few years, ever since I started reading about ‘primal’ and ‘paleo’ diets and how eating as our ancestors ate may have benefits to our overall health (I’ve found Mark Sisson’s work on Mark’s Daily Apple particularly interesting, useful and inspiring). But what’s amazing about Mosley and the Horizon programme is how strongly it’s struck a cord with what seems like the entire nation. I know dozens of people who have been doing the 5:2 diet, and what’s incredible is that they’ve been keeping it up and seeing results for weeks and months.

So what is the 5:2 diet? In case you’ve somehow missed it, the 5:2 diet works like this: two days a week you restrict your calories to 500 per day if you’re female, or 600 per day if you’re male. It doesn’t matter which days you choose to fast or how you partition the calories throughout the day. On non-fast days (“feast days”), you can eat whatever you want.

That’s it.

Perhaps this is what’s sold the nation on 5:2: the method is so simple and easy to follow. You can have your cake (and your beer, chips and chocolate) and eat it, too. It’s not socially restrictive. The only real hard part is not eating much two days a week, which isn’t really as hard as it sounds.

The diet is so simple that it almost seems a shame there’s now an official website and book about it, padding out the story with extra “tips” and “success stories”, and making the diet seem more like, well, a ‘diet’. And what ‘diet’ has ever really worked for anyone? (Seriously, I’d love to know.)

The book has merits, though. The most useful bits are the first few chapters that describe the science behind intermittent fasting and why this crazy 5:2 thing might actually be the way forward, not just for weight loss, but for disease prevention and long life. When we fast, we fool our bodies into thinking we’re in a potential ‘famine’ situation, and our body responds by toughening up. A major player here is growth hormone IGF-1, a hormone that influences cell reproduction, and thus ageing. Fasting causes levels of this hormone to drop, and in response, repair genes to switch on. This is a good thing, and has huge implications for reducing age-related diseases. Fasting also gives our pancreas a rest, which improves insulin sensitivity and thus reduces our risk of diabetes, obesity and heart disease. There is also evidence that fasting improves your mood.

Oh yeah, and you tend to gradually lose weight, too (a natural effect of dramatically restricting your calories twice a week).

At least, this is all true in theory. The problem with the science behind intermittent fasting is that most of it has been done on mice. In reading the book, you get a sense of the hand-waviness behind some of the theories. Dr. Mosley and Ms. Spencer aren’t shy about this, and that is why only a small portion of the book is devoted to ‘science’, and the rest devoted to their own personal experiences with fasting and tips for making it work for you (groan, it becomes a ‘diet’ book).

Intermittent Fasting: The Monica Method

I’ve practising intermittent fasting since December, but I’m loathe to call it “5:2″ because my approach and my motivations are a bit different from most people I know (and I’ve never really liked being part of the “in crowd”). I’m less interested in losing weight than I am in longevity and mental health. I’ve already been through my own “weight loss journey”, and I’m grateful to have succeeded, but it’s left me with certain mental baggage about ‘diets’ and ‘calories’ that I’d rather cast aside. I like that intermittent fasting frees the mind from thinking about food as calories (except on fast days, of course). Also, in the same way that “feast days” allow food to be truly celebrated (as it should be – there should be no such thing as a “guilty pleasure”), fast days too offer a different kind of freedom.

If you’re a foodie like me, then you tend to obsess about food – what’s for dinner? What can I make today with all the ingredients I have? (How lucky are we to live in the modern world?!) And so I find fast days quite liberating: for a good solid chunk of the day, I just don’t have to think about food and I can get on with other things, be it work, writing, cleaning or walking (admittedly, the more active I am on fast days, the easier it is to forget I might be hungry).

I’ve seen many foodies channel their food obsessions towards creating really amazing super low-calorie fast day recipes. But here’s my issue with this: on fast days, I don’t want to worry about food. In fact, I personally find the idea of eating a lot of small pathetic meals throughout the day extraordinarily depressing. So my “fasting” approach is to simply eat nothing all day until about 6pm, at which point I have a “sensible meal”. I don’t typically count the calories, but I don’t go crazy either. I deliberately try to have a light meal, and usually go for soups. A recent favourite is vegetarian pho with julienned carrot and courgette “noodles”, broccoli and tofu. There’s also lots you can do with an egg (about 80 calories), be it hard boiled for a salad nicoise or filled with veggies and turned into a tasty frittata or omelet.

My other motivation for fasting this way is the argument that your body gets the most benefit from fasting when you’re actually, well, fasting. But again, the science is patchy on this and, according to Mosley, it appears even if you do snack on a fast day, you still glean most of the ‘benefits’ of fasting.

But that’s just me, and as Dr. Mosley explains in his book, that is the beauty of the 5:2 – you can tailor it to suit your own personality and approach to eating, as long as you stick to the basic rules. The thing to remember is that you can deal with going hungry for a bit. It might seem hard at first, but that’s only because we’re so used to being satiated all the time. Hang tight in the knowledge you can eat whatever you want the next day and just get on with life. I know. We’re foodies. It’s kind of a bummer to miss out on a meal. But it means we get to enjoy the meals we DO eat with more freedom and pure pleasure, and none of that pesky guilt stuff.

A few final observations from my personal experience:

Fasting is hard but not as hard as it sounds
Sometimes you get hungry, but you just have to get over it, because…
Being hungry isn’t the end of the world, and if you’re only fasting for a day, the hunger doesn’t build and build until you explode… it comes in subtle waves and then it passes
Missing a meal isn’t a total travesty
Fasting is a handy approach to dealing with crappy airline food on long-haul flights
Drinking a lot of fluid is very helpful, and in fact necessary; I like tea and sparkling water
After an indulgent day or weekend, fasting for a day feels like hitting the “reset button” on your body, mentally and physically
Fasting is addictive
Fasting is harder when the weather is miserable
Fasting is easier when occupied by physical activities like walking, cleaning, shopping and exercising
You can work out while you’re fasting – your body won’t crumble to pieces
You should go to the doctor before you start fasting and make sure it’s a safe idea, plus get some blood work done to set a baseline so you can measure how fasting effects your physiology (one of the best features of the fast diet book is that it tells you which tests you can have done under the NHS through your GP)

This post first appeared on the Great British Chefs blog.

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Carrot and Courgette “Pasta” with Poached Egg

Ok, it’s not pasta. It’s peelings of carrots and courgette given the pasta treatment. I mostly followed this recipe for Zucchini “Pasta”, which is basically a raw mixture of zucchini, tomato, basil, garlic, oil and walnuts. I added carrots, and also cooked the garlic in the olive oil, then added the zucchini and carrots very briefly. I used pine nuts instead of walnuts, and added a poached egg and an avocado (because that seems to be what I do).

Would make again. Next time, I’d like to try the raw version with walnuts.

Recipe: Zucchini “Pasta”

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Salsa Macha: The life changer.

I almost didn’t make this recipe because it calls for two cups of olive oil. But when all was said and done, I ended up with a “salsa” that has completely blown my mind and changed my world. I’m not exaggerating!

It began with a recent good fortune: a few weeks ago I won a “goody bag” of dried chillies from the Cool Chile Company. I rarely enter competitions, and win them even less, so I was pretty psyched to receive a weighty parcel of dried pasilla, ancho, guajillo and chipotle chillies, and a bonus sack of masa harina.

Ever since, my mind’s been reeling over what to do with them. One of my objectives is to use this opportunity to get to know the unique flavours of these chillies. I’m very familiar with chipotles and their wonderful smokiness, but the others are a bit of a mystery to me.

I first made the ancho lentil tacos, where I discovered that anchos (dried poblano peppers) are milder than chipotles, though still a touch smokey, and sweeter. I’ve also made tortilla soup, which includes pastilla chilli, which seems similar to ancho to me, except is possibly milder.

Moving on from these recipes I wanted to take advantage of something that was really all about the chillies, so started hunting for salsa and sauce recipes. Rick Bayless’ salsa macha caught my attention because it was suited for any one or a mix of dried chillies, and also included some interesting ingredients like almonds and sesame. I only noticed the oil quantity after I’d mentally decided to make it. But I’m so glad I pushed on.

This isn’t a “salsa” like the kind you find in jars at the grocery star. It doesn’t contain tomatoes or lime or cilantro. This is more like chile pesto, a puree of dried chillies with nuts, seeds, garlic and a little salt, vinegar and Mexican oregano. And the flavour is out of this world.

I used six guajilla chillies and four chipotle chillies, plus some of my homemade apple cider vinegar. The resulting “salsa” has an awesomely sweet and smokey aroma with a flavour to match. There’s only a little bit of vinegar in the recipe, but it’s just enough to make the puree seem almost “fresh”, despite all the oil. The nuts and seeds, which have been fried in the oil, add further depth of flavour and balance out the chillies.

So it’s good, but life-changing? Well yes, for a vegetarian anyway, who isn’t accustomed to eating foods that are so deep, rich and satisfying. Although I don’t eat meat, I can understand why some meat-eaters would find it difficult to go vegetarian because it’s very difficult to duplicate meat’s, well, meatiness in vegetarian food (meat-eaters, maybe you can explain this phenomenon?).

Still, eating this salsa made me feel very much like one must feel after eating a good steak. I used the salsa macha in something very simple: a bowl of sautéed onions, potatoes and greens (a bit of egg would have been good here, too). I included some of the salsa in the saute pan, and then added a little more at the end. The flavours were so intense and wonderful that I finished the meal with a weird satisfaction that I’m not really used to. It had nothing to do with spiciness – in fact, the guajillo and chipotle combo resulted in a pretty mild heat – but pure flavour.

I think the phrase “awesome sauce” is appropriate here. I see myself using this all over the place – potato, eggs and tofu come to mind. I can also see adding it to other salsa and sauce recipes to add deeper flavour. Rick has a recipe for Slow-Cooked Fennel where salsa macha is used almost as a baste. He also does lamb chops with salsa macha for any meat eaters who are keen to give this a try. And you should, because it really is a life changer. And I can’t stop opening the jar just to have a whiff.

5.0 from 1 reviews

Guajillo and Chipotle Salsa Macha

Author: Rick Bayless

Adapted from Rick Bayless’s recipe for Salsa Macha.

Ingredients

2 ounces dried guajillo and chipotle chillies (about 6 guajillos and 4 chipotles
1½ ounces (1/3 cup) almonds
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
4 garlic cloves, peeled and halved
2 cups olive oil
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
A generous ½ teaspoon dried Mexican oregano

Instructions

Stem the chiles, then break or cut them open and scrape/brush/let fall out most of the seeds; cut into ¼-inch pieces – you will have about 1 cup.
In a large (4-quart) saucepan, combine the almonds, sesame seeds, garlic and oil. Set over medium-high heat and cook until garlic and sesame seeds are golden, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the chiles. Let cool 5 minutes.
In a small bowl, mix the vinegar with the salt until the salt dissolves, then add it to the pan along with the oregano. When the mixture has cooled to room temperature, pour it into a blender or food processor and pulse until everything is chopped into small pieces. You don’t want a super smooth puree – leave some texture in there.
Pour into a jar and store in the refrigerator until you’re ready to use.

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Healthy Vegan Breakfast Salads: eBook for Sale!

Buy it now for just $0.99!

This eBook is a stepping stone on my way to producing The Healthy Vegan Breakfast Book. This first “edition” is all about: Breakfast Salads! It may seem a bit untimely, given the wintry weather we’ve been having, but I’m starting with salads because these are the breakfasts that started it all: colourful bowls, crazy combinations and some unlikely breakfast ingredients like quinoa, arugula, tofu, tempeh and loads of fresh herbs. These breakfasts have always attracted the most attention on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, so I’m riding the wave: it’s Healthy Vegan Breakfasts v1.0!

A few very practical reasons to buy the Healthy Vegan Breakfast Salads eBook:

You’ll be an early adopter of the “breakfast salad” craze, which instantly makes you cool
It’s about breakfast, but the recipes are suitable for lunch and dinner, too
It’s almost free – the cost is just $0.99, or about £0.66 – so you’re not risking a whole lot
The eBook is formatted as a PDF so you can read it on any computer, iPad or smart phone
You’ll be supporting a two great causes: (1) my subsistence. (I like many self-employed folk rely on multiple income streams to feed myself and pay the bills) and (2) the development of more healthy vegan books!

There are loads more reasons to buy this eBook on the salesy page, so head over there now and buy it for just $0.99. You’ll get a great book and lots of love from me.

Thanks for all the support, everyone. Roll on Healthy Vegan Breakfasts v2.0!

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