Supplements

I know I don’t “do” girly things and grooming, but I do do supplements. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean minerals and vitamins, energy tablets – brain activity boosters when I’m revising for exams – anything natural and simple which helps you a little. I do green tea for energy, health and weight reduction; when I feel travel sick I suck mints; when I have a cold I chew airways gum and use minty nasal inhalers; and when I have a sore throat I drink chamomile tea with honey.

They work. And most of these things are as simple as swallowing a pill, or nice to eat or drink anyway, so it’s no loss if they’re not as effective as you hope. They don’t cure you, they alleviate, but they do it well. Afterall, isn’t all medicine based on natural finds? Quinine in bark, digitalin in foxgloves, laxatives in rhubarb… All of that.

It also feels healthier and more natural to eat something which you can eat without it being a ‘medicine’. I like to top up on my spinach (iron), citrus (vitamin C helps absorb iron), garlic (selenium) and bananas (vitamin B12) in general, because these foods make me feel good. In truth, I’m quite sensitive and can feel a lot of difference eating them – but they still do everyone the same good.

RE the wedding, I’ve gone back to taking my multivitamin supplements for the last week or so.

I used to take a similar one daily as a child, because my mother was worried that my fussiness might leave me undernourished. When I started uni, I bought my own and continued taking them, before realising that this was probably silly, I probably didn’t need them, and I’d keep hold for when I was going to give blood, or for whatever reason needed a boost.

I gave some to the Fiance as well, but he’s been pulling faces and saying they taste bad, which I think is a function of him not managing to swallow properly – I’ve had lots of practice. And it’s not like they’re as unpleasant tasting as paracetamols.

So today I had a little dig in the medicine cabinet to locate with these:

They’re energy tablets which you add to a pint of water, whereupon they fizz, dissolve, and produce a rather bizarrely-flavoured orange drink. They’re packed with vitamins and are advertisded to give you energy and keep you awake. I took a few before exams to give me the push to get through the slog. I’m not sure where I acquired them originally – I think I was given them, probably by my grandma. They work, the flavour is odd but not unpleasant, you get a lot of water down yourself simultaneously and a key thing – they don’t contain sugar, but use sweeteners, so are only full of the good stuff.

The Fiance was fascinated by the dissolution process.

He did this the entire time it was dissolving – and has now finished the whole drink.

Well, back to the green tea for me…

An Excuse for Baking

I’ve played with calorie counting, and now I’ve tried Healthy Snacks. I know, I know… it conjures up awful images of rice cakes and apples when everybody else is eating large wedges of chocolate cake. So I made cereal bars.

You may not be able to see too well, but they’re cut into wedges about 2.5 x 2 x 7cm. These are very easy to make. In a pan, I melt 1 large tablespoonful of butter and 1 of honey with a bag of soft toffees. I then pour this goop over a mixture of oats and cereal – I like to use rice krispies with a few bran flakes in the mix. To make it extra yummy, add a packet or two of yoghurt coated fruits (my favourites are apricots and pineapple). You will have to use a lot of cereal with this amount of toffee – approximately half or three quarters of a rice krispie packet and at least half as many oats. It may seem at first as though the amount of cereal far outweighs the toffee, but after vigorous mixing the stuff should even out and pressing it into a tray causes it to glue together satisfactorily. Cut the bars out when set. Oh, and for those still counting, these are 85 calories a bar.

I also had a go at banana loaf, using this recipe from the reliable BBC Good Food Guide (my favourite source of online recipes).

I did, however, make a few changes… as usual.

For a start, I decided that cutting down the sugar was a good move. I’ve recently bought some sweetener, and used it in a cake-like recipe to see what the result was. Suprisingly, I had to add most of the carton, and although the sweetness was right, the texture was incredibly crumbly, filling a space somewhere between scones and biscuits.

For the banana loaf, I had wised up. For 8oz of sugar, I used 6oz, plus 1oz of the sweetener to supplement. End result? No problem with the sweetness, and texture as normal.

But I also did a couple of other things.

My wonderful grandma makes a delicious banana loaf, the recipe for which I can’t find or never had, using nuts and raisins, so I wanted to have nuts and raisins in my banana loaf! A scout about the shops uncovered walnut halves at Home Bargains for £1.29, which I crushed into smaller lumps using a pestle and mortar. The best value raisins I could find were 99p “Flame Raisins” at Holland & Barrett (where I went for my yoghurt-coated fruits for the cereal bars). These had been reduced to half price.

I’m still unsure quite how they differ from conventional raisins.

The final difference made to my banana cake was raising agent. I used self-raising flour and half the amount of raising agent suggested in the recipe. Banana loaf can be quite dense and stodgy, so I wanted to give it a little extra lift (like a good bra) to make sure it went a bit further and took us longer to eat up. However, it’s important to ensure that you don’t overdo raising agent: too much can cause the cake to rise and then rupture, collapsing back down to form a kind of cakey biscuit best used for the base of a cheesecake. Worse, you can incorporate a nasty salty flavour into your baked goods, which can often surprise you with good and bad “patches”.

The addition of my extra raising agent meant that a 2 egg banana loaf was good for one long AND one ordinary loaf tin, although the smaller loaf tin was not entirely full and gave me a lower/shorter bread.

230 calories a slice.

I’ve also been thinking carefully about my breaddy snacks. A single slice of bread is 119 calories, seemingly a lot for something so staple. Bread can also leave you bloated and feeling full after rather than during a meal.

At home, we often stock up on crackers. Tesco do a 25p own brand pack and we also pick up good deals at Home Bargains, or various pound/99p stores. I eat crackers with cheese, cream cheese, hummous and even peanut butter. Sometimes I have them with salad, just with butter, or dry. They also work well with coleslaw or pates.

Another favourite of mine is oat crackers. I’ve always loved oats, and these very filling high-energy release biscuits are good with much the same things as ordinary crackers. Some people also eat them as a healthy substitute for biscuits and they can work well with sweet things as well as savoury. My preferences is for the plainer, simpler biscuits, but you can also buy oat crackers with seeds and other additions to make them more exciting.

These are part of my usual diet, but the other day I went out and bought some extras.

At 99 and 69p respectively, Ryvita Crackerbread and Abbey Crisp Bakes are 40 and 21 calories per slice, providing fun alternatives to ordinary bread. I’m yet to try the crackerbread (tomorrow for lunch I will be trying them out with guacamole dip), but the crisp bakes have already proved entertaining. I’ve used them like sandwich bread, but I’ve also used them for something creative: the bread bun around a giant courgette fritter topped with egg mayonnaise and salad: a very yummy lunch of about 410 calories – just over 1/5 of a woman’s daily recommended intake and nearly 1/6 of a man’s.

My final breaddy product is wraps. I LOVE wraps. Anything I can put in a wrap instantly becomes awesome. Obviously burritoes are the best – in my first year at uni I could cook spicy veg, dump them in a wrap with cheese and salad and have a hot lunch complete in about 15 minutes. They’re much thinner than ordinary bread and go further, complementing hot and cold food. I also use wraps with falafel, bean dishes, cheese and tomato, cheese salads, and ginger and lemon grilled or fried veg. You can have them for lunch or dinner, and if wanted supplement with rice to include more carbohydrates in your diet. I don’t have any in my freezer right now, so I can’t give you their calorie count. If you’re desperate, I’d recommend google.

Soupathon II

In recent efforts to eat well, eat less, and be frugal with our food, I introduce you to 5 more soups.

Noodle Tomato Soup

I roasted some very pretty pieces of red pepper and tried to make a tomato and roasted red pepper soup, but the flavours weren’t coming out well enough with tinned tomato (you definitely need fresh not tinned), so I added noodles.

It also contains half an onion and half a bag of bean sprouts. A lot of flour and a little milk was used to thicken it. Stock, extra salt and a few herbs and spices are a must, but the soup is quick and healthy, if a little peculiar. Done properly with a large quantity of roasted red pepper and fresh tomatoes, skinned by dipping them in hot water, it’s amazing.

Black Bean Soup

I had a lot of black beans in the cupboard, dry, which I soaked overnight and boiled for over an hour. Sadly the soup product still found them slightly undercooked, but you can’t have anything, and it tasted really nice – the flavour soaked out really well!

I found a variety of receipes for black bean soup on the web, but you actually have to type in “vegetarian” if you want one without bacon or pork in it! In the end, I borrowed some ideas and did it myself – using plenty of fresh ginger, tomato puree, stock, and a generous dollop of honey.

Mixed vegetables go into the recipes suggested. Mine contained onion, carrot, potato, mainly.

It’s very much a do-what-you-want-with-it soup, in my opinion.

Floating Mushroom Soup

I don’t like cream of mushroom soup; I think it’s vile. And the Fiance is not keen on mushrooms full stop. However, I do really enjoy the floating button mushrooms in the Chinese Noodle Soup recipe I use from the Women’s Institute, so decided to do a version of my own.

I diced up some potato, chopped some onion, quarted my somewhat large button mushrooms and opened a tin of butterbeans. A bit of stock and cayenne to spice it up, and voila, floating mushroom magic.

It was delish.

Tomato and Lentil Soup

I gotthis recipe, oddly enough, from the Recipe of the Week section in our local Brummy newspaper. I usually just glance at it, as it is mostly meaty, but today’s wasn’t, so I read it, adjusted quantities (I think it was to feed 6 or something) and made some. I made enough to feed 3.

Used:

Half an onion
2 small carrots
2 sticks of celery

…and chopped them up really really fine using a herb chopper until it was practically mash. Heated in a bit of oil until golden, then added

About a cup of lentils
A tin of chopped tomatoes
Half a stock cube (Knorr vegetable)

I also added salt, pepper and thyme, which were not in the original recipe, but made it good.

I then boiled it gently, adding a little extra water, until the lentils were cooked and I was pleased with the viscosity.

I couldn’t get a photo which accurately represented the colour, so here’s one which is too red:

And here’s one which is too orange:

French Onion Soup

This is a very simple soup, but delicious and completely timeless. For soup for two all you need is 1 large onion, 1 stock cube, water and oil – it’s that awesome!

Finely chop the onion, frying slowly on a low temperature until golden. Then add water and stock and boil for a while. Doesn’t really matter how long, and you can always make more and reheat.

To serve traditional French style, toast two slices of bread per person and cut into quarters, then grill a small bit of cheese onto each piece. The squares of cheesy bread may then be floated in the soup. You can also use a French stick.

Suppliers from Scratch

We’ve been working with Lamb. They are friendly, compromising and their food looks great. But maybe not that comprmising. We asked them to try and find ways to reduce the price (e.g. by cutting some service, et cetera)… and it crept UP.

Since it’s now nearly twice what we wanted to pay, we decided to have another look for Oxford caterers from scratch. We’d been tipped off that smaller caterers will have lower prices (though they are harder to find out about), so we started hunting through lists to find more obscure ones.

In the end 4 caterers got back to us, but only two were really interested in helping us and giving us a low price, and sent us menus tp peruse. We asked for quotes. One of them was even higher than Lamb!

However, the other was lower than the Lamb quote, and, unlike the others, was INC VAT!

We have a WINNER.

We haven’t booked them yet, so I won’t link you to them, but here is a little taster…

I have given some thought to your main course requirements and have listed a few suggestions that you may like to consider or that may spark some ideas with you.

Butternut squash and sweet potato Tagine with dried fruits, honey and Moroccan spices
Lamb strips or Chicken Fillet Tagine with similar fruits and spices.
Served with a timbale of tomato scented cous-cous and a selection of steamed vegetables.

Slow cooked British Beef Steak in Red Wine with a hint of horseradish
Or a Pastiche of baby Roots braised in Burgundy
Both served under a herb scone
With a selection of potatoes and seasonal vegetables

Turkey Cranberry and Brie Wellington
Or Portobello mushroom cranberry and Brie wellington
Both served on a bed of wilted spinach
With minted new potatoes and steamed garden vegetables

Old Town Smokie
Salmon, smoked haddock and tiger prawns cooked in a creamy cheese sauce
topped with golden sliced potato
Or broccoli, courgette and almond bake topped with golden sliced potato
Served with ratatouille stuffed tomatoes and glazed chantenay carrots

This list is by no means exhaustive or exclusive if you are happy with the price and would like to go ahead and decide on your choices a little closer to the date please let me know and we can put the booking into the diary.
I do hope that we can share your special day with you and look forward to hearing from you.