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.
Leave a comment | tags: 15 minutes, 99p, 99p store, abbey, apple, apples, awesome, awful, banana, banana bread, banana loaf, bar, bars, base, BBC, bbc good food, BBC Good Food Guide, bean, beans, biscuit, biscuits, bra, bran flakes, breadd, breakfast, butter, cake, cake like, cakey, calorie, calories, carbohydrates, cereal, cereal bars, cheese, cheesecake, chocolate, cold, coleslaw, collapse, collapsing, complement, complementing, courgette, courgette fritter, cracker, crackerbread, crackers, cream cheese, creative, crisp bakes, crumbly, delicious, dense, dinner, dry, egg mayonnaise, extra lift, falafel, flame raisins, flour, food, freezer, fried, fritter, fritters, fruit, fruits, good bra, good food, google, grandma, grilled, health, healthy, healthy snacks, Holland & Barretts, Holland and Barretts, home bargains, honey, hot, hummous, images, large, larger, lift, loaf tin, love, lunch, misture, mix, nuts, oat, oat biscuits, oat crackers, oats, online, own brand, pack, pate, pates, peanut butter, pick up, pineapple, pound, Poundland, raising, raising agent, raisins, recipe, recipes, recommend, rice, rice cakes, rice krispies, rupture, ryvita, salad, salty, scone, scones, scout, self-raising flour, small, smaller, snack, snacks, soft toffee, spoon, stock up, stodgy, sugar, supplement, sweetener, tablespoonful, teaspoonful, Tesco, texture, tin, tofee, toffee, toffees, tomato, topped, topping, veg, walnut, walnut halves, walnuts, wedges, wrap, wraps, yoghurt, yoghurt coated, yummy | posted in Food and Drink
I thought I would take this opportunity to plug my gift list site. I’m very happy with it: it’s free, easy to use, and allows us to add gifts from anywhere online (so sadly no gifts from Poundland or Atkinsons, but it covers most avenues). It’s only downfall is that it’s pink.
marriagegiftlist.com (what was that? MARRIAGE, not wedding???) allows you to link to a page, select a picture from that page (for sites that don’t work you can download a picture and upload to marriagegiftlist.com from your computer, write in how many you want and how much they cost, and even rename it if you want to.
This fun function has led to “Egg Prick”, “Cock and Hen Divided Serving Bowl”, “Runcible Spoon”, “Beastmaker” and a few other treasures.
It’s live from the moment you start adding gifts. We can log on as a couple and see if anybody has bought anything (but not whom it was bought by until after the wedding date), write and edit the interface the guests will see, preview it as they see it and add or remove or repair links to gifts as we see fit. The guests can log on using the gift list ID and our emails, see what’s still available and how many we want, as well as our personal message. We can choose an interface for the guests, and they do have the option of ones which are not pink (hurrah!).
We’ve appointed a Gift List Manager to help guests with queries or problems, so we don’t know who bought what if they want to keep it as a surprise until after the wedding, and so we don’t have that extra bit of admin to worry about. We put her details in our invitations and they also appear on the site.
Not being tied to a shop, our imagination is the limits, and has led to the inclusion of some rather bizarre gifts, such as the archery kit (which we really really want, but nobody seems interested in), a toilet seat (which went in a flash) and a catnip mouse for our little Iris (which was very much appreciated, and is now bought).
We have a range of gifts from £29.99 ex postage to £1.10 for some kitchen bag clips (bought!). We know who a lot of the gifts are from, but not all of them. Some have sent them to our house, but not all of them. We even had to stop ordering parcels to our house so that we didn’t get confused with gift list items!
We have lived together for over a year. We do have a kettle, microwave, et cetera, but we’re still a young couple starting off and there are lots of things we want for our house, for our leisure or for our amusement – but not everybody realises you need egg poachers – so a gift list has come in handy, especially one which allow for such eclecticity.
On the other hand, I’m aware that asking for money for the honeymoon is popular, but fraught with the usual faux pas, awkwardness and possibilities for offence. People like buying you THINGS. They (mostly) don’t mind lists and being directed what to buy for you, as they still get to choose and don’t have to use much brain space.
Cheesy little poems in invitations on the plea of please give us cash are common. Some people set up a paypal system or website. Personally, I’m not so keen, as I feel to actually make a difference I would have to contribute more in cash (say, fifty quid plus) than I would spend on a present (maybe ten to twenty – twenty if we’re buying as a couple), and this would make me feel like the couple had higher expectations of me and were being a bit rude. So they would probably get a pretty card and a box of chocolates from me. But at least I wouldn’t buy them a toaster.
So this is why I wanted to show you this idea – a “Honeymoon Gift List”. I hope the lovely couple I have stolen this from won’t mind – it was originally posted up in a public forum, so I don’t suppose they will. In the linked example, Tom and Abby used Our Dream Honeymoon to create a list where people can “buy” experiences for their honeymoon, from woolly socks to keep their feet warm in their Lapland adventure to a Heathrow hotel. Essentially people just choose options and give you money by paypal, but it still offers the same novelties as a gift list, and shows your guests that they’re really contributing to the luxury of your enjoyment, not giving money towards their own reception dinner.
I would definitely recommend a list based on one of these two.
Leave a comment | tags: adventuer, archery, archery kit, Atkinsons, available, beastmaker, buy, card, cars, cash, catnip mouse, chocolates, cock, computer, contributing, divided serving bowl, download, eclecticity, egg poacher, egg prick, enjoyment, ex[periences, feet, fifty quid, forum, gift, gift list, Gift List Manager, gifts, giving money, guests, Heathrow, hen, honeymoon, hotel, house, household items, ID, interface, Iris, kettle, Lapland, log in, luxury, marriage, marriagegiftlist.com, microwave, money, not pink, novelties, online, open, opening, Our Dream Honeymoon, page, paypal, pink, plug, Poundland, presents, reception dinner, runcible spoon, select, serving bowl, site, ten, toaster, toilet seat, travel, treasures, twenty, ublic, upload, warm, website, wedding, wedding date, woolly socks | posted in Guests, Uncategorized