Welcome

Welcome to new readers who have come via the forum at Taste Australian ... four and a half years ago, my apparently healthy husband had a heart attack out of the blue (on the tennis court). Soon after, I started this blog to keep notes for myself and my friends about the changes we were making to our diet. Less salt, less fat, more vegetables, more oily fish - easy to say, harder to incorporate into daily eating, particularly with a young family.

After all this time, my main piece of advice would be to take back as much control of your diet as you can from the food industry, by cooking from scratch as often as you can manage. You've got the best interests of your family at heart; the food industry doesn't even know them.

But, whatever you do, don't get worked up about getting there all in one day: baby steps, one meal at a time. And remember the 80/20 rule on bad days.

The sidebar has links to posts for people starting out on this journey ... also quick links to some of the best authorities on heart disease. Do feel free to email me if you think I can help


PS that heart-shaped stone ... my youngest, then aged about four, lugged it up a cliff from a beach in Brittany. At the top, he took it out of his rucksack, and gave it to me. It's been on my mantlepiece ever since.

Another cauliflower gratin

I've been trying to have at least one completely vegetarian day a week here. This is easier when Horatio is away at uni, and very hard when he's at home - a 19-year-old late-growing carnivore is apt to make a fuss if there's no meat. For a whole day.

I managed yesterday.

The eat-less-meat idea has several sources: there seems to be some real proof that less meat more veg and fruit is a healthier diet; it's cheaper; it's more environmentally-friendly (meat production is notoriously heavy on agricultural resources); there are lots of good vegetarian dishes to cook and eat.

Eating less meat and dairy produce has implicit in the changes to our diet since my husband had a heart attack two and a half years ago. If you are eating more vegetables, more beans, more fruit, then clearly there's going to be less meat, less cheese, less eggs. There are some basic ideas in a post I wrote two years ago when we began to get serious about our post-heart-attack diet. (Although it's fair to say we don't stick rigidly to it ... see my 80:20 post.)

All the same, it's only this year that I've started made a conscious effort to cut out meat altogether, if only for one day a week - and you may well think that is pretty feeble. I'd happily cut meat out altogether, but I have to tread gently in a house full of carnivores ... and, so far, they aren't complaining.

This cauliflower gratin is not for vegetarians, however, because of the anchovies. They are there to give that savoury something that we used to get from cheese. But anchovies are better in a heart-healthy diet than a cheese sauce on cauliflower that constitutes the what-on-earth-shall-I-give-them-for-dinner type of cooking that is the daily grind for most family cooks. That's if you can persuade your young to eat cauliflower at all.

We ate this with baked potatoes and roasted onions, but I sometimes make it as a side dish, in which case you can cook it ahead (let it come to room temperature before putting it in the oven, otherwise you'll crack your dish).

Cauliflower gratin

One head of cauliflower
White sauce

breadcrumbs
a tin of anchovies
lemon zest
parsley

Break the cauliflower into pieces and cook covered in a minimum of water. Drain. Meanwhile make white sauce - I use olive oil and skimmed milk, which makes a wonderfully sweet scented sauce, infinitely more delicious than one made with butter. Put the cauliflower into an ovenproof dish - you want it to be a tight squeeze. Pour the sauce all over it.

Blitz a couple of slices of stale bread (this doesn't work well with supermarket slimy sliced). Add anchovies - just try a couple if you think you don't like them, I'm such an addict that I use a whole tin - and the parsley. Blitz again. Finely grate the zest of half a lemon into the mixture, which will be sticky with oil (and if it isn't, add some). Sprinkle over the dish, and bake in a hot oven, 200C for 20 minutes.


Related links

Cauliflower gratin
One veggie day a week will save the earth

Great big veg challenge on cauliflower
The Guardian "Meat-free March" links

Mount Athos pilaf rice

I was going to cook the Mount Athos pilaf rice yesterday, but discovered there were no eggs in the house. This recipe is subtly different from other rice and pea dishes, particularly in the treatment of the egg.

It comes from The Observer/Guardian's two-part booklet about the diet eaten by the Mount Athos monks, who, it's said, have very low rates of heart disease and cancers. The information in the booklets came from The Cuisine of Mount Athos, by Brother Epifanios, published in Greek by Synchroni Orizontes Publications. Judging from the interest I've had in these recipes, it's time for an English edition.

Peas with pilaf rice
for 8

1kg peas (frozen is fine)
200g rice
3 finely chopped onions
olive oil
an egg yolk

Blanch the peas. Leave in the colander. Gently fry the onions in olive oil in a large pan. Add the peas and rice. Stir. Cover with water (1:1.5). Add the egg yolk, salt and pepper, then turn up the heat until the mixture boils. Then simmer gently until the liquid has evaporated (about 15 minutes).

Related links

Mount Athos diet / chickpea patties
Chickpea patties from Mount Athos
Chickpea patties, an update
Chickpea mash
Nohutlu pilav
Houmous
A weblog about Mount Athos

Mount Athos chickpea patties, an update

First, a warm welcome to those of you who have found their way to this blog via a search for the Mount Athos diet. I hope that you will find other things of interest in this blog.

Quick update: I made the Mount Athos chickpea patties last night, the only change being that I found there was no garlic in the house (how could I let that happen??). If you are making them, I would suggest that you halve the flour, there's FAR too much, and it makes them heavy. Also the recipe doesn't specify what type of flour; I used white, which I rather think the monks don't.

Apart from that, they are DELICIOUS, lovely and green, flecked with gold on their crusty edges. I'll be posting the other recipes in the coming few days.

Related links

Mount Athos diet / chickpea patties
Chickpea mash
Nohutlu pilav

Mount Athos diet / chickpea patties

This weekend the papers were full of food: Delia's new book, full of so-what-? recipes, appeared in at least two. Out of the Guardian/Observer fell two little booklets about the food and diet of the monks at Mount Athos, "the world's healthiest people" - men who fast 200 days of the year, who eat a home-grown, home-made version of the Mediterranean diet, two meals a day, red wine for breakfast. Everyone stops eating when the bell rings - it's rung when the ringer judges the eating to have slowed down, so no-one eats too much (and visitors, it emerges, are likely not to eat enough, at least for the first couple of meals).

I don't like faddish diets, so I'm wary. Five recipes were given, taken from a book in Greek: artichokes with potatoes, peas with pilaf rice, chickpea patties, fish soup, and cuttlefish with rice. Good, wholesome, simple food, easily adaptable to a Western kitchen. Here's one, I haven't made it yet, but I don't want to lose it in the welter of paper here.

Chickpea patties
for 4-5

300g tinned chickpeas
3 cloves garlic
1 chopped onion
1 handful chopped flat-leaf parsley
1/2 tsp ground cumin seeds
100g flour
one beaten egg
olive oil for frying

The monks do this with a knife and a pestle, but we are going to use a Magimix. Blitz the chickpeas with the garlic, onion, parsley, cumin and flour. Pepper but probably not salt. Tip into a bowl and add the egg. Mix into a dough, then rest in the fridge for 10 minutes (more?).

Shape the patties; you want them to be quite thin. Heat the oil, and fry them gently - the heat needs to be low enough to be cooked inside before they brown.

Mmm

Related links

Chickpea mash
Nohutlu pilav

PS Despite an extensive search, I couldn't find these little booklets on the Observer website, but here's a link to an article by William Sitwell about Mount Athos itself.

Roasted red onions

An honest laborious countryman, with good bread, salt, and a little parsley, will make a contented meal with a roasted onion. John Evelyn 1620-1706

This morning the BBC news website carried a story about the good effects of eating onions, and it reminded me that it's a long time since we've eaten onions as a separate vegetable ... it's not something I think of in the summer. I thought I'd try a new method, using Skye Gingell's book A Year in my Kitchen.

I've read this book, and it's full of original ideas, good ones. Her restaurant at Petersham Nurseries is widely praised. I've been puzzled as to why this book hasn't had much impact, and now I know ... the recipes don't work. Or at least, this one didn't. It's the same old problem of catering cooks not being able to scale down to the domestic kitchen.

I rescued it, and it was delicious, but I'd do it differently next time. Here's the recipe as printed:


Roasted red onions

5 medium red onions, peeled
100g caster sugar
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
200 ml balsamic vinegar
50 ml extra virgin olive oil

Preheat the oven to 180C. Slice the onions into pinwheels, about 3mm thick, and spread out on a baking tray. Sprinkle with the sugar and a generous pinch each of salt and pepper. Pour over the balsamic vinegar and olive oil and mix together lightly with your hands. Roast in the oven for 30 minutes or so, turning them (with tongs or a wooden spoon) and basting half way through cooking. When the onions are ready, they should be deep purple in colour and glistening, tasting sweet and sharp at the same time.


















The trouble is that they're not cooked after 30 minutes. And there's too much liquid, which hasn't begun to reduce down. I gave mine nearly an hour, and even then I had to reduce the liquid hard for several minutes. Then it was delicious. Only there was far too much sugar. 50g max next time. Oh yes, and I realised after I'd got past the point of no return that I only had about 60ml balsamic vinegar, so I topped it up with some dry sherry. I can't think how black it would have been if I hadn't cut the vinegar.

Lucius liked this a lot, so I will tinker with it a little. And treat other recipes in Skye Gyngell's book with a great deal of caution.

Keeping it real: What the World Eats

This morning we're all worrying about the new report issued yesterday by the World Cancer Research Fund ... but we're the lucky ones, lucky enough to worry about what we're eating, rather than whether we're eating at all.

Peter Menzel's book, Hungry Planet, shows what the world eats: 30 families on 24 continents photographed with a week's worth of food. It's sobering: ... how little some people have to survive on ... how much the developed world depends on industrially processed food ... how much more appetising the Far / Middle Eastern and Sicilian diet looked than all the others ... & to see the global reach of the Coca Cola Corporation.
















I'm grateful to my new friend Joanna - yes, another one - at My Vegetable Blog for providing me with the link to Peter Menzel's work.

Quick oat loaf

I've been making a lot of soda bread recently, in fact I can't remember when I last bought a loaf of bread - if there's no bread in the house, I can have one on the table in less than an hour. Easier than a trip to the shops. But I can't help feeling that making bread without using yeast is cheating.

So I'm making a starter (because the last one died of neglect), and I'm trying this lazy loaf ... it's proving in the oven as I write this.

Quick oat loaf

200g rolled oats
325g spelt flour
2 tsp dried yeast (see update on this)
1 tsp Maldon salt
250 ml skimmed milk
250 ml water

Mix the dry ingredients, add the liquids. Stir to a porridge. Leave to soak for 20 minutes to soften the oats (don't bother if you're in a hurry).










Dollop into a large loaf tin and put it into your cold oven. Switch it on to 110C. After 45 minutes, turn it up to 180C and cook for an hour.











The method comes from Nigella Express, but I've changed the ingredients around so that it's bread, rather than a tea loaf. The oats and spelt make it a healthy and tasty alternative to a wheat loaf.

HotM 8: Baking

Baking, for those watching their cholesterol and seeking a heart-healthy diet, is a minefield. I am the sort of blogger who would enthusiastically join the Daring Bakers - but all that cooking we can't eat ... it seems a little crazy. All those eggs, all that butter. There's only so much bread you can eat.

In the three years since Lucius's heart attack, I've found delicious ways round lots of the problems - what to do instead of cheese, how to make delicious heart-healthy puds that feel indulgent - but I've never really cracked cake. Or biscuits. I bought by mail-order a book called Low-fat Baking by Linda Fraser. I've never cooked anything from it, or felt remotely tempted to do so. I nearly threw it out last month. Now, this October, I'm giving it one last chance. And I'm going to share the results with you.

You'll have realised by now that this post is a cry for help ... we're looking for heart-healthy baking recipes. That means NO butter and not much marge. Not many egg yolks. No cream. No cheese to speak of. Not a lot of oil, even if it is olive oil. You see the problem. Off the top of my head, we're down to meringues and macaroons. As we're all after a healthier lifestyle, and as SO many food bloggers like to bake, I feel sure that you've all got at least one delicious yet low-fat cake or biscuit recipe that you use in your kitchen ... you'd be doing me, and countless others, a huge favour if you'd share it.


I'm sure many of you know the "rules" by now, but here's a recap: all you have to do is to send me the link to your entry at joannacary AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk before 23 October, make a link to Joanna's Food and to the HotM blog as well if you like. I'll post the round up on both blogs. In order to keep the focus on heart health we ask you to consider this as a one-entry event, i.e. we prefer that you don't use your post for other events as well.

I'm really looking forward to reading all your recipes and tips ...

PS you CAN include bread in this if you want, but I think we might save that for another time ....

Butter-less pastry - & a fruit tart

This pastry is a revelation ... and, for those of you who think pastry can only be made with butter: this is a French recipe, a proper recipe. There are egg yolks and oil, so it's still not something to eat every day, but this is a real breakthrough for those who can no longer eat butter. And for those people who think that our low-cholesterol way of eating is somehow second best - this is really delicious and worth a try in its own right. Also, if you're not a natural pastry chef - and I never was - this is quick and easy, a definite improvement on bought shortcrust. All the virtues, then.

The recipe was discovered by clever Anna, in Geraldene Holt's French Country Kitchen, one of my most favourite of all cookery books. I've cooked and cooked from this book (but stupidly failed to spot this pastry), more than any other I own, I should think, and I've never been able to understand why Geraldene Holt isn't better known: she's at least as good as Jane Grigson, and considerably better than a whole host of well-regarded food writers. She writes out of real experience - in this book, her many years of summer living in France.

This recipe for shaken hot-water pastry comes from Mme Chalendar, who, GH notes, sells earthenware and stoneware kitchen pots in Lamastre.

225g flour
1 tbsp caster sugar (leave it out if you're making something savoury)
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
4 tbsp mild salad oil
1/2 beaten egg
3 tbsp hot water

Put all the ingredients into a lidded plastic box and shake it for at least a minute. When you take off the lid, you will find a lumpy mixture; form it into a ball with your hands, and roll it out on a floured surface. GH says this is enough for a 24cm tin, but I have made this a number of times, and find that it is enough for a larger tin, and rather too much for a 24cm tin, because the pastry is better when it is very thin. You can use this straight away, no need to rest it.

Plum tart


















If you are making a fruit tart, here's another trick, and I'm not sure if it come from Mme Chalendar or GH: mix 20g flour with 20g sugar and sprinkle it over the pastry base. Then add the stoned fruit halves (raw). The flour and sugar mix will effortlessly thicken the fruit juices to make a delicious sauce.

This tart needs 30-35 minutes in a moderate oven, 190C. When it's done, glaze the fruit with a little melted jam - I used the rose petal jelly I made last month, but anything would do, even a little sugar syrup if there's no jam in the house (especially if you have vanilla- or lavender-flavoured sugar). The first time we made this, we forgot all about glazing it in our excitement - it's the one in the photographs, so you can judge for yourself whether it's worth the bother, because glazing is fundamentally a cosmetic exercise. We didn't bother with the flour and sugar that first time, which was a mistake, as I think you can see in the photograph.

We ate this tart by candlelight in the garden. It's quick and easy, the sort of food you can cook ahead, either for a party or just because you feel like it.

This is my entry for this month's Heart of the Matter ... fruit and berries is the theme for September ... and Ilva at Lucullian Delights is hosting. The idea is to build a bank of heart-friendly recipes on the Heart of the Matter website, a resource for everyone to use, and one which would have been very useful to me in the days after my husband's heart attack. There's more information about how to submit here, and some guidance for those of you worried about heart-healthy eating.

HoTM 6: the very late round-up

Next time I'm away for a chunk of August, I'll get someone else to do the round-up - how can I have thought it would work? No, that wasn't it ... I just didn't think at all. And next time it's grilling, perhaps the round-up should be done by someone who can rely on a little summer sunshine, even in these times of weird weather. We haven't used our grill once this summer, and I'm not sure that we will now - my family is all in winter mode (I'm not), pulling on jerseys and muttering about open doors and windows. That's enough breast-beating ... there are some great recipes to try - and I have already promised to cook all of them as a kind of penance. Wrong word, of course, it will be my pleasure.










Katie at Thyme for Cooking has made wonderful Spanish roasted potatoes with allioli, a garlic sauce not unlike French aioli, only without eggs, which makes it perfect for HoTM. Katie also has a grilled chicken salad (and a photo of some very black sausages her husband cooked ...)












Gilli at So So Simple Food has a good trick to keep her Ultimate Chicken BBQ moist - soak it in brine for a couple of hours.










Chris was in the hairdresser flipping through the magazines when she got the inspiration for her wild mushroom linguine with grilled gazpacho sauce. You'll find details for cooking indoors or outdoors at Mele Cotte. She's also sent a recipe for grilled salmon with three vegetables.









Cookie Baker Lyn loves asking couples how they met. So you won't be surprised to hear that she calls her grilled seafood Happily Ever After Shrimp.










Sophie says that her Earthy fig, chicken and mushroom salad can be used as a basic formula for healthy grilling. She's a nutritionist, and often includes useful links in her posts at Mostly Eating.









Kalyn gets out her mortar and pestle to make the rub for her herb encrusted grilled salmon, which she says is one of the best-tasting salmon steaks she's cooked. As usual at Kalyn's Kitchen, there are full South Beach details for dieters, and plenty of links for further information.













Ilva, my co-host for Heart of the Matter, loves to grill, and has posted grilled sweet peppers with onion and thyme or peperoni grigliate con cipolle e timo. As always at Lucullian Delights, lovely clear flavours, and beautiful photographs.











The wet weather in England is no excuse: Swaha used her George Foreman grill indoors (in a heatwave) to make Rosemary-garlic-lime tilapia and Barbeque tofu. I'm not sure that my fishmonger stocks tilapia, but I'll definitely ask him. And Swaha discusses the concerns some people have with soy products.


So, lots of things for me to cook at the first sign of an Indian summer ... thanks for joining in, thanks for being so patient about the delayed round-up. And don't forget, September's HotM is fruit and berries ....

Blogging for positive change

I am extremely flattered and surprised to have been nominated by Amanda of Figs Olives Wine as a Blogger for Positive Global Change - it's a joint nomination with Ilva of Lucullian Delights, a pat on the back for Heart of the Matter, the blog we started together earlier this year.

The idea of Heart of the Matter is simple - each month, people contribute heart-healthy recipes on a theme - this month it's fish. That way, we build up a resource of delicious recipes for people with heart disease, people watching their cholesterol, people worried about their genetic inheritance. It's beginning to come together - and I know that it's something I would have found hugely helpful after my husband had a heart attack two years ago.

When I first began this blog, my ambition was modest - I wanted a means of keeping track of the food I was cooking (it was changing all the time, still is to some extent), and a means of sharing it with friends who saw the benefits the new diet were bringing to us, and wanted details. Gradually - does this sound familiar? - I turned into a blogger ... more frequent posts, more photographs, more engagement with the blogospere - and re-thinking a lot of my attitudes to food and the world at large.

I have come to see - I hope this doesn't sound pretentious or pompous - that what is sustainable personally is often sustainable globally ... the best example of this, the only one I am going to give now, is what happens when people decide to eat more vegetables. It's good for the individual - better heart-health, good protection from other diseases including cancer, more vitamins, huge feeling of well-being (bordering on smugness) if you grow even some of them yourself. Etcetera. And all this is good for the planet: it is fantastically wasteful to eat meat - vegetable matter has to be grown to feed to the animals before their protein can be fed to us. I'm not advocating that we all become vegetarian ... but eating more vegetables is a positive change in our diet AND a step in the right direction for the globe. And once you start thinking like that - well, the next thing I did was to start growing a few (really very few), and to stop buying any food that has been air-freighted (who wants to eat food with jet lag?).

I am a real beginner on this road. I started this blog in order to help me keep track of what I was learning. I have found that it is a useful tool in keeping me learning - I read other people's ideas, I think hard about what we're doing because I'm regularly explaining it.

Some of the very best blogs that have helped me on this journey have already been nominated for this meme ... but here, in random order, are five that are doing good work, that I hope you will find as interesting as I do:

1. The Cottage Smallholder, who no longer buys supermarket flowers. This may sound like a small change, but it's an increasing problem, as most are airfreighted, many from Kenya: it's something we'd do well to think about seriously. If you've got a garden, it can be done, just take a look at this lovely jug of flowers. If you haven't got a garden, well, you could try talking to the manager of your supermarket about how the flowers get there. Stumbling self-sufficiency is a small space - it's always an interesting read.

2. Mike's Allotment Diary has a wonderful address: surelythisisn'tinteresting. But it is, Mike, it is. The first time I visited, I laughed out loud at his title page: this diary is really for my own benefit as I can never remember when I've sown/dug/harvested anything and it always annoys me when Monty Don mentions that he harvested his first sweetcorn of the year 20 minutes earlier in 1976. The deeper I've got into blogging, the more I find I no longer need mainstream media for information - if you're new to veg growing and you don't have an allotment, Mike is the experienced gardener you need for useful tips and pointers. Who needs Monty Don? Can't remember the last time I watched Gardener's World.

3. David Hall at Book the Cook teaches children how to cook healthy food. He writes about that, and also about how he feeds his own young family. His blog is full of infectious enthusiasm and good recipes - check out this vegetarian Turlu Turlu, definitely a keeper. I'm always pleased when BtC is bold in my feed reader.

4. I'm amazed to find that no-one has yet nominated A Year in Bread ... this is a collaborative blog by three experienced bakers, Susan, Beth and Kevin. They take a topic each month, and post their own take on it, often contradictory, always interesting. Baking is soothing in itself (personally sustainable), and globally sustainable - less plastic bags, very likely less trips to the shops, almost certainly using flour from a more local source.

5. Janelle at Brown Bag Blues is full of ideas for healthy packed lunches - she's keen to educate children into eating well, using wit (I seem to remember an entirely pink day for her daughter) and sound nutrition. Although I don't have to make daily packed lunches, I've used lots of her ideas as a starting point for picnics, and indeed for meals in my kitchen.


Should they wish, nominees may now proudly display the BPGC badge on their blogs. If any nominees have someone in mind that they’d like to nominate in turn, just be sure to pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging.

The participation rules are simple:

1. When you get tagged, write a post with links to up to 5 blogs that you think are trying to change the world in a positive way.
2. In your post, make sure you link back to this post at Climate of our Future so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
3. Leave a comment or message for the bloggers you’re tagging, so they know they’re now part of the meme.
4. Optional: Proudly display the “Bloggers For Positive Global Change” award badge with a link to the post that you write up.

Healthy eating - a reminder

Here's a reminder about healthy eating ... it's easy to backslide, especially when you're busy. I'm not sure I've been so good about my five-a-day in the past week or so, what with all the huge quantities of food I've been cooking for hungry oarsmen, and my children working out the best way to cook roast potatoes.

Abby's absolutely right - the easiest way to improve your diet is to eat more vegetables and fruit. I'm not sure I could ever manage 17 a day, though!

One vegetarian day a week will save the earth, as well as your health

Today's the last day for entries to this month's Heart of the Matter ... the topic this time is vegetables, and I've already got lots of delicious recipes to share with you in the roundup. I'll start working on it tonight, and will post it tomorrow, so there'll probably be room for your submission even if it's a little late. All the details you need for submission are here.

Meanwhile, here's something interesting to spur you on ... going veggie one day a week will make a significant difference to the planet, as well as your health. This list of 10 reasons to go veggie one day a week comes from Wannaveg, a website I discovered this morning. It makes food for thought.

The top 10 reasons why adopting a vegetarian diet one day a week will make a difference. In a year you will…

* Save 84,000 gallons of water.

* Save 245 lbs of grain.

* Save 7,700 sq feet of rain forest. (That is equivalent to four good-sized houses.)

* Reduce your contribution to the over 10,000,000,000 animals slaughtered for food.

* Save 15.5 gallons of gasoline, good for one fill-up!

* Not contribute to over 403 lbs of manure produced by food animals.

* Reduce your contribution to over 24,000,000 pounds of antibiotics that are added to animal feed.

* Save 87 square feet of topsoil from erosion.

* Reduce your impact on our quickly-vanishing ocean life!

* Do not forget about your health! A vegetarian diet, even one day a week, will help reduce your risk of heart disease and cancer, and it may even help to drop a few pounds.

There are figures on the website to back up all these claims. It's often difficult to know how you can make any kind of difference ... this is worth thinking hard about, because it works in purely personal terms, as well as global ones, and there's no doubt we're all better at thinking about ourselves than the bigger picture!

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's slimming diet

I've just come in from the garden, where I was sitting in an arbour hung with scented roses as night fell. When it got too dark to read, I began to count the sounds I could hear - birds settling down for the night, the muffled roar of a distant motorbike, the last plane in the Heathrow stack, a blackbird (the only bird in the garden not in its nest) calling to his mate to share a titbit. The stars began to come out in the unclouded patches of sky. The cat jumped off my lap to start his night's hunting - time to come in.

I was reading Hugh Fearlessly Eats it All, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. I'm on the first chapter, a rant against the big and vested interests of the food industry. Some of it is funny, but overall it's a little tiring to read because of the strident tone. I was beginning to get slightly fed up with it, considering skipping to the next chapter, when I came across a rant against the Atkins Diet. It ended with Hugh's slimming diet. It's funny, it's healthy, and it's good advice. Here it is in full:

Hugh's anti-Atkins diet

This is principally a diet for energy and health, not weight loss, but serious fatties will probably find the kilos fall off. By rights I should earn billions for this, as it is guaranteed to keep you well-nourished and fit for the rest of your life. But here it is, gratis, from the goodness of my happy, healthy heart:

For breakfast

Eat a bunch of fresh fruit. Then, if you're still really hungry, have a piece of toast.

Mid-morning snack

Eat more fruit. Then, if you're still really hungry, have another piece of toast.

Lunch

Eat a bunch of veg. Raw if possible. If you're still hungry, have a sandwich (but not two), or a piece of chicken, or a lump of cheese (but not both). Eat with juice or water, not Coca Cola or Fanta.

Mid-afternoon

Have another piece of fruit. If it's a bad day, have a biscuit too.

Supper

Eat whatever the hell you like. If you're actually trying to lose weight, eat whatever the hell you like, but not too much of it.


It's very good advice, especially when added to the heart-healthy stuff about not too much saturated fat - limits on cheese, butter, meat, and, above all, processed food.

Heart of the Matter 4 - vegetables

Time to announce the fourth round of Heart of the Matter, and this month's theme is vegetables. They are the basis of the healthy eating pyramid. So just about the easiest thing you can do to help your heart's health is to eat more vegetables ... five a day, seven a day ... you know the drill! The trouble is, once you start to eat more veg, you can quickly get bored of them plain steamed / boiled - and, of course, for many people in the northern hemisphere, vegetables are often served smothered in butter, which is a definite no-no if you're at all concerned about your cholesterol.

So, we're looking for fresh ideas, new ways with vegetables - either as a side dish, or a main course. Lots of the so-called superfoods are vegetables. Quick and easy, or elaborate and sophisticated - you decide ... just so long as the result is heart-healthy. This is how my fellow HotM eventer Ilva at Lucullian Delights explained HotM last month:

If you feel uncertain about ingredients, check out Joanna's list here or the links here on the Heart of the Matter blog. Remember that you are doing yourself a great favour when you eat heart healthy food and if you participate in the HotM you do the whole community a favour because all the roundups are collected here at the HotM blog so that it in the end becomes a permanent recipe base to go when you need inspiration for your heart healthy cooking.


This time the roundup will be at Joanna's Food (as well as at Heart of the Matter of course) so please send the link to your entry to me joannacary AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk, the last day is 22nd June, please remember to link here and that we want only one-event entries.

Any thoughts?

Good news if you hate exercise ...

This is for all those people who hate gyms and exercise ... a mere 10 minutes' exercise a day has been found to benefit your heart.