Tag Archive for 'Breakfast'

Soup of The Day

Published
by
thetoad
on 9 April 2008
in Dieting, Food and Losing Weight
. 0 Comments

I really enjoyed both eating and cooking the wonderful curried cauliflower soup I made yesterday. For the curry powder I used the Tandoori Masala blend that I bought from www.seasonedpioneers.co.uk to make my Delia Smith curry that I created last week. The story of that fantastic curry is in an earlier entry. I think the curry powder used makes all the difference to the finished recipe.

What I love about homemade soups is that they have far more flavour than the ones you get out of tin, and with all the veggies you pack into them, you know you are getting your five-a-day and I have to say, you do feel very virtuous tucking into a bowl of homemade soup, knowing you have taken the trouble to make it, and that it has zero points or free on the core plan.

I am just simmering today’s soup. Going off what vegetables I have and what needed using, I had a cabbage that was looking like it wouldn’t last much longer in the fridge. So here’s the recipe for the soup I will be eating today.

Cabbage and Tomato Soup

1 cabbage
1 handful of spinach
3 onions, finely chopped
2 fat cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 inch piece fresh ginger, chopped finely (I used 2 teaspoons EPC very lazy Ginger)
Vegetable stock made up with boiling water and 2 knorr vegetable stock cubes
2 tins chopped tomatoes
2 tablespoons tomato puree
Fry Light Oil Spray

Spray a large non stick pan with Fry Light and add the finely chopped onion, garlic and ginger. I used the chopper attachment of my stick hand blender and gave it a quick blitz – Delia would be proud! But if you don’t have a mini chopper or chopper attachment, finely chopping it all is fine. Sweat the onion mixture for one minute over a moderate heat.

Add the chopped cabbage and combine with the onion mixture, following with your handful of spinach. Cook for a further two minutes.

Add the tinned tomatoes, tomato puree and enough of the vegetable stock to cover the mixture.

Allow the soup to simmer for 30 minutes. It will reduce down slightly and go all thick and tomatoey/cabbagey.

After 30 minutes, blitz with your stick hand blender until it reaches a smooth, or chunkier if preferred consistency.
I must add a very STRONG WARNING. Once the soup is blended and smooth, take extra special care when re-heating. It will SPIT. When re-heating a tomato based soup a couple of weeks ago I lifted the lid off to stir it and got a huge splatter of scalding hot tomato soup on my ring finger. It blistered so badly I couldn’t wear my engagement ring for over a week. Re-heat with caution and when stirring it, take it off the heat entirely which immediately stops it spitting.

The resulting soup is thick and filling with a wonderful rich tomato flavour with the gentle heat of the ginger in the background. This recipe makes enough for four large portions – if you are eating a zero point soup I think “fill your boots!”. Although if you were having a sandwich or crisp breads with it, you prefer a little less depending on your appetite.

So I have three more boxes of soup cooling ready to go in the freezer to join the three curried cauliflower punnets I put in yesterday. My aim is to get enough homemade zero pointed soups into the freezer so I can have a different flavour each day of the week, without having to cook from scratch!

Breakfast Update

I ate some breakfast on Monday, but neglected to yesterday as I was at my weigh in and by the time I’d got home and faffed about a bit, it was basically lunch time. My breakfast today is going to be some rhubarb yoghurt with oats stirred through it, as recommended by my good friend Kate.

This breakfast has protein in the yoghurt and slow release carbohydrate in the oats, so I think it is the perfect thing to keep me going until my bowl of soup at lunch time, whilst being totally scrummy at the same time!

The Great Breakfast Debate

Published
by
thetoad
on 7 April 2008
in Dieting, Food and Losing Weight
. 1 Comment

Years ago, possibly ten or more, a magazine recommended a book that you could only get in America; it was called simply ‘The Skinny’ “What every skinny knows about dieting but won’t tell you”. I HAD to have it. I managed to get it from Amazon and when it arrived I could not put it down until I had read it.

To write the book the authors had conducted a series of “skinny lunches”, inviting skinny women to lunch to find out what exercise they did and what they generally ate to stay slim. Each chapter of the book, there are lots of them and all fairly short and includes funny topics such as “What to do if you accidentally drink a full fat coke instead of diet coke” how much weight you can expect to lose or gain depending on life events – moving house, a divorce etc. As well as comprehensive calorie lists for fast food restaurant foods. One chapter was entitled “Breakfast”.

I was brought up on breakfast before school. No matter if I couldn’t really face it or want it, I had to eat a bowl of cereal before school. We were never allowed the sugary fun cereals that were always on TV when I was watching kids television. The most exciting it got was rice krispies! I had some kind of belief that bad things would happen if I didn’t eat my breakfast.

Then I started my famous “breakfast/tea diet” which I have written about in an earlier post, and I always began my day of starvation with a large bowl of cereal. During this time cereal was a bit of an obsession. I’d spend ages wandering up and down the cereal aisles, checking the fat content of any that I hadn’t tried before and fancied. It was just about the only food I could eat without guilt, without measuring out, just enjoying it.

Then I read ‘The Skinny’ which explained that there are no proven benefits to eating breakfast. The people who think if they don’t eat breakfast they will faint by 10am have probably never skipped breakfast to see if this was true. That not eating breakfast saved loads of calories that you could spend later when you were actually hungry and on something more worthwhile than a bowl of cardboard tasting cereal. This seemed to sink in with me, so when I stopped the “breakfast/tea diet” and followed a more calorie controlled Weight Watchers style of diet, if I could get away with skipping breakfast then I did. Firmly believing what I’d read in the ‘The Skinny’; that I was saving calories, it was an unnecessary meal. I was rarely hungry first thing in the morning so it wasn’t hard.

I did lose some weight following this method of not eating breakfast. But I was being very careful of what I did eat during the day. And the summer of my Atkins style of eating I never ate breakfast, but then I was not eating very much during the day and for my evening meal either. So what impact not eating breakfast had on my diet and weight loss at that time can’t really be gauged.

But since reading the book and going through a long phase of not eating breakfast it is a meal that I always struggle to eat, thinking I am saving myself calories by not eating it.

However, more recently people like Ian Marber, The Food Doctor, sometimes seen on Richard and Judy, advocates eating breakfast as part of his “10 Principles” for losing weight. It’s just that I never really feel hungry in the morning, but then having read through the CORE Plan in my Weight Watchers book I am thinking that maybe I think feeling hungry is feeling absolutely RAVENOUS, starving hungry, which is not the correct hunger to feel. The hunger scale makes for interesting reading; and in fact the more I read about Core and seeing the results that you can get from people in my Weight Watchers meeting, I am wondering whether trying a week on core would be worth a trial?

So this week I am going to make sure, as much as possible, that I eat my breakfast within an hour of waking up and see if that has any effect on my metabolism and weight loss. Has anyone else noticed whether eating breakfast or not eating this “most important meal of the day” has had any effect on their weight?