Fragrant Herb and Coconut Chicken Soup (AIP, Paleo Friendly)

Soothing, comforting and fragrant – this is one of my favourite soups. It’s suitable for the auto immune protocol and Paleo diets, as well as being gluten-free to boot. It’s inspired by the flavours of Thai green curries. Except, true to AIP form, there are no chillies in it (add some though if you’re not watching your nightshades). 

The ‘noodles’ are actually strips of courgette sliced using a swivel-headed vegetable peeler and the natural fats in the coconut milk, along with the protein in the chicken will keep you full. It’s a blustery autumn day as I write this, just the weather for a refreshing and bolstering soup like this. 

Fragrant Herb and Coconut Chicken Soup

Serves 3-4

Ingredients

For the paste: 

2 slices lemongrass stalks

2 fat garlic cloves

1cm slice ginger, peeled

3 spring onions, washed and trimmed

small handful coriander (use the stalks for the paste)

juice of half a lime

handful basil, stalks and all

good pinch of salt

For the soup:

2 ladlefuls of home-made chicken stock

400ml can coconut milk

1 tsp coconut oil 

4 large chestnut mushrooms, sliced

big handful leftover roasted shredded chicken

1 courgette, top and tailed and sliced into strips using a vegetable peeler

Method

Blitz the ingredients for the paste in a food processor, saving the coriander leaves for scattering over after cooking the soup. 

Melt the 1 tsp coconut oil in a medium-sized saucepan and fry the paste for a couple of minutes until sizzling and aromatic. Pour in the chicken stock and the coconut milk and bring to a simmer, stirring to incorporate all the herbs and spices. 

Once the soup base is simmering nicely, add the cooked chicken, mushrooms and courgette strips and continue to cook for another 5 minutes, until everything is warmed through and hot throughout. Taste, and season with more salt if needed. 

Serve in bowls, with the coriander leaves scattered over and a wedge of lime. 

This recipe has been entered into the AIP Recipe Roundup at Phoenix Helix. For more AIP recipes go and check the other entries out. 

Oh for the Love of Provoleta

For ages, I thought that Provoleta was just Provolone marinated in herbs and then grilled. And then I found out I’d got it completely wrong. Provoleta is actually a trademarked cheese, which derives from Provolone, but something happens in the manufacturing process to make it tougher and more at home on the smoking hot grill.

My sister-in-law cooked us Provoleta in Argentina and it was delicious.

It’s served as a starter in Argentina, often before they get going on the meat-laden asado – with bread alongside or sometimes it’s grilled on top of bread, like a more glamorous cheese on toast. It’s sliced and then sprinkled with oregano and sometimes a mild chilli powder or chilli/red pepper flakes. And once it’s set down in front of you, you’d better crack on, because it’s just not the same when it’s cooled. It starts to go from stringy and soft to rubber-like in just 30 seconds after serving.

The herbed cheese is griddled or barbecued straight on the bars of the grill for just a couple of minutes each side (rub with oil so it doesn’t stick though), which gives it a dark, chewy crust while it stays creamy and soft on the inside. You don’t want to overdo it, or you’ll end up with cheese spilling out everywhere, and through the bars of your grill, too. Flip it when the underside has just browned and you won’t go far wrong.

Great served with a salad dressed sharply with balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil, and some crusty bread. If you’re after some, I get mine online, from Pampas Plains.

Sweet Pea Pantry Baking Packs

If you haven’t heard of Sweet Pea Pantry, it’s a company with the aim of getting kids in the kitchen making things like pizza, biscuits and pancakes – they include all of the dry ingredients, pre-measured out. You just add eggs, butter, water or whatever else is needed. 

Probably the main thing about the mixes is that the recipes have a healthy twist – the oat cookies come with quinoa, the pizza dough contains sesame and oregano and gingerbread biscuits have flaxseeds, wholegrain rye and barley in them. I was asked if I’d like to try out a couple of their products and I agreed. 

In the week they dropped through the letterbox, my eight-year old was at a friend’s for tea, so I took the opportunity to keep the five-year old busy by making dinner. We set to work on the Playful Pizza Dough. We tipped the flour mix into a bowl and added the combined water, oil and yeast mixture, mixing and kneading until ready. At first, she wasn’t happy about getting her hands sticky but after a while she was kneading and mixing and loving it. We covered the dough with cling film and left it to rise for an hour. 

While that was rising we got on with the Super Oat Cookies. Again, everything was pre-measured – all we had to do tip it into a bowl and stir in melted butter to form a flap-jack type mixture, pressing it into little cookies and placing them on a lined baking sheet. There was a generous amount of raisins and I could make out the quinoa in the mix too. Once they were baked we tried a couple each. It was good to see her tucking into cookies that were actually good for her. Quinoa is rich in protein and oats are thought to be good for many things, such as regulating cholesterol and aiding digestion.  

I know you can buy ‘ready to bake’ mixtures from the supermarket, but part of the Sweetpea Pantry ethos is that they use ingredients that aren’t refined or overly-processed. Read the labels of these mixes and you see demerara sugar, wholemeal flour and plain, rolled oats. No flavour-enhancers, colourings or hydrogenated this and that.

Proud to have made dinner, we tucked into the pizza together –  we’d added some olives and Parma ham we happened to have in the fridge, too. It was difficult for all of us to resist the cookies, and she took one in her packed lunch the next day, telling everyone she’d made them. 

I know that you don’t need packet mixes to get kids in the kitchen – in fact all that weighing and measuring out does help them with maths and volume too – but I can’t deny they were much easier to use and quicker than cooking from scratch. Quite often I’ll plan to bake something with my children and turn around to find they’ve become fed up half-way through weighing ingredients and flicked the telly on. If you’re after something quick, and are concerned about the nutrition levels in pre-packed baking mixes, these would be a good alternative. 

For more information check out the Sweetpea Pantry website.  

The World’s Most Expensive Cupcake… But It’ll Set You Back £768

It seems that, even in times of austerity, there’s always someone who’s willing to make a hugely expensive version of an everyday food. We’ve had the doner kebab (£750), a meat pie (£1,000 per slice) and sushi (£1,714 per serving). And now, it’s the turn of the cupcake, a snitch at £768.85. 

Have a look at this: 

If gold dragees and foil cases aren’t quite your idea of cupcake bling then you’re in luck. This cupcake was created for TV channel Food Network, and if you’re lucky enough to bite into it (we can all dream) it has a chocolate centre, encased in a peach and champagne jam and the buttercream is infused with Chateau Yquem wine. I’m not sure which year the wine was from that was used in the cake, but to put it in perspective, a bottle of 2009 Chateau Yquem would set you back around £640. 

The cake was then topped with Charbonnel et Walker chocolate fondant. As if that wasn’t enough it was then wrapped in 24-carat edible gold leaf. 

What do you reckon? Creative? Insane? Potentially rather delicious? Let me know in the comments below…

Roasted Pork Chops with Sticky Bramley Apple Chunks

Have a look at the picture below. Those things next to that glistening pork chop aren’t potatoes – they’re APPLES. Nice, eh? 

Pork and apple is such a classic combination, but instead of a dollop of apple sauce, it makes a nice change to roast the apple slices along with the pork so they pick up all of the flavour and turn soft and sticky. It doesn’t take long to make, either – a quick sear on the griddle and then in the oven for 15 minutes. Perfect for a Sunday night, if you don’t feel like cooking a whole roast, too. 

Roasted Pork Chops with Sticky Bramley Apple Slices

Serves 2.

Ingredients

2 large, thick-cut pork chops

2 Bramley apples, peeled and cored

half a teaspoon duck fat or olive oil

Method

Heat the oven up to 180ºC and slice your peeled and cored Bramleys. Arrange them, in one layer, onto a shallow roasting tray and slide into the oven to start cooking. 

Next, melt the fat (or oil) in a cast iron griddle pan, on a medium heat. Once hot, sear the pork chops for a couple of minutes on each side – don’t move it about, just let it sit there. Turn once, with tongs. Once the chops are seared on both sides, lay them over the top of the apples on your roasting tray and return the whole thing to the oven, seasoning with a little salt. 

Roast for about 15 minutes, or until the pork chops are cooked all the way through (cut into one to be safe). Serve with the apples and some veggies alongside. Perfect Sunday night tea.

Home Made Cupcakes vs Shop Bought Packet Mix

Whether we admit it or not, most of us at some point have done it – reached for a supermarket packet mix to whip up a load of cupcakes quickly and easily. You just dump the powdery contents of the packet into a bowl, crack in a couple of eggs, a slosh of milk (or water) and mix before baking. No creaming of butter and sugar – no worrying about taking the butter out of the fridge to get it to room temperature first. No making sure the butter and sugar are at the ‘pale and fluffy’ stage before cracking in the eggs. There’s no denying it’s a lot simpler. But what’s really the difference?

I made some cupcakes and then baked a packet mix (both vanilla-flavoured, I like to keep things fair, you know) to see what the difference was. Here’s what I found.

The packet mix cakes are puffier

The cupcake on the right is home-made, the one on the left is from a packet mix. On reading the label, I noticed there are a fair few extra ‘raising agents’ listed on the packet as opposed to my home-made cakes with its 1 teaspoonful of baking powder. Three, in fact: potassium bicarbonate, calcium phosphate and sodium hydrogen carbonate. But puffy cupcakes aren’t always what you need. Quite often when you’re piping buttercream roses or want to put on some fondant icing you need a flat surface to work on, so end up chiselling the domed part off the cupcake anyway. But then with butterfly cupcakes you need that bit to cut off to make the butterfly ‘wings’.

VERDICT: The height of your cakes depends on how you’re decorating them, so I declare round one a draw.

The packet mix cakes are lower in fat – but higher in sugar
Well, the home-made cakes do have half a block of butter in them. And with the packet-mix people substituting this for palm and rapeseed oils, which we know are lower in saturated fats, it wasn’t going to be a huge surprise. The packet mix contains 3.2g fat per cupcake (1.5g of which are saturates) and the home-made cakes each contain 9.3g fat (5.7 of which saturates). But each packet-mix cupcake contains almost 3g more sugar than the home-made ones (packet mix: 13.4g sugar/home-made: 10.6g sugar). At least by making them yourself, you can alter the sugar – you could even add less than the 125g specified in the recipe. I’ve used 100g sugar before and it’s been fine. 

VERDICT: A close one, as there are arguments for each – but just because I consider cupcakes a treat and not for everyday I would want the ingredients to be as natural as possible and you do get to control the amount (and types) of sugar you use. So I go for home-made to win this one. 

Taste: home-made cakes taste buttery
You could taste the butter in the home-made cupcakes. And the vanilla. They had a lovely golden crust on the top, which added a deeper flavour. But for me, the packet mix cupcakes just tasted sweet. They didn’t seem to have a ‘cakey’ flavour of their own, and they weren’t as vanilla-flavoured as the home-made ones, either. They cooked to a pale magnolia colour. And on the packet mix, the flavouring is described as just that: ‘flavouring’ – even if it’s derived from natural sources, it would be nice to know what it is.  

   VERDICT: Taste-wise, the home-made cakes win, hands down. 

Home-made cakes are more crumbly

packet mix cake

Home-made cake

A weird thing with the packet mix cakes: they’re bouncy and spongy, but when you bite into them they don’t crumble. They kind of keep their shape and have an oily, slightly rubbery texture – not surprising when you see from the label that they contain quite a bit of oil. It’s the same when you buy cheap white mass-produced bread – it sticks to the roof of your mouth, while artisan or home-baked bread doesn’t. Why IS that? 

VERDICT: Home-made cakes win. I like a crumbly cake, not a chewy one.

Ingredients:
Home-Made: salted butter, caster sugar, eggs, wheat flour, baking powder, milk, vanilla extract. 

Packet-mix: Wheat flour, sugar, palm oil, raising agents: potassium bicarbonate, calcium phosphate, sodium hydrogen carbonate; rapeseed oil, flavouring. Plus the eggs and milk you add yourself.

VERDICT: Does a cupcake really need three different types of raising agents? Plus what are the ‘flavourings’? I think it should be more specific. Home-made wins. You know what’s going into it. 

Cost:
Home-made cost for 12 cupcakes: £1.50
Packet Mix for 12 cupcakes (including the egg and milk you add yourself): £1.95.

VERDICT: Home-made are cheaper. 


Do you use packet mixes to bake with? What are your experiences with them? And do you notice any differences between these and home-baked?

Roasted Queen Squash with Sage

It’s funny really, when you think that we tend to rely on huge amounts of starch to go alongside our food. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing more soothing than a buttery pile of soft mashed potato or a plate of Carbonara, but if you have it all the time it’s nice to make a change.  

Lately I’ve been mixing it up a bit, roasting and mashing squash as an alternative to potatoes. It still fills you up, but is also soft and sweet and adds colour to your dinner. 

And there’s no better time to try it, as shops start to stock all these lovely squash in the autumn – pumpkins, butternut, marrows and also this one – Queen Squash. I’ve roasted it in a little duck fat (but you could use olive oil if you like) with sage leaves, which turn crispy in the oven. Great with roast chicken and veggies, or stirred into a risotto. 

Roasted Queen Squash with Sage

Serves 4

Ingredients

1 Queen squash, peeled, seeded and cut into chunks about 3-4cm wide

1 teaspoon duck fat (or olive oil if you prefer)

salt

handful of fresh sage leaves

Method

Get your oven heated up to 200ºC. Tip the prepared squash chunks onto a large, shallow roasting tray and toss with the duck fat or olive oil (I find it’s best here to use your hands). Sprinkle with a good pinch of salt and scatter over the sage leaves, tucking some of them inbetween the chunks of squash. Roast for 35 minutes, giving the squash a shake a couple of times during cooking. 

I’ve added this recipe to the Tuesday’s Table link up on the Love in the Kitchen blog. 

London Fashion Through the Decades at The Cake and Bake Show 2013

Probably the main reason I love going to the Cake and Bake Show in Earl’s Court each year is to see all the amazing cake exhibitions. It makes you realise that cakes are so much more than a cherry-topped cupcake, or a shiny, ganached chocolate number. Every time I go, the talent and creativity of UK cake designers always inspires me.

And this year, the Cake and Bake Show opened alongside London Fashion Week. It was probably no coincidence then, that one of the main attractions of the show was the Cake Catwalk Competition sponsored by Stork. Cake designers were invited to submit their ideas and interpretations of the London fashion scene, past and present, in CAKE. Here are a few of my favourites…

This cake, by Sylvia Barthes, is inspired by the Edwardian era and the inspiration for the topper comes from the English actress and singer Lily Elsie. 

This cake was created by Silvia Ruggiero and is inspired by 1920s fashion.

Rufaro Matsinde created this cake, inspired by the late 1920s evening dress – the top tier is indicative of evening headgear of the time. 

This cake won the professional category on the day – it reflects a ‘fashion mad girl’s bedroom’, complete with Philip Treacy hat and Vivienne Westwood shoes.

 

One of my favourites, a beautiful cake inspired by The Great Gatsby and created by Julia Emmett.

 

This fun and vibrant 1980s and Vivienne Westwood inspired cake was created by Jo and Erica Quincey.

 

Steampunk originates from the fashion of Victorian Britain, and here, cake designer Heather Bicknell has included some lighter colours and softer detailing to make it look more contemporary. Another of my favourites. 

 

A 1970s-inspired cake by Veronica Rondon, complete with platform shoes and floppy hat. 

Ella Harvey’s beautifully decorated cake was another one inspired by 1920s ‘flapper’ fashion. The 1920s looks set to be a key trend for the coming months in cake design. 

A modern cake design by Asmara Hanna, showing fashion from East London and ‘juxtaposing casual garments with ostentatious accessories.’

A 1950s-inspired cake by Aggy Dadan. The idea for the cake came from the ‘full, frothy skirts with tight belts’ from the rock ‘n’ roll and pinup years.

 

 

Did you go along to the show? Which of these cakes – or any others you saw – do you like the best? 

 

Because Sometimes It’s Good to Chat

Don’t you ever read blogs and wish you knew a little bit more about the person that wrote them? I do. And when I noticed a ‘chatty’ blog post by the brilliant Monique at Ambitious Kitchen I wanted to do one just like it. Want to know more about me? Here ya go…. 

I like food (but you already knew that I guess).

Especially burritos from Mission Burrito… I most often choose carnitas (pork) with rice, pinto beans, lettuce, guacamole, sour cream, cheese, pico de gallo salsa and then a mild salsa verde. I can’t eat one without slathering it in Cholula hot sauce though, and I most often skip the wrap and have it as a salad, like this one I made at home… (this one’s slow-cooked chicken)…

But I love it at Mission Burrito. 

I have two children who, along with my husband, are my taste-testers – they try everything I cook and we all decide how delicious it is and if I could do something else to make it more delicious. Then I make it again with the changes. I think they’re doing me a favour but sometimes I reckon it’s the other way round. 

Sometimes my five-year old closes her eyes and pretends to faint when she tries something she really loves. My eight-year old is now too cool for that. She just grins at me (usually with chocolate between her teeth) and asks for another one… 

I do yoga. Most often hot yoga, which you do in a big room with mirrors and heated to 42 degrees celsius. The heat is supposed to help you bend and get in all the positions properly. I love it, and go (when I can) 2-3 times a week. The rest of the time I practice at home. Namaste, people.



And I am trying to eat healthily. 

Yeah I know, there was this. 

And then this: 

 
But I am. 

Honest. 

You can’t go through life just eating processed food, cheese and doughnuts. At some point you’ve got to think about what you’re eating and how it’s affecting your body. My aim is to come up with good comforting food that anyone can enjoy on any diet or with any dietary requirements. 

Over to you – tell me about yourself – what do you enjoy? What foods do you love? 

Ginger Chicken with Courgette ‘Noodles’ – Auto Immune Friendly, Paleo, Gluten and Dairy Free

On the Auto Immune Protocol, it’s sometimes tricky to find something you can eat that’s delicious, comforting and isn’t going to send your immune system into overload. And so much of the food needs a lot of preparation and long cooking too (bone broths, stews, slow-cooking). But have a look at this…

Nice, eh? 

It’s healthy, colourful and took just about 5 minutes to knock together. A perfect lunch or dinner and great for anyone on the AIP or Paleo diets. The ‘noodles’ are just yellow and green courgettes that have been sliced with a veggie peeler and stir-fried gently until soft. The ginger freshens up the whole dish, and it’s also a potent anti-inflammatory.  

Ginger Chicken with Courgette ‘Noodles’

Serves 1. 

Ingredients

half a teaspoon duck fat 

1 free-range or organic chicken breast, skin and bones removed and chopped into bite-sized pieces

1 thick slice of ginger, peeled and chopped into small cubes

1 fat garlic clove, peeled and chopped

2 spring onions, peeled and sliced

2 courgettes, washed

salt

Method

Melt half of the duck fat in a medium-sized frying pan. Top and tail the courgettes and then slice using a vegetable peeler to create long, ribbon-like courgette ‘noodles’. Fry on a low heat, stirring often, until softened. Season with a pinch of salt. 

Melt the remaining duck fat in a smallish frying pan and stir-fry the chicken until almost cooked. Throw in the ginger, garlic and spring onion and continue to stir-fry for a minute or too. Cut into a piece of chicken to make sure it’s cooked though, if not, cook for a few minutes longer and check again. Season with a little salt. 

Arrange the courgette ribbons onto a plate and serve the gingery chicken on top. Eat hot. 

Nutella Brownies

My girls go crazy for Nutella. They have it in their porridge, on toast and between slices of bread. I’ve even made them a milkshake using the stuff (coming soon, don’t you worry)… 

And, while searching online, I found out that you can make BROWNIES with it. 

I made the Nutella Brownies from the Look What I Made website, and I was a bit underwhelmed. They came out very thin, like a cakey biscuit because I’d used a 25cm x 25cm baking tray. So I altered some of the ingredients, worked out different quantities and decided to add hazelnuts on top for some crunch, and started again. 

They were delicious. But as you can see, I left them in the oven a bit too long – next time I’ll take them out after 20 minutes, so they’re still nice and fudgy. Anyway, I couldn’t wait until then to show them to you. 

These were quickly polished off at a family picnic the other weekend – I hope you like them. 

Nutella Brownies
Makes about 20 squares
Ingredients
430g Nutella
3 eggs
100g plain flour
pinch of salt
handful chopped, roasted hazelnuts (leave out if you’re serving very young children). 

Method
Scoop the Nutella out and drop into a mixing bowl. Crack in the eggs and beat well, so you get a runny liquid. Sift in the flour and the salt and mix well. You should have something that resembles a standard brownie mixture. 

Pour into a lined 25 x 25cm baking tray and scatter over the chopped hazelnuts if you’re using them. Bake at 175ºC for around 20 minutes (or 30 minutes for cakey brownies like mine, if you prefer). The brownie will be nicely cracked and glossy on top. Allow to cool and cut into squares. 

Like these? Which are your favourite Nutella recipes? 

Why a Vegetarian Diet Might Not Be for Everyone

I stared at the doctor. And she stared back at me. It was awkward.

‘Keep a food diary’, she eventually piped up. But I struggled to understand how this could be diet related. 

I’d decided, five months earlier, to go vegetarian, as I’d heard enough in the media about how bad red meat was for you, and how everything from salmon to bacon could give you cancer. I decided to avoid eating meat and fish for a while and just concentrate on eating wholegrains, brown rice, nuts, seeds, beans, dairy and loads of veggies. I was doing everything the experts had told me (through the news) that I should. So why had my health suddenly taken a turn for the worst? 

Does this look good? Well then you might be a ‘protein type’… 

Here I was, complaining of indigestion, heartburn, tiredness and an unpredictable and often very painful tummy. My psoriasis patches were raging: red, itchy and burning. I was hungry all the time, and bloated. In the end, I was put on stomach acid-reducing tablets, given strong steroid cream for my skin and sent off to have a blood test for a stomach ulcer. It came back negative. 

The Meat Fix by John Nicholson (Amazon link)

‘Maybe you’re not eating enough protein’, my vegetarian Mum advised on the phone one day. ‘Eat more soya, that’s got protein in it.’ She lives on the stuff, with her Quorn fillets and pretend scampi. Desperate, and by now quite ill, I did, along with the nuts, seeds and cheese I was already eating. But everything just got worse. I’d lost a lot of weight, was constantly moody and the tablets didn’t seem to be working, as my heartburn and indigestion raged on.

In the library, the spine of an orange-coloured book stood out from all the others on the shelf. It was called ‘The Meat Fix: How a Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me’, written by John Nicholson. I had to read it. I was so gripped that I finished it in two days. It told the story of a man who had been vegetarian for 26 years. He’d suffered from similar symptoms to mine and just put it down to age, stress or other lifestyle factors, until the day he ate meat again. 

He says: 

‘After eating I felt elated. I felt very strongly that the steak was really good for me; that it suited me; that it was feeding me properly… it was an entirely new sensation and, I must reiterate, it was a profound one.’ 

He talks about how he has more energy, sleeps better and feels more satisfied after eating, needing to eat less and actually losing weight. All the health problems, which he’d put up with for all those years, vanished almost overnight.

I did some searching online, and found other similar stories. Lots of them. Kids that were poorly and underweight on vegan diets, similar stories of constant heartburn affecting decades-long vegetarians – even Angelina Jolie stated once that a vegan diet nearly killed her. 

Acting on Ang’s advice that ‘a steak is her beauty secret’ I tucked into my first piece of flesh (roast chicken) in almost half a year. So can a vegetarian or vegan diet really be followed by everyone? Dr Mercola thinks not. He reckons that people are all different, and we all need different ratios of things like animal protein, veggies and wholegrains. Apparently Ang is clearly a ‘protein type’ and thrives as an omnivore. They also note, reassuringly, that ‘there is no one diet that works for everyone’. Phew. After I started eating meat again, my tummy problems cleared up, I seem to be more focused and generally happier. I eat far fewer carbs than I used to, and my psoriasis is fading a bit, too. 

But, unlike Dr Mercola, the doctors I saw didn’t seem to want to acknowledge our biological differences. Some of us don’t react well to a vegetarian diet, obviously, although the advice is dished out as if suitable for everyone. 

My Mum, a vegetarian for decades, gets on great, and has often told me she believes humans were never designed to eat meat, picking on berries and snacking on root veggies. After reading up about the Paleo diet, I have other ideas. But hats off to her, she’s been vegetarian for decades, and she’s fine.

To all you vegetarians and vegans who get on fine with your diets, I salute you. I really do. I wish I’d managed it. You do feel lighter and less stodgy as a vegetarian. But if you’ve tried a vegetarian or vegan diet and subsequently develop some health problems like I did, consider your diet, and have a chat with your doctor. Maybe you just need a different ratio of foods. We’re all different, after all…

Do you think it’s possible that some of us just aren’t cut out for vegetarian diets? Let me know what you think…

Infographic – The Best Foods for Body and Brain

If, like me, you’re interested in the link between food and the brain – or if you just like infographics – you might like this illustration posted by the website TheBestColleges.org They’ve come up with a handy guide for students to find out which foods help alleviate stress, ensure a good night’s sleep and help you focus when studying. 

Interesting, right? 




If you know someone heading off to uni or college this year, do share, or check it out at its original source: The Best Foods for Body and Brain. 

A Review – Walker’s Mighty Lights Crisps

Walkers couldn’t have timed the release of their latest crisp more perfectly – just in time for the kids going back to school in September, with parents all over the country furrowing their brows over what to put in packed lunches. 

They sent me a packet of each flavour for us to try. The new Mighty Lights crisp comes in the following flavours: cheese and onion, lightly salted and roast chicken. They’re ridged, which makes them feel a bit more like a ‘grown up’ crisp – no puffy shapes here, just proper big, crunchy crisps. 

The girls ripped open the packets and quickly decided that the roast chicken flavour was their favourite, followed by the cheese and onion. The flavours are bold and natural-tasting, without being too strong. The lightly salted flavour was just that – it didn’t taste too salty, which is great as salt levels are often a worry for parents, especially when you add up what’s in the rest of the lunchbox such as ham, bread, cheese and olives etc. 

Personally, I don’t drop a packet of crisps in the girls’ lunchboxes every day – maybe once or twice in a week – but they did like these and I’d consider them for their ‘crisp’ days. Walkers say they have 30% less fat than standard crisps, no artificial colours or preservatives and no MSG. You can pick them up at the shops for £1.79 for a pack of 6. 

Have you tried Walkers Mighty Lights crisps? What do you think of them? 

GIveaway: Win a Copy of CRUSSH

You may remember that I recently went all smoothie-mad, blending up all manner of fruits and veggies and waffling on about chia seeds and enzymes. This is mostly due to the book Crussh, written by the people from the smoothie bar of the same name. And the lovely people at Duncan Baird Publishers have given me a copy to give away to one of you! (yes, you).

Have a look at my review of Crussh – I reviewed the Kindle version, but the hardback book is full of lovely photography, recipes and information on juices, smoothies and boosters and which ingredients will best benefit your health.

To enter, click the Rafflecopter icon below. Good Luck!

Rules
1. I have one hard-back copy of Crussh to give away to one reader, chosen at random via Rafflecopter.
2. You must click on the Rafflecopter widget below to register your entry – just leaving a comment on the blog post or ‘liking’ on Facebook won’t get you an entry by itself. There are extra entries available, see the widget below.
3. This giveaway is open to readers in the UK and the book will be posted to the UK Mainland only.
4. All entries must be registered by midnight (UK time) on 17th September 2013. 



a Rafflecopter giveaway