Get these:
500g fresh wholewheat spaghetti (enough for five people; I’d make the sauce for five, and refrigerate what I didn’t use in one sitting)
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 tin anchovy fillets in olive oil
1-2 fat cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 400g tins of chopped tomatoes
A pinch of salt
3 tablespoons of capers (I like them whole but you could chop them)
8-10 black olives, chopped
Half a teaspoon of dried oregano
Get these:
50g oats or oatmeal - I really like jumbo rolled oats, but whatever you want is fine, ok?
300ml milk - skimmed, semiskimmed or (OMG!!1!1!) whole - which, by the way, is still a low-fat food and not a dirty word.
1 heaped teaspoon of peanut butter - smooth OR crunchy or maybe like a completely different nut butter altogether?
1 flat tsp golden caster sugar, or to taste.
Then do this:
You know what I really hate? I hate those stupid fad diets where some lollypop-headed wizened strip of beef jerky masquerading as a health professional tries to persuade you that you can learn to eat nothing but lean meat poached in water and steamed vegetables forever. I hate that. I HATE it. Eating well should be about eating well in every sense. If you’re dieting, it’s really important that you eat healthy, satisfying, tasty food that fills you up and doesn’t leave you feeling like, well, a strip of beef jerky living on adzuki beans and lean meat poached in water.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot to be said for lean meat and veggies. I don’t believe in cutting out carbs altogether because it is stupid and bad for you, but for some reason I’ve fallen into the habit of eating carbs at breakfast and lunch and keeping my suppers relatively carb-free. Or rather, potato or bread or rice. Starchy carbs, I suppose. Except veggies are carbs and don’t they have starch in them? WHATEVER LOOK I AM NOT A FOOD SCIENTIST OKAY.
Anyway, that works for me. But honestly. You do not have to spend the rest of your life eating chicken poached in water. You are allowed to eat meat that tastes good and it’s really easy. So let us tiptoe behind the “read more” tag, Dear Reader, and I shall whisper the recipe in your ear.
Lunch is tricky if you work away from home. It’s a difficult meal anyway, to be honest - I never really know what to have or how much to have. Where I work, there are more soup bars, sushi bars, noodle bars, sandwich places and sit-down cafes than you can shake a stick at, but the portions are huge and excess fat lurks everywhere. NEVER, for example, let the girl behind the cafe counter put butter on your baked potato for you, unless you want to spend your lunch hour wading knee-deep in said butter to find your potato.
(Does anyone else find the thought of wading knee-deep in melted butter profoundly sexually arousing?)
(What? I like butter.)
Takeaway sandwiches are always bigger than they need to be, the bread/filling ratio is always high (or low? Whatever. More bread than filling, that’s what I mean) and generally bulked out with mayonnaise or cheap spread. Plus, they cost a fortune. A sandwich, a drink, a yogurt and a couple of pieces of fruit will set you back between £4.50 and £8.
No wonder we’re always hungry. And strapped for cash.
I appreciate that the whole browniegate thing earlier in the week has somewhat dented my credibility as a healthy eater. But I am about to redeem myself. Follow me past the “read more” tag, my friends, for a couple of simple, tasty, filling recipes that are both reasonably priced and nicer than anything you could buy.
For years I filed ice cream under “things that are not sufficiently nicer when made at home to justify the bother of making them at home instead of buying them from the supermarket”.
(I often feel that I should have taken my feel for a short, sharp, punchy tagline to the cut-and-thrust world of advertising, but it is too late now.)
(Anyway.)
The problem with buying ice cream is that you never quite know what you’re getting. Cheap ice cream - the fluorescent stuff in the gigantic tubs - often doesn’t have any dairy in it at all; that’s cold churned vegetable fat you’re eating. Mmmm hmmm. And posh ice cream like Ben & Jerry’s or Haagen-Dasz is full of cream, £4 for 500ml and can you ever find a shop that stocks the coffee flavour? No you bloody can’t.
And that’s if you aren’t watching your weight. If you ARE watching your weight, forget it. You can’t have any ice cream, thunderthighs. YOU, my friend, will be directed straight to the murky realm of the “frozen dessert”. Ice lolly? WeightWatchers Frozen Desserts? Skinny Cow? Tofutti? They’ll do in a pinch, but let’s face it: they are all part of the huge anti-fatty conspiracy, a product of the giant collective mind that not-so-secretly believes that fat people MUST NOT enjoy their food.
The amazing thing is that a lot of the members of the anti-fatty conspiracy are fat themselves. And also that it is demonstrably RUBBISH. We can lose weight on delicious, healthy food that doesn’t make us feel like slitting our wrists when we look down at our plates.
Now follow me into the kitchen. Because I’m about to show you how to make 1.5 pints of ice cream that can compete with Ben & Jerrys and Haagen-Dasz at their best, but - divided into 6 servings - comes out at about 3.5 Weight Watchers points per serving (about 3 scoops), as compared to 3.5 points per scoop of Haagen Dasz.
Bread is pretty taboo in dieting circles.
You can’t have bread on the Atkins diet. You can’t really have bread on the low GI diet, although some breads are less bad for you than others. You can have bread on the Weight Watchers Points Plan, because you can have anything you like on that plan, but two slices of shop-bought bread are at least 3 points, which is quite a lot if you’re on 18 points a day, which fortunately I never was because I would have wasted away. However, if you are following Weight Watchers Core, you have to use some of your weekly Points for bread, even though you could substitute it for unlimited brown rice or oats or Ryvita or any number of other grain-based products that you wouldn’t have to Point at all.
That doesn’t make sense. Does that make sense? I don’t think that makes sense.
Poor, neglected bread. Everyone seems to hate it. If they aren’t counting carbs, they’ve got an allergy; if they haven’t got an allergy they’ve got an intolerance. You’d think the bread basket was full of poison, the way people recoil from it as it passes them.
Until recently, I never ate bread; it was a leftover from my hazy, hallucinogenic days on the Atkins diet, of which more later. The reason was that I didn’t really like it very much. What I didn’t like about it was:
(a) It didn’t really taste of anything. Wholemeal was better than white, but both were pretty bland; and
(b) It didn’t really seem to have much in it. Even the posh baked-in-store stoneground multigrain seeded loaves only ever seemed to contain one lonely little pumpkin seed, cowering miserably in a sea of unadulterated flour. And even the most robust, sturdy, authentically crusty rustic loaf disintegrated upon toasting, especially if you buttered it whilst it was still hot.
All in all, I’d eat two slices of toast, and for ten seconds I’d feel deliciously full. And then suddenly - *pop* - and I was starving again, and battling the urge to just toast, butter and devour every slice in the bag.
It was like crack, except, well, no, okay. I’m not sufficiently thick to think that toast is anything like crack. Sorry, crack addicts, for trivialising your situation. I won’t do it again. Jesus, it was just a figure of speech. Whatever. Anyway, what I mean is that I realised that I couldn’t eat bread without either immediately eating too much bread, or eating too much of something else later because I was still hungry. And not because it was particularly nice to eat, either. So I stopped eating it at all.
Funnily enough, much though I love baking, I’ve never baked my own bread. It looks like too much effort and I’d always filed it under “things that are not sufficiently more nice when made at home to justify the effort of making them”. So I didn’t discover the difference between home made bread and shop bread until I got a bread maker, just after Christmas. Yes, it’s a Russell Hobbs Bread Man, actually, and it is Miraculous. What you do, right, is you put your ingredients in, just sort of on top of each other in the tin, and then you put the tin in the breadmaker and you programme it and the next morning you wake up with the scent of fresh bread wafting deliciously past you.
And it’s amazing. The bread is amazing. I don’t think it’s quite as good as hand-kneaded bread, probably, but it is a real revelation after Tesco’s Value White Bread. It is delicious and crusty and warm. It is robust enough to withstand the most immediate post-toasting buttering. And - it feeds you. Especially if you add oatmeal or seeds or fruit or wholegrain flour. One slice of bread from the breadmaker for breakfast, with a low-fat natural yogurt and a couple of pieces of fruit, keeps me going until lunchtime. Two slices left me uncomfortably stuffed.
Now, I’m sure that there are at least a couple of people out there thinking “Well actually Katy one slice of shop bought bread leaves ME feeling stuffed to the HILT actually and that’s WITHOUT butter, you great big porketeer” and to those people I say, through gritted teeth, that I am VERY FUCKING HAPPY FOR YOU. Seriously. I wish you nothing but good things and certainly no bad things. Really. But for me the bread maker was a revelation. It was, in fact, the colossal difference between the bread from the breadmaker and the bread from shops that got me thinking about the quality of home made food versus ready-prepared food, and whether I should start cooking more from scratch and worrying less about how much I ate. It made me realise that if the food you eat is really, really good and full of good things, you don’t need to eat as much of it.
And now I give you a recipe.
