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Semi-healthy Convenience Food

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When I’m in the office these days I prefer to bring my own lunch rather than eat in the canteen. There’s nothing wrong with the canteen, but I like cooking in the evening, so having a large lunch would be a bad idea..

So for lunch I try to vary things as much as possible. There’s only so much soup that you can eat!

One recent discovery is Uncle Ben’s Rice Time range.

Here’s what you get (via the official site):

uncle-ben-rice-time

They currently come in five flavours:

  • Sweet & sour
  • Medium curry
  • Spicy tikka masala
  • Mexican chilli
  • Cantonese

(Though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen at least one other flavour for sale there isn’t any mention of it on their site)

They’re easy to prepare and very tasty.

At less than 400 calories (most seem to be around 330 or so) they’re heavier than a soup, but not insanely so.

Preparation time is only a couple of minutes and since we have crockery etc., in the office I can easily chuck the final product into a proper bowl and eat it at my desk.

Exploring Different Flavour Soups

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While I’d love to be able to make my own soup every single day it’s not going to happen just yet ..

Even a “simple” soup requires preparation time and I haven’t quite got to that stage yet.

So for the moment I try to keep it “interesting” by choosing as wide a variety of soup flavours as possible.

Today for example I had a very tasty, although a bit salty, split pea soup.

split pea soup

I think I picked it up in my local Tesco or SuperQuinn. To be frank I’m not sure, as it’s a tin, so it’s probably been sitting in my cupboard for a couple of months

 

More Kitchen Gadgets!

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When I tried to make pasta for the first time a couple of weeks ago I immediately ran into a small, yet quite annoying problem. Being able to roll out pastry requires a rolling pin. Sure, I was able to use a wine bottle, but it’s not exactly ideal.

So I added a rolling pin to my shopping list 🙂

Since I’m a bit of a gadget geek I was attracted to the Joseph Joseph adjustable rolling pin. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but I love the concept.

adjustable-rolling-pin-joseph-joseph

 

Instead of simply being a rolling pin this one gives you the option to adjust how thick the pasta ends up being rolled

rolling-pin-adjustable-rings

All you have to do is switch the rings .. so you can have thick or thin dough, or maybe you can start out with thick and roll it until it’s easier to make it thinner.

The other problem I ran into with pasta was drying the damn stuff. A friend suggested I use my clothes airer, but that’s not going to work too well if I’ve got clothes on it and it’s only a “stop gap” measure

There are, however, specific racks available for drying pasta. In fact there’s quite a few different models you can choose from. I ended up going for the DB-Tech Wooden Pasta Drying Rack (available on Amazon and elsewhere). It’s not a fantastic bit of equipment but it should be able to do what I need ie. dry pasta on something that isn’t also used for airing my laundry

pasta-dryer

Unfortunately the rack doesn’t ship with the vegetables included!

I now need to research storage of fresh homemade pasta – while homemade might be better for you than stuff you buy off the shelf (at least it tastes better) you can easily end up with a rather large quantity. Ideally I’d make the right amount of pasta, but I can’t see that happening any time soon .. and besides, it’s time-consuming, so making enough for two meals at once would make sense.

First Attempts at Homemade Soup

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I’ve been meaning to make my own soups for some time, as I really don’t want to be buying things I can make myself.

While a lot of the “healthy” soups out there are pretty good, they’re still going to have more salt in them than I really need.

So yesterday I finally got round to making a spicy lentil soup so that I could bring it into work today for my lunch. But I first needed to get some kind of container for transporting the end product. I’ve got plenty of containers for dry food and even salads, but I didn’t have anything that would work for soup.

Luckily I was able to pick up a Stanley Classic Vacuum food jar in my local Tesco. I compared their prices against a couple of online outlets and there wasn’t much in it – I might have saved myself 1 or 2 Euro, but not much more, by buying online.

Stanley food jar

 

A “food jar” is essentially the same concept as a flask, except it’s designed for food. While a flask will have a fairly narrow opening the “food jar” has a much broader one and with about a 1/2 litre capacity it can hold a single serving of soup, stew or chilli sauce.

stanley-food-jar-open

 

If you’re not going into an office which might have bowls etc, the jar’s lid can double as a bowl.

The first soup I made was based on a “spiced carrot and lentil soup” recipe from BBC GoodFood

Most of the recipes I’ve come across for spiced soup assume you’re using dry herbs, whereas I generally cook with fresh chillies, so my soup was a tad spicier than I’d have liked, though still edible.

lentil-soup

I’m not sure what other recipes to try out, but I suspect most of them will be biased towards vegetable / vegetarian recipes and away from meat. I’m not going to give up eating meat, but I suspect I’ll be cutting back my intake (more on that anon)

 

Pasta Making Second Attempt

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My first attempt at making pasta wasn’t a “roaring success”, but as the saying goes “you live and learn”.

This afternoon / evening I had a second go at it and tried my best to document it.

Starting off right with the flour (sieved) and mixing it with the egg and oil:

eggs-flour-mix

Last time round this part went terribly wrong. This time it wasn’t perfect, but by spraying some water on the dough I was able to get it to something close to the right consistency.

Once I’d kneaded it quite a bit I wrapped it in some cling film and left it for about 45 minutes.

I then started work on running it through the pasta machine. However, before I could start that, I needed to roll it out a bit. Of course I don’t have a rolling pin so I resorted to using an empty wine bottle (washed and all stickers removed).

Then I began running it through the pasta machine starting at the widest / thickest setting and working my way down to the thinnest one

pasta-in-progress

A small bit of dough really goes very far (note to self for next time – make less!)

The work space I have in the kitchen isn’t exactly ideal – it’s a little bit cramped. So I had to cut the dough into two parts and then as I continued running it through the machine and it got thinner I cut it again.

The end result, however, was beginning to look a lot better

tagliatelle-coming-out-of-machine

I really like tagliatelle so that’s what I opted for. The pasta machine can do spaghetti as well, but I prefer tagliatelle.

The end result should then be let dry a bit before you cook it (or so I’m told). I really don’t have anything or anywhere suitable for drying pasta (adding that to my todo list) so I ended up using a wooden spoon to collect the pasta:

tagliatelle-finished-with-hand

But I couldn’t just hold it there. In the end I sort of hung it into a large saucepan, but it wasn’t exactly ideal ..

Of course we’re talking about pasta here so until you’ve actually tasted it you’ve no way of really knowing how it is.

I made a simple carbonara sauce for the pasta (boiled for about 4 minutes or so) and served it.

End result? Very tasty!

So the second attempt worked out a lot better than the first, but it’s still far from perfect.

I’ll have to keep working on it and seeing what I need to do to improve my technique. For example, at the moment the pasta as it goes through the machine isn’t coming out straight – it sort of bends around as it goes through, which is far from ideal. I need to learn how to get it to come out in a more uniform fashion.

So more practice is needed

Forks Over Knives

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Forks Over Knives poster

Forks Over Knives poster

I am not a big fan of documentaries, but I do watch some. Last night I finally got round to watching “Forks Over Knives”. As I’d already watched “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead” Netflix had been suggesting “Forks Over Knives” to me as a relevant title. They were right.

“Forks Over Knives” is well worth watching. Sure, it’s very American biased, but even if you’re not American you can relate to it.

What’s it about?

In a similar vein to films like “Hungry For Change” and “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead” the film talks about how the US (and worldwide) populations are suffering from a lot of ailments. What it does, however, is shows how, scientifically, these ailments can be linked directly to diet. For example, when the Germans invaded parts of Scandinavia they took away all the meat. That meant that the locals had to resort to more plant based foods to survive, which might not have been pleasant, as it was forced, but when you look at the health and mortality data for the period both before, during and after the occupation the numbers are very revealing. When the population switched away from the meat heavy western diet the number of people suffering from heart disease and many other ailments dropped.

I like “fact based”. But I don’t want to watch 90 minutes of statistics. That would bore me to tears.

Forks Over Knives isn’t boring. It has a nice mix of the science and the people, both the doctors and other professionals who have been conducting research into diet and nutrition and how it impacts health and their patients.

The message from the film is pretty blunt. Meat = bad. Vegetables, fruit etc = good.

Personally I could not see myself cutting out ALL meat out of my diet completely, but I could see myself reducing it. (At the moment I do have weeks with zero red meat intake, but I usually have fish or chicken a couple of times a week)

The film is definitely “food for thought” and worth a watch.

Here’s the trailer:

The film’s available on both Netflix and iTunes.