STRATEGIC NUTRITION

Carling Cup - Food for My Soul

2009-10-28T23:08:00.002Z

Just a quick blog while waiting for the television highlights of this evening's Carling Cup matches. I've managed not to blog on City so far, but I just can't hold it off any longer.

We had a great match this evening, after initially letting Scunthorpe equalise in the first half. Another four goals made up for the defensive error. It was especially pleasing to see Michael Johnson get a goal after a long, long time fighting injury. He has taken a lot of stick from some fans for being seen socialising while out injured. He is a lot heavier now than he was a couple of years ago, but he is older, has probably been on steroids and seems fit enough now. He certainly seems to have plenty of muscle if that 27-yard rocket is anything to go by.

Happy days...

Yummy Mash

2009-10-26T22:46:00.003Z

The clocks have gone back, the slow cooker is out on the worktop more often, and the delights of mashed potatoes are calling... There’s nothing too unhealthy about mashed spuds but given how important a varied diet is, here’s a few tweaks and alternatives which you could incorporate into your meals this winter:

Save the water you cooked them in, and then add it back in when you mash them. This means you need less butter and/or milk for a creamy taste.
Instead of butter, try adding extra virgin olive oil or avocado oil – they are both rich in monounsaturated fatty acids.
Given how full of antioxidants herbs and spices are, experiment with any flavours you fancy. Mustard is a well-known addition, but what about pesto, wasabi, chives, shredded basil or turmeric, to name a few?
Add practically any other root vegetables as you boil the potatoes. Carrots, swedes, celeriac, parsnips and turnips are all good, but you can also add non-root vegetables like cauliflower for the last few minutes. You’ve increased your portions of vegetables at a stroke!
Talking of adding vegetables, you could also add gently sauteed onions, leeks or spring onions after mashing for a version of colcannon, or lightly cooked shredded cabbage or kale to make bubble and squeak.
Actually on Saturday night, my husband combined the two suggestions above. He boiled some peeled swedes in Marigold vegetable stock, mashed them and added sauteed leeks – delicious!
Add some cooked Puy lentils after making the mash (you can buy Puy lentils dried and cook them yourselves, saving the leftovers for mash the next night, or buy them cooked in cans or sachets)
Instead of ‘normal’ potatoes, have mashed sweet potatoes instead. My recommendation is not to boil your sweet potatoes as they can absorb a lot of water. Instead, bake them until they start browning after peeling and drizzling with olive oil. Then mash them with a little creme fraiche. Actually you could do this with butternut squash as well.
I find the flavours of sweet potato and butternut squash go really well with tastes like ginger, cumin, basil and Thai curry paste, so there’s another load of mashes to try.
As another alternative to mashed potatoes, try straining a can of beans (butter beans are my favourite in this recipe) and gently crushing them before heating in a pan with some olive oil and any fresh herbs you fancy.
Talking of ‘gently crushing’, instead of peeling your potatoes and mashing them to a lovely smooth texture, you could try leaving their skins on. Then rather than mashing them, just crush them a little. It’s mash but not as we know it!

Finally, you could just cook a few less spuds, leaving more space on your plate for other vegetables. All these suggestions are adding variety to your diet, which means you are getting a greater variety of phytonutrients.

Jerusalem Artichokes, by the bucketful

2009-10-19T20:28:00.001+01:00

I couldn’t wait any longer – I had to dig up one of my Jerusalem artichokes last week to see how well they had grown. I was absolutely amazed at my harvest. From one tuber planted last spring, I dug up a whole bucket full of little knobbly vegetables, just begging to be turned into tasty soup, or mashed, roasted or sauted. Even after sharing my bounty with bemused neighbours, I still had plenty left to for experimentation. The only problem was the 27 hour power cut which followed, leaving me with lots of peeled and browning chunks of artichoke... (If you are going to peel your artichokes, pop them in some water with the juice of half a lemon to stop them browning too quickly)

Jerusalem artichokes are not related to globe artichokes, and don’t come from Jerusalem – they are in fact members of the sunflower family. It is thought that their name may come from the word, ‘girasole’ which is their name in Italian. They do have an interesting smoky, almost truffly taste, not unlike globe artichokes but as a tuber they are cooked completely differently. You can use them peeled or scrubbed in a variety of recipes where you might use other root vegetables including potatoes. I was attempting to roast them, sprinkled with olive oil, with beetroot when the power went off on Thursday. I did manage at the weekend to make a beautiful soup with leeks, garlic and chicken stock. I strained it through a sieve so it was velvety smooth and added just a dash of cream, so as to not overpower the taste of the artichokes. My guests appeared to like it, though at the time of writing I have not heard if they all survived the alleged downside of artichokes – a rumbly tummy!

The wind-producing powers of artichokes are actually due to their relatively high content of a very useful indigestible carbohydrate called inulin (not insulin). This natural substance preferentially feeds the good bacteria in our gut, meaning it is a ‘prebiotic’. Essentially if you eat more prebiotics than you have good bacteria to eat them, the prebiotics will start to ferment in your gut – hence the gas. The more prebiotics you eat, the more good bacteria your diet can support, so the more will grow – and your health will only benefit in the long term. Thus, adding foods rich in prebiotics to your diet is a great way of improving your gut environment, with positive effects on immune function, mineral absorption and even levels of cholesterol and insulin in the blood. In addition to Jerusalem artichokes, good levels of prebiotics can be found in chicory, garlic, leeks, legumes, asparagus, bananas and other fruit and vegetables.

In theory we can also improve our gut environment by adding probiotics or good bacteria directly to our diet. If you have taken a lot of antibiotics lately and really feel you need to supplement your good bacteria, you may want to go into a good quality healthfood store and ask for a supplement of probiotics, each dose of which contains billions of good bacteria with research to back up its claims – not all good bacteria are the same! Don’t forget - good bacteria are found in fermented foods such natural yoghurt and yoghurt products like kefir ( fermented milk originally from the Caucausus Mountain region) as well as sauerkraut, miso soup and many pickles. These natural unsweetened products are probably a better source of probiotics than the highly-sweetened drinks and yoghurts which are advertised so much lately, especially if you also eat plenty of the prebiotic-containing foods listed above.

Insomnia and Nutrition

2009-09-17T13:04:00.002+01:00

If you suffer from insomnia, especially long-term insomnia, you will know that there are many contributory factors. Some are more obvious than others – a snoring bedfellow or wakeful child, anyone? Any form of stress is not normally associated with a good night’s sleep. The effects of being regularly awoken by babies or having your sleep patterns interrupted by shift work may still be obvious years later. Obviously it probably isn’t possible to change some of the factors affecting your sleep, but there may be other things you can do.

‘Sleep hygiene’ refers to all the behaviourial and environmental factors which precede sleep and so can interfere with it - in other words, your evening routine and bedroom set-up. It is generally recommended that people get up at the same time each day and go to bed when they are tired, while making sure that their bedroom is not too hot, cold, noisy or brightly lit. Most authorities on sleep advocate keeping the TV out of the bedroom, as you need to associate your bed with sleep not stimulation.

Coffee, alcohol and nicotine are other stimulants which can interfere with sleep, and as such it is worth avoiding them for several hours (at least) before bedtime. Caffeine for example, speeds up the action of the nervous system as well as other major body systems. Within fifteen minutes of a cup of coffee, the level of adrenaline in your blood rises, triggering an increase in heart rate, breathing rate, urinary output and production of stomach acids. In other words caffeine's effects are the reverse of what you want to happen as you go to sleep. Some people are more sensitive than others to the effects of caffeine and need to remember that it is found not only in coffee and tea, but also chocolate and cola drinks.

What can you eat and drink in the evening to help you sleep better? Tryptophan is an amino acid which is used by the body to make sleep-inducing subtances called serotonin and melatonin. So eating foods rich in tryptophan should help us sleep better, right? And it is an amino acid, so we should eat protein, right? Well, it’s not quite that simple…

Tryptophan is the least plentiful amino acid in a normal meat-eating or vegetarian diet. In order to be used to make serotonin it must first get into the brain, across the protective blood-brain barrier. This can be a problem as it wants to enter the brain using the same transporter molecules as several other, more plentiful amino acids. The best way to give tryptophan a helping hand into the brain is actually to eat a meal, snack or drink which is rich in carbohydrates, with just a little tryptophan-containing protein. Foods which are high in tryptophan include dairy, soy, eggs, meat and poultry, as well as whole grains, pulses, hazelnuts, peanuts, sesame and sunflower seeds. So yet again, traditional ideas are largely backed up by science - good bedtime snacks include a malted hot milk drink, wholegrain cereal and milk or a turkey sandwich. Foods containing calcium as well as tryptophan, such as milk or sesame seeds, are helpful as the calcium can also help convert the trypophan to melatonin. In addition, try to choose complex carbohydrates such as brown bread so that your blood sugar is less likely to drop during the night. Low blood sugar can induce a surge of adrenaline, which may wake you up with a start.

It is worth mentioning that tryptophan takes about an hour to reach the brain, so don’t have your snack or drink too close to bedtime. And eating a high fat snack may slow down your digestion, leaving you with a gurgling stomach at bedtime, so easy on the mayonnaise in your sandwich!

My parents always drank a milky coffee at about 10pm – a ritual which fills me with horror, as I personally struggle to sleep if I have had a sniff of a cup of tea after about lunchtime! This is a prime example of how different we all are, and why we need to experiment to figure out what works best for each of us as individuals.

Apples - A Humble 'Superfood'

2009-09-07T17:42:00.001+01:00

We keep hearing about ‘superfoods’. The term seems to apply mainly to expensive foods, such as acai berries or pomegranates, which usually need transporting from distant lands. In fact, I can’t think of a single fruit or vegetable which couldn’t be classified as a ‘superfood’. And when you mix as many of them together as possible over the course of a week, you will be eating a super intake of a super variety of nutrients! Much better for you than eating a narrow range of a few superfoods.

Having said that, I suspect a lot of us will be eating a lot of apples in the near future - or at least freezing them or bottling them in jams and jellies. Apples are not as exotic as the glamorous ‘superfoods’, but certainly pack their punch in terms of nutrition. They contain both soluble and insoluble dietary fibre – both of which have their uses. They also contain lots of vitamin C (especially straight after picking from the tree), potassium and B vitamins.

It is the more obscure phytonutrients in apples which really help them up the league of superfoods. These phytonutrients include a wide range of antioxidants such as three different versions of quercetin, procyanidin, coumaric acid and catechin. The peel and the flesh of apples each contain different proportions of different nutrients, meaning we really should eat them both to get all the benefits

It is very hard in research to ‘prove’ that eating a particular food has a particular effect – the strongest conclusion which can usually be drawn is that there is an association between eating the food and the outcome being studied. For example, research links the eating of apples by both pregnant mothers and children with a decrease in asthma. This type of research is backed up by laboratory tests which suggest that apples also help with cardiovascular disease and cancer. But we all knew that, didn’t we? An apple a day…

I’m sure everyone has their favourite apple recipes at this time of year – here’s my Mum’s:

Dorset Apple Cake
Sift 225g of plain flour, 1½ teaspoons of baking powder and at least 1 teaspoon of cinnamon together into a large bowl. Add 115g of sugar.
Peel, core and chop 225g of cooking apples together with the juice of half a lemon – I whizz them briefly in the food processor as we like the apples in small pieces, but you may prefer big chunks.
Beat one egg and mix with 3 tablespoons of milk.
Now add the apples and egg mixture to the dry ingredients and mix well.
Put in an 8” baking tin and sprinkle with 50g of sugar and ½ teaspoon of cinnamon.
Bake at 180°C for about 40 minutes before leaving it to cool in the tin.

Beautiful Beets

2009-07-16T11:34:00.001+01:00

My only experience of beetroot as a child was pickled beetroot, with an overpowering taste of vinegar. Thanks to our local vegetable suppliers (Ken and Thelma), I have discovered the joys of young, tender beetroot which are a world away from the pickled beetroot of my childhood.

Beetroot contains lots of vitamin C, fibre, potassium, magnesium, manganese, and folic acid. As a root vegetable, they do contain a lot of natural sugars, which makes them suitable for the cake recipe below in the same way that carrots are used. Flavonoids give beetroot their beautiful purple colour (though golden beetroot are also available) and also their anti-inflammatory properties. The leafy tops are an excellent source of beta-carotene, iron and calcium, and when young and crisp can be eaten raw or cooked like spinach.

A small study last year indicated that the nitrate content of beetroots could help lower blood pressure, though the participants were drinking 500ml of beetroot juice, which is quite a lot as it can have a fairly strong taste. I sometimes suggest to clients that they juice beetroot with carrots, apples and/or oranges, though another idea is to juice just beetroot with a little root ginger, possibly topping it up with ginger ale to taste.

Thanks to a recent glut of beetroot, I have been trying to be creative with both sweet and savoury recipes. Beetroot and chocolate cake is usually pretty popular, and can be made with either wheat flour or gluten-free with equally good results:
· Whisk together three large eggs with 220g of sugar until light and fluffy
· Add 200ml of good quality vegetable oil (I use cold pressed rapeseed oil), 1 teaspoon of vanillla essence and 250g of beetroot which you have previously cooked and grated finely*
· Fold in 75g of cocoa powder, 180g of plain flour and 2 teaspoons of baking powder.
· I usually use this mix to make one small round cake and a batch of buns, so you need to adjust baking times according to the size of your cakes, but check with a skewer after anything between about 25 and 40 minutes at 180°C.

* You can either boil your beetroot or bake them in foil until tender. Just chop the tops off about an inch away from the root, scrub the root and cook. Then after they are cooked, top and tail the roots and rub the skin off.

I also used cooked beetroot to make a tasty dip recently. I whizzed a couple of small, cooked and peeled beetroot with about a third of a tin of rinsed chickpeas, about 50g of diced fetta cheese and a big glug of olive oil. Add a little extra water if it is too thick, and black pepper to taste. You shouldn’t need to add salt as the fetta is usually quite salty. I did make it again without the chickpeas, but I think they do improve both the taste and the texture. You can add the rest of the tin to a salad for protein. If you still have any beetroot puree left over, try adding it to risotto at the last minute for a glorious pink dinner!

Finally, if you do eat a lot of beetroot, you may notice that it can give an indication of your ‘bowel transit time’! Amusing as this is to the less mature among us, it can also be quite a useful as an indicator of your digestive system. Too slow a transit time (more than 24 hours) could indicate a sluggish digestion which gives your body time to absorb excessive toxins and may increase the risk of colon diseases. If it takes less than 12 hours for the beetroot colour to appear, food may be passing through your digestion so quickly that you don’t have time to absorb nutrients, perhaps due to an infection, food intolerance or stress.

Digging for Victory

2009-06-17T19:57:00.003+01:00

About 15 years ago, our house was renovated and an extension which housed a butcher’s shop was removed from the front. This left us with a good-sized front garden, especially relative to our wee back garden – but not much skill or knowledge of gardening!

Even though our back garden is only small, it does benefit from having lovely brick walls and a sheltered aspect. So over the last few years we have enjoyed peaches, plums, redcurrents and rhubarb. We have a very vigorous Kiwi vine against the house, but unfortunately, the summer has never been long enough for the Kiwi crop to ripen properly. We also pop broad bean plants among the flowers, and last year grew peas in a tub. Mind you, not a single pea made it into the house – they were all eaten, pods and all, straight off the plant!

So when we had to do some remodelling work to the front garden last year, we decided to have a go at creating a vegetable garden. We dug the whole thing up so that the frost over winter could break up the soil. Then in the spring, Dave made up some wooden-edged raised beds. We wanted the beds to be narrow enough that we did not need to stand on the soil at all, with gravel paths which were just wide enough for access. We added lots of manure from the farm and some lovely river silt which was excess to requirements at a garden down the High Street. We have not grown any of our vegetables from seed this year – we don’t have enough space either in the house or garden for all the seed trays required. Instead we have bought seedlings where we can – the watercress farm, Cressman’s Corner or gifts from friends and relatives. We have lost very few seedlings once planted out, so I don’t think it has cost us much more than buying seeds.

We have been approximately following the principles of ‘square foot gardening’. You plant the vegetables very close together, but make sure you feed them well. So far all we have been doing is to add chicken poo pellets when we plant the seedlings, and that seems to be enough. Our biggest problem this year has been pigeons, pecking at our cabbage seedlings. Not too many slugs or snails have found us this year, perhaps because the garden was bare for the whole of last winter, leaving them with nowhere to hide. We are assuming they will find us sometime soon! Caterpillars have started to appear, but my rather blood-thirsty children seem happy to go caterpillar hunting most evenings. We like to throw pests like snails and caterpillars into the High Street for the passing cars to deal with – apologies to any cyclists passing at the time!

We have been pleasantly surprised by how little work the garden is, especially now that the vegetables have grown enough to suppress a lot of weeds. It’s literally a couple of minutes here and there, plus the joy of harvesting immediately before eating. So far we have enjoyed a variety of salad leaves, a couple of broad beans and peas, plus a lovely pointy cabbage – oh, and one lovely little round carrot, eaten while writing this article! I can’t wait for the Jerusalem artichokes, pink fir apple potatoes, sweetcorn and beetroot.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone about how much more nutritious freshly picked produce is compared to stuff which has been stored for weeks – or how much more tasty it is!

A Summer Breakfast Idea

2009-05-17T20:41:00.003+01:00

Porridge has had a resurgance in popularity in the last few years, due to an increased awareness of the benefits of oats. Oatmeal contains about 22% protein, 66% carbohydrate and 9% ‘good oils’. It contains soluble fibre, which is thought to be good at reducing cholesterol, by binding to it in the gut and ‘escorting’ it out of the body. Most people with Coeliac’s Disease avoid oats - the protein in oats seems to be too similar to gluten for their bodies to be able to handle, though in many cases the problem is that oats are generally milled in places where other grains are also milled and as such, are contaminated with gluten from barley, wheat or rye.

But assuming you don’t have a problem with oats and have been enjoying porridge all winter, you may be looking for something a little lighter for these lighter mornings. This month’s recipe idea is Bircher muesli, something my husband and I started eating when we lived in Switzerland about 18 years ago. It was invented by Dr Bircher-Benner for the benefit of patients in his Zurich clinic in the 1890’s. Over the years, although the basic recipe remains the same, it has been adapted and personalised so much that I wonder if the good doctor would still recognise it!

Basically, we make up a dry mix of 100g of rolled oats, 60g of mixed (unsalted) nuts, and 30g of seeds and keep it in a large jam jar or tupperware box in the fridge. Experiment with whatever nuts you have available, but I always have flaked almonds for texture along with a selection of chopped hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans or macadamia. For the seeds it can be a little more complicated. Tiny seeds like linseed and sesame seeds are very hard for the body to digest, so their goodness can pass straight through. They really should be crushed or ground in a clean coffee grinder no more than a couple of days before eating (ideally immediately before eating as their good oils are delicate and prone to going rancid, which is really bad for you). Bigger seeds like sunflower or pumpkin seeds can be simply chewed well to make them more digestible.

Anyway, it’s a good idea to take a couple of dessertspoons of your dry mix and soak it overnight in a cereal bowl in water, apple juice or milk, according to taste. This makes the minerals in the oats more absorbable, but it also makes the nuts soggy, so you may prefer to skip this step. In the morning, add the mix, whether pre-soaked or not, to a small pot of yoghurt. If you use a fruit yoghurt, read the label and make sure it’s not too sugary. Otherwise use plain live yoghurt with a little honey if necessary.

Finally fold in fresh fruit. Yet again, it is all a matter of taste. I understand the original Bircher muesli contained grated pear or apple. I personally prefer fresh or frozen berries or slice banana. If you are making a big batch for the whole family, you could put all the fruits in! The final result should be a big bowl, full of a pretty sloppy but very tasty Bircher muesli.

This recipe can seem pretty complicated at first, but once you have a batch of dry mix in the fridge, it’s quite straightforward and offers a great deal of variety depending on all the different choices you make. It’s full of fresh, healthy ingredients and makes a tasty, satisfying start to a summer’s day. En guete, as they say in Switzerland!

2009-04-26T20:25:00.003+01:00

Inflammation and Food

Our body’s response to infection or injury is inflammation. The initial trigger sets off chains of immune system responses in order to promote healing or to repair affected tissues. Unfortunately, the body’s inflammatory responses are sometimes triggered inappropriately or run out of control, which is a major cause of ill health and impaired quality of life. It is hard to list the range of conditions which involve inflammation, mainly because the list is so long and wide-ranging, but joint pain, including arthritis, has a prominant place on it. Some foods can contribute to joint pain, while others can have an anti-inflammatory effect, and relatively minor adjustments to the diet can have a positive effect.

We have all heard about fish oils and how good they are for joints. Fish oils, along with seeds and nuts, contain omega-3 fatty acids, which the body uses to make substances called anti-inflammatory prostaglandins – these are obviously good for damping down inflammation. However, the body struggles to make these prostaglandins if it also has to cope with fatty acids from saturated fats, trans-fatty acids (found in processed foods, including margarine), or excessive amounts of alcohol, stress or insulin.

So if you are suffering from joint pain, foods which you could increase in your diet include:
* Fish, seeds and unsalted nuts, as they contain omega-3 fats
* A wide variety of fruit and vegetables. These contain many anti-inflammatory nutrients, including vitamins B, C and E and minerals such as zinc and manganese. They also contain sterols, which can reduce an excessive immune response, and less well known nutrients such as quercetin and bioflavonoids.
* Olive oil contains a compound called oleocanthal which acts like ibuprofen, and oleic acid which is also anti-inflammatory. Fish oils actually reduce the level of oleic acid in body tissues, so if you are eating oily fish or supplementing with fish oils, it is worth making sure that you eat olive oil regularly too.
* Herbs and spices like ginger, turmeric, garlic, and rosemary can block inflammatory molecules in the body so use them generously in your meals. Healthy food certainly doesn’t have to be bland!

There are also foods of which you could try to eat less:
* Animal products containing saturated fat, like meat and cheese.
* Processed foods with trans-fatty acids.
* Too many sugary treats – this increases your body’s production of insulin, which then decreases its production of anti-inflammatory prostaglandins.

If you are suffering from joint pain, you could try making a few simple changes to see if they help reduce inflammation and ease the pain. These changes won’t do the rest of your health any harm!

Glorious Garlic

2009-04-18T16:03:00.008+01:00

I love it when science backs up the traditional use of foods, herbs and spices. Garlic is a prime example of this. Along with onions, garlic was considered sacred by the Egyptians, who thought that it possessed magical powers which could ward off evil spirits and the effects of their bad deeds. Garlic was used as a medicine by the Greeks, Romans and Babylonians, as well as in ancient China and India and right up to the first World War.

Research suggests that garlic’s main active ingredient is ‘allicin’, which is antiviral, antifungal, antibacterial and antiparasitic. However, the chemistry of garlic is complex, as allicin is not actually found in fresh garlic. Instead it contains something called alliin and an enzyme called allinase, in different parts of the plant. Destroying the membranes between those parts of the plant allows the two substances to mix and form allicin. The allicin does not last very long, to prevent the plant damaging itself if it’s damaged by pests. The way that allicin is formed explains why we need to crush, finely chop or chew garlic to get its full benefit.

Try to eat a clove a day, although if you are fighting an infection you could try eating up to 5 cloves a day. If the smell of garlic puts you off, try the odourless brands of capsules available in good health food stores, making sure they contain allicin. The allicin in these capsules is apparently activated in the intestine, so it shouldn’t affect your breath. Alternatively, just enjoy the real thing and then chew on fresh parsley or mint, or a few fennel seeds to take away the garlic smell. Most people can benefit from eating garlic, but anyone on anticoagulant medication or preparing for surgery should avoid it due to its blood-thinning properties, along possibly with breastfeeding mothers as it may cause wind in the baby.

It's quite easy to add garlic to your diet - in salad dressings or with chopped onions in soups or stews. From this time of year onwards, you could look out for wild garlic in the woods. It has beautiful white flowers, relatively wide green leaves and a very strong smell of garlic. Make a simple, tasty soup by gently frying a chopped onion with a knob of butter until translucent. Add a scrubbed, chopped potato and sweat for a few minutes, before adding a good pint of chicken stock then simmering until the potatoes are just about cooked. Add about 4oz of well-rinsed wild garlic leaves (enough to fill a colander) and cook for another couple of minutes. Whizz the soup with a blender before stirring in a generous glug of cream. Check your seasoning, adding pepper and a little more salt if necessary.

2009-04-09T11:22:00.003+01:00

Just a quick report on my flying visit to the Natural and Organic Products show at Olympia on Sunday:

Due to family commitments, I could only spend a few hours at the show and went round with a friend from ION. As nutritionists, we are always on the look out for new products to recommend to our clients. As a mother, I am always checking out products which I think my children will like. There were definitely several products which fitted both categories - and some which didn't!

Relatively big name companies such as Dove's Farm, Green & Black, Glebe Farm, Ecover and Dragonfly Tea make high quality products which are readily available and reliably tasty (according to the Strategic Nutrition Junior Tasting Panel, anyway). There were also some smaller organisations, some of whom were at the show to raise their profiles or look for distributors. Unfortunately, I am away from home at the moment, so don't have the leaflets which I picked up, so can't share the names of any of the products I liked with you - oops!

There were also lots of cosmetics companies, and supplement and homeopathy suppliers there - it is always worth checking them out, as the quality of manufacture makes a huge difference.

2009-04-01T10:29:00.005+01:00

I love rhubarb. It's been available for a while as 'forced' rhubarb, which is a beautiful pale pink. I've never dared try to force the rhubarb in my garden for fear my crop is reduced! As you can see in the photo above, it has recovered magnificently from the recent snow, thankfully.

Rhubarb is not actually a fruit but a vegetable as we eat the stalks, which should be crisp and firm. Generally speaking, the pinker the stalk, the sweeter the rhubarb. The leaves contain toxic amounts of oxalic acid and should be thrown away. As far as nutrition goes, rhubarb contains fibre, vitamin C, potassium and calcium among other nutrients.

It does have a tart flavour, which means that most people like to eat it with a little sugar, but also means that it goes beautifully with rich meats such as duck or fish like mackerel. Apparently the reason why lots of people groan when they are offered rhubarb resulted in part from the war, when sugar was scarce, and it was hard to overcome the tartness. That reluctance to eat rhubarb was passed on down the generations, which is a real shame as far as I'm concerned. If you have avoided rhubarb in the past, hopefully these ideas might pique your appetite

Sweet Rhubarb Puree

The acid in rhubarb reacts with aluminium, so cook it in a stainless steel or cast-iron pan. Put the chopped rhubarb stalks into a pan with just a splash of water. The amount of sugar depends on the rhubarb itself and your taste, but you can add more at the end if necessary. So start with about a quarter sugar by weight – usually a couple of dessert spoonfuls. Cook over a medium heat for about 5 minutes, and then leave to cool for a couple more minutes. Whizz it in a processor if you want a smooth puree. (If you really want the rhubarb to keep its shape, cook it in the oven instead of in a pan).

The flavour of rhubarb goes beautifully with ginger, cinnamon, vanilla, rosewater and orange, so experiment with it – adding these spices or replacing the water with orange juice while cooking.

You can use the puree, with or without stewed apples, as a base for a variety of puddings, such as crumbles, betties or pies. When it’s cooled, fold in whipped cream or Greek yoghurt to make a fool, or add to custard and then churn it in an ice-cream maker for lovely pale pink ice cream.

Savoury Rhubarb Sauce

Gently fry a finely chopped shallot in 1oz/25g of butter in a non-stick pan until transparent. Add 8oz/225g of chopped rhubarb and cook gently until the rhubarb has softened and become sauce-like. Force the mixture through a metal sieve and serve with salmon, mackerel, pork or duck. Again, try adding ginger (powder or fresh grated root) for variety.

Did you know, rhubarb grows so fast that you can actually hear it grow? The heart of rhubarb growing in Britain is Wakefield in Yorkshire. Visit Wakefield’s Rhubarb Triangle either in person or virtually on http://www.yorkshirerhubarb.co.uk/ for more about this tasty treat

My First Blog

2009-03-29T21:38:00.002+01:00

Welcome to my blog.

As a blog novice, I imagine I should introduce myself, but have also been told that blogging little and often is the way to go. So I will say a little now, and then add to it as seems necessary over time.

I am a qualified nutritionist, with a degree and diploma from the Institute for Optimum Nutrition (http://www.ion.ac.uk/). Growing up with a diabetic sister, I was always conscious of nutrition. My parents were always more nutritionally aware than was average in those days -Mum breastfed us all, in the face of the opposition which was common in the early 60's, and the diabetes obviously had a huge impact on all our lives.

When I started my own family, breastfeeding was a no-brainer. Even so, my eldest child developed severe eczema. With the help of the dermatology department at the hospital in Geneva, we learned the effect of food on her skin - and my interest in the power of nutrition was kindled!

I find food and its impact on our health fascinating, and love seeing the dramatic improvements to clients' health which can result from a few manageable changes to diet and lifestyle. In this blog, I plan to share this fascination with nutrition, hopefully passing on useful information. I imagine I will pass on some less than useful information at times (especially about the rollercoaster ride which comes with being a fan of the glorious Manchester City) - and hope I will be forgiven for that.

I know I am a little late, joining the whole blog world - but it seems it is probably easier to do a blog than rewrite my website http://www.strategicnutrition.co.uk/ all the time.