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Mojito Cheescake – recipe coming soon!
Had a lovely dinner with friends last night. I won’t know the calories until I get the recipes written up in detail, but this is healthy eating with great flavour and a perfect way to celebrate seasonal foods.
Spring Vegetables with Sesame Crisp
Fresh lightly cooked broad beans and petit pois, combined with cucumber, apple and bean shoots. Dressed with tamari soy sauce, lemon juice and toasted sesame oil and topped with a wafers of filo pastry and sesame seeds.
Red Mullet with Coconut-Lime Sauce and a Puy Lentil Salad
The fish is dusted with curry-spiced flour and pan fried in a little butter. The pan is deglazed with light coconut milk, spices and raisins. The puy lentils are tossed in lime juice, mint and chilli, with red onion, red pepper, tomato and apple.
Rhubarb-Orange-Honey Compote with Cardamom Custard
I used my beautiful home grown forced rhubarb, which I baked with orange juice and zest and a little honey. Surrounded with a delicate, lightly sweetened soya custard aromatised with cardamom and vanilla.
I’m really enjoying the fact that we can eat like this whilst losing weight!
Now updated with photos and calorie counts.
Continuing my tour of light and healthy Mediterranean cuisine this week, with influences from France, Morocco and Italy, but adding in a little inspiration from elsewhere to spice it up a bit.
I’ll be aiming to use asparagus and rhubarb as key seasonal ingredients. At the market this morning, I also bagged a lovely bunch of watercress, some Swiss chard and a very healthy looking bunch of pale and interesting carrots.
Behind the carrots are some early globe artichokes – my favourite way of eating these is with loads of butter, so I’d better find a more healthy recipe before I add those to my meal plan!
A few less dishes on this plan – I am finding that we often have left-overs to use up, as I am still buying and cooking more than we are actually eating!
This is week 11 for us on our 5:2 diet. I am over 2/3 of the way to my target healthy weight now, having lost 8.7 kg (19lbs), which is absolutely brilliant. My husband meanwhile has lost nearly 15 kg and has revealed that there was a six pack there, all along… 🙂
So this week we’ll do another 2 fast days and the rest of the time we’re keeping light on the carbs, so as not to lose momentum – but there are plenty of delicious treats along the way, as I focus on flavour and make light but tasty versions of some of our favourite dishes to share with you.
Saturday: dinner for friends ~ 550 kcals
Sunday: local specialities and home grown rhubarb
Monday ~ Fast Day with an Indian kick
Tuesday: Italian day
Wednesday: Moorish influences
Thursday ~ Fast Day Italian style
Friday: a Moroccan menu with a Mexican twist
As I go through the week, I’ll be checking my recipes and calorie-counting them, putting some of them up here on my blog. I’m also working towards my 5:2 recipe book…..
Soft sharp pear contrasts wonderfully with a sweet, nutty chocolate meringue topping, less than 150 calories per serving – or if you make mini ramekins, only 60 – 75 calories each, depending on the size and sweetness of the pears.
The idea for this dish came from BBC Good Food, where it is called Chocolate Pear Crisp. But their recipe had way too much sugar for my taste, so I radically changed it.
If you like the Spanish flavours of Saffron and Garlic, I’m sure you will enjoy this way of cooking fish.
This recipe is based on one in Tapas, the little dishes of Spain, by Penelope Casas, where she used Swordfish or Shark – but these are off the list of acceptable fish to use these days. I used Haddock, but it would be equally good with Cod or Halibut or a firm meaty fish like Tuna (as long as it was caught by pole and line). If you want more information about which fish are ok to eat and which aren’t, please download Fish to Eat and Fish to Avoid or get the Fish Fight App.
The lovely golden colour of the finished dish is not entirely due to saffron – I used some frozen tomato flesh, of a home-grown variety called Amish Gold.
I served the Fish in Saffron Sauce with Cauliflower Rice and Broad Beans. A very satisfying and delicious main course under 300 kcals.
This Spanish style salad makes a great change from Cole Slaw having a light dressing, lovely crunch and an excellent combination of flavours.
We ate it with Chicken with Garlic and Saffron (Pollo al Ajillo) and Potatoes with Spicy Tomato Sauce (Patatas Bravas) – about 400 kcals in all for me.
I have reduced the amount of olive oil and raisins used in order to make this a light, low-calorie salad that is suitable to use on a 5:2 Fast Day, or on any day as part of a healthy, balanced diet.
Caraway Seeds contain a variety of vitamins, minerals, essential oils and anti-oxidants with many potential health benefits. They go particularly well with cabbage, as their anti-flatulent properties are particularly helpful.
I do like a challenge!
I was asked if I could come up with a less syrupy version of baklava and as I had some filo pastry left, I decided to give it a go.
I’m pretty pleased with the result: crispy, nutty and slightly sticky Baklava at only 110 calories a slice!
Notes on the ingredients:
I had some agave syrup that I bought for us to try – it is low GI, so better for you as a sweetener than sugar, and while it is processed, it is not synthetic. It is also sweeter than sugar so you need less of it. You could use honey or maple syrup or sugar syrup if you prefer, but as you wouldneed to use more for the same sweetness, the end result would be higher in calories. I didn’t add any sweetness to the pastry itself.
For nuts, I chose to use ground hazelnuts, though I think that walnuts or (unsalted) pistachios, or any other nuts would work just as well.
I wanted to use rosewater in the syrup, but didn’t have any, so I used orange flower water instead. I think the flowery note makes it more middle-eastern, but if you can’t get either then probably not the end of the world! Maybe use a little lemon juice instead.
I used a slivers of lemon zest in the syrup, but orange zest would also be nice.
I had a few sheets of filo pastry left, 4 I think, plus a part sheet. So I cut them all to a smaller size, about 20 x 30cm, which I folded over to make my baklava 20 x 15 approx and used the trimmings to make up the layers as well. When baked, I cut this into 8 portion sized pieces – I got a little distracted just before putting it in the oven and didn’t cut it into shapes before baking it. Didn’t seem to matter really, I just had to be a little careful with cutting it after I had poured the syrup over.
I wouldn’t make a whole trayful unless we had a lot of guests. As it is, if you are prone to being indulgent with sweet things, it might be better to make just half the quantity!
So this recipe makes enough for 8 servings, coming in at around 110 calories each. It was an absolute winner with vanilla ice cream, as it was not as sticky as a traditional baklava. Now we have another 6 pieces to eat 🙂
Apologies for any discrepancies between my calorie estimates and those of my recipe cards. I don’t have control over how it calculates the ingredients and it may be using different products than the ones I have entered and used in MyFitnessPal. If it is critical to you, work with the higher figure!
I have a lot of cookery books and browsing through them is one of my pleasures. Sitting with a pile of them beside my and thinking of a trip to Spain – I passed my book of Tapas, the little dishes of Spain, by Penelope Casas over to my husband, who marked a few selections for us to try (I have the original paperback version of the book, I bet the new one is lovely with more recipes and more photos). Small dishes of wonderful ingredients, prepared to delight the palate, sounds just right when you only have a few calories to play with. Let’s see what I can do with them this week.
Seasonal food: I have glorious forced rhubarb about ready to pick. Other desserts will depend on what looks good in the market. I’m hoping to find more asparagus, despite the very chilly weather we have had the last few days. I’ll be adding some soups in too, again depending on the seasonal choices on offer. Plus I have my own quince preserve to use.
I am feeling better I think from eating less refined flour so I’m going to try making my pizza dough with wholewheat flour this week.
This meal plan will work with our intermittent fasting lifestyle and support our weight loss targets, helping us to keep to around 1200/1800 calories on a normal day and 500/600 calories on a fast day.
Saturday:
Sunday:
Monday ~ Fast Day
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday – fast day
Friday
Recipes and calories counts will come later, when done!
Please see my other meal plans and recipes, also my list of what we have been eating on Fast Days.
I hope to inspire you to eat well and enjoy every day, fasting or otherwise!
I had forgotten how great this soup tastes! Spicy, slightly sweet, sour, bitter, salty – it has that umami savoury satisfaction factor.
Especially with home made chicken stock… but you can use Marigold bouillon or even plain water and it is still yummy.
You may know it as Tom Yam Gung – Prawn, or Tom Yam Gai – chicken. The fish sauce is an essential part of the flavour combination, so this won’t work for strict vegetarians, but you could try using soy sauce and a little sugar instead and some cubes of tofu.
I buy lime leaves and lemongrass from time to time at an Asian store in Toulouse, and freeze them.
If you want to see my meal plans for the week, please go to Meal Plans – you’ll find my outline plan for the current week, and more detailed calorie counted plans for previous weeks.
Mmm, soft pear topped with a creamy, crunchy topping, and under 100 calories a serving!
There are still some lovely European-grown pears to choose from – these are small Williams pears.
