Posted on

Tuesday, 24th March

Chickpea shepherdless pie

A winter warmer for those cold nights and a nice dinner after an exercise session at home!  Most of the ingredients are staples I keep in the cupboard and I only had to buy some fresh veg to add to it.

I’ve added mint sauce to the mash potato topping as our kids love it!  It’s easy to leave this out though.  You could use a little milk and butter instead if liked.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon rapeseed oil

2 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced thinly

2 x tins of chickpeas

1 tin of chopped tomatoes

1 onion, sliced

1 tin of sweetcorn

small head of broccoli, sliced thinly

handful of fresh mushrooms, thinly sliced

handful of frozen petit pois peas, thinly sliced

1 tablespoon Marmite

3 tablespoon Bisto gravy granules

1 teaspoon dried Sage

8 red potatoes, peeled and chopped into quarters

Splash of almond milk (or any milk of choice)

1 tablespoon of ready prepared mint sauce

1 teaspoon french mustard

Method

  1. Peel and chop the potatoes bring to the boil and then medium simmer until tender.  Around 20 – 30 mins.
  2. Place the oil in a large pan and add the onion, garlic, broccoli, mushrooms and peas
  3. Leave to cook on a medium heat for 5 mins and then add the chickpeas, tomatoes, Marmite, Bisto granules and Sage.  Cover the ingredients with just enough water and give it a stir.
  4. Leave to simmer for around 20 mins.
  5. Meanwhile mash the potatoes and add any extras you like.  Either mint sauce, or the traditional butter and milk.
  6. After 20 mins, tip the vegetable mixture into a lasagne dish and top with the mash.  
  7. Place in an oven for 10 mins to brown the potato mash and serve with a salad.
Twitt
Posted on

Friday, August 16th

Habit 1

The best way of taking control of your food and eating habits for good is to develop good strategies that you can easily implement and stick to without overwhelm.

Losing weight and most importantly sticking to it, is a complete lifestyle overhaul and not just a meal plan that you can stick to.  This is why so many fail at it.  It means changing not only your ways of shopping, cooking and eating, but also dealing with other issues such as how you deal with stress, celebrate when you are happy and how you deal with moments of sadness and other emotions we tend to avoid feeling.

Along with this, your tastebuds will need to adjust to less salt, sugar and fat and so finding foods that you actually like is a trial and error process.  This requires patience to try and experiment without giving up if you cook something you don’t particularly like a few times.

The truth is, our tastebuds change over time and you soon lose the taste for sugar, salt and fat very easy if you stick with it through the first couple of weeks.

Just like when we were children, we were taught how to brush our teeth, change our clothes and brush our hair before setting out.  Now, we do these things automatically without any thought whatsoever. 

This is the same with diet.  If we change our habits to healthy ones gradually until they stick, losing weight becomes a lot easier and ingrained, without the pain and shock of changing everything at once.

Habit 1

Our first habit for the 1st week is – Write down everything that passes your lips all day, every day.  This is an excellent habit to adopt.  When you see it in print, you start making changes very quickly!  Ensure that you write everything down, from a nibble here to a spoonful of yogurt there.  Have pen and paper handy in the kitchen and at work, so that you keep tabs on yourself.  This will really open your eyes to the food you consume, as we often forget throughout the day what we have eaten and how much.

Twitt