Marking my students' assignments today, I came across a quote from a student's friend, who had been asked to make a few simple dietary changes, and report back. The friend's feedback was "It's very time-consuming reading all the product labels".
Guess what, if you use fresh foods and cook from scratch, there's nothing on the product label except the name of the food: eg. rice, potatoes, cauliflower, beans, tofu, olive oil, walnuts and so on. If you are looking at lists of ingredients, you are trying to use a convenience food.
Convenience foods often have hidden nasties: artificial colouring and flavouring, preservatives, trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, stuff with chemical names that we've never heard of - everything taking the place of real food.
Convenience food isn't profitable if it goes bad quickly, so the manufacturer usually makes it a priority to increase the shelf life as much as possible. But remember the maxim: "Good Food Goes Bad!" Long shelf lives are good for the manufacturer, bad for the consumer.
With the exception of some occasional canned peaches, or tomatoes in natural juice, I don't buy convenience food at all. I know how to make food that has natural flavour, so you don't need additives to make something delicious. And it needn't take much time at all. Just to show you how easy it is, I'm going to share with you what I ate tonight.
I make a lot of one-pot meals, often with a high liquid content, which helps me to control my weight. As explained in my book the Big Healthy Soup Diet, warm liquid in a meal slows down the emptying of the stomach, so you stay feeling full for longer. At the same time, due to the high water content, that food naturally contains fewer calories.
In my freezer today I had frozen soffritto (finely diced onion, celery and carrot) which I buy in freezer packs to avoid doing lots of chopping. I also had some frozen tofu, cooked brown rice, and some borlotti beans, which I had bagged after cooking a whole batch of dried beans in a pressure cooker (see my last article).
In the fridge I had some fresh parsley and half a cauliflower that needed using up.
Could I make a meal out of these? Yes, no problem!
I'm not going to give quantities, because I do everything by eye and by taste. Following recipes is far too fiddly. But to make two large bowlfuls like the one in the photo, I used about a cup of soffritto, and sweated it in a large saucepan with LOTS of olive oil, some chopped garlic and chilli, and some salt. When softened I added two handfuls of frozen borlotti beans, some boiling water and a bouillon cube, and cooked until it looked like I would get a smooth consistency if I whizzed it with an immersion blender. While blending, I kept adding a little more boiling water, until I got the consistency I wanted. I guess you have to just do it to know what I mean. Basically you are making a soup, and you want it to be not too thick and not too thin.
When nice and smooth, and the perfect consistency, I added a cube of frozen lemon juice, some chopped parsley, some cauliflower florets, some whole borlotti beans, cubes of extra firm tofu, and half a cup or so of cooked brown rice. Then I just continued gentle cooking until the cauliflower was tender.
Don't forget to correct the seasoning before you serve any meal. The right amount of salt makes all the difference. I've been using Himalayan pink salt since I read that sea salt may be contaminated with micro-plastics. (How sad that is...)
A little lemon juice brightens the flavour of most soups and sauces, which is why I always have some in the freezer in ice cube trays.
I can confirm that this meal was tasty and very filling. It’s the combination of the olive oil and the soluble fibre in the beans that makes it so filling and unctuous.
There are only a couple of rules to this kind of cooking. (1) Don't over-crowd the soup base. You want the ingredients to swim nicely in it, not to have a dense clump of solids. (2) Don't use ingredients that fight. Imagine what it's going to taste like before you add ingredients. For instance, I like the taste of cauliflower. I want to be able to taste the cauliflower, so I only add ingredients that will enhance its flavour, not mask it. So I would never add tomato or strong herbs like oregano to a cauliflower dish.
You don't have to use cauliflower and tofu. Once you have your soup base, the sky's the limit. Pieces of fish or chicken, seafood, broccoli florets, or leave out the rice, add an extra quantity of whole beans, plus a few green beans, and go for a tomato, bean and Italian herb combo.
I once had a boyfriend who introduced me to the delights of adding butter to canned spaghetti in tomato sauce (which would then go on buttered white toast). Unfortunately I never heard the screams from my immune system asking what I was doing to it! Thankfully I saw the light by the time I was 30, and forever abandoned canned spaghetti. Now I hope to rescue others, so feel free to share this 😀
Don't forget to let me know in the comments if there is something you would like me to write about or to fact-check for you :)
Linda