All posts filed under: Easy Meals

Healthy Living Challenge: Day 14 – Alternative Eating

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I call it alternative because once you decide to eat healthily, you have to find replacements to the things you used to comfort eat. Like, did you use to fill up on bread and keep yourself awake with coffee, like me? Then you have to find things that keep you full and awake but don’t necessarily tip the scales the wrong way… To give you the motivation to change some of your habits, please take a moment and have a look at this chart I came across last week, while browsing Stumbleupon. Have you done it? What shocked you the most? For me, it was the fact that when hungry, most people would go for a 400-calorie burger while they could have 3 KILOS of celery for the same amount of calories. Okay, who could eat 3 kilos of celery, anyway but you get my point…you need to find alternatives to your go-to-snacks or meals if you want to lose the weight. So today I replaced what used to be my Saturday fry with a …

Healthy Living Challenge: Day 13 – Celebration Day

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As I told you before, I have this habit of weighing myself in the morning, first thing. Well, almost first thing. Hmmm, how do I put this delicately in a blog post? What I mean by almost is I weigh myself after….ahem…my bowels empty…blush…I wouldn’t have mentioned this aspect, really but I think that when dieting this is one thing that needs to be very…regular. And I will tell you for why. You see, your body needs to start fresh every morning so to say but if your bowels don’t empty properly, due mainly to the consumption of processed wheat, in the form of bread, buns, cakes and the like then all you do is carry around…dead weight! Anyway, since I started my almost-no-wheat-but-plenty-of-fruit-and-veggies-diet, the dead weight has been shedding, so to say :-). So from 71 kilograms(that is11st 2.5282lb, for you, metric lot!)  on Valentine’s Day(I know, shame on me!!) I am down to 68.7 kilos(10st 11.5lb) today!! I am thrilled for a number of reasons: 1. I didn’t feel deprived at any point. …

Healthy Living Challenge: Day 12 – New Flavours

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I bought millet and aduki beans from the health store last Friday and today I decided to give them a go! I haven’t made millet before and I didn’t know what to expect. I like couscous and I sort of expected it to be similar in texture and taste. It sort of is and it isn’t, I found millet a bit coarser and drier than the couscous but I think the millet has the potential to retain more flavour if boiled with the right ingredients(I added chicken stock, a bay leaf and a whole onion plus a spice mix we bought in the Greek open market, called Arabiko) . I used this recipe I found online last night but I decided to replace the lentils with my aduki beans. It came out a bit too dry so next time I will not roast the millet and I will probably add 3 cups of water to one cup of millet. I served it with fish which I marinated, inspired by Ottolenghi’s Mediterranean Feast on Channel 4, …

Healthy Living Challenge: Day 11 – Easy Week Meals

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I love cooking our meals from scratch but I don’t like spending too much time in the kitchen, especially on the days I work. So tonight I’ll be making a meal we all love that takes less than half an hour to put together: Thai chicken! These are my four magical ingredients: chicken breast, that I chop and tenderise in the pan with a bit of coconut oil, salt and pepper. Green Thai curry paste( a couple of spoonfuls) that I add to the chicken, once cooked(I never let it get brown, just not pink in the middle). Reduced fat coconut milk that gets added on top of the chicken and curry paste, once the chicken is coated in the paste. And stir fry veggies that I add after the coconut milk has boiled for a good 10 minutes and infused the chicken, only for about 3 minutes(I have overcooked veggies!). I serve it with boiled rice. How do you get sticky Thai rice? Add 1 and a half cups of water to one cup …

Healthy Living Challenge: Day 5 – Another Dimension

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I am only now starting to realise how much I know about dieting and nutrition. Since hubby went on a dieting bender three years ago I have been accumulating- willingly or not- a lot of information about dieting. It happened mostly because I did the cooking and the portioning (at some point he lived for entire months on microscopical 100g portions of lean meat and wholegrain rice !!). Then when we travelled to see his family I noticed his brother eating an equally strict but slightly more varied diet, including “good” fats like peanut butter, tahini and fruit. Needless to say they  were both the beaux of the beach wherever we went and got all the attention but many times I wondered at what cost. Well, I got my answer this weekend when hubby had what I called a “48-hour body shut down.” He had felt tired and slightly run down for a month with a couple of bouts of cold but then we attributed it to work stress. What I never expected was for  …