Mostly Eating

20 ways to eat more oats (even if you don't like porridge)

2009-06-21T13:10:08Z

Oats have a lot going for them. The soluble fibre in oats can help your body to get rid of excess cholesterol, something pretty much everyone can benefit from. I'm spending a lot of time working with people who have irritable bowel syndrome at the moment and it seems that oats are also one of the few starchy foods that can exert a calming influence across the full spectrum of uncomfortable symptoms that can come with IBS. And did I mention that they're also tasty, filling, cheap and versatile?

So far so good, but what if you don't like to porridge (oatmeal)? A bit of trawling through my bookmarks and cookbooks and it turns out that there are loads of different ways to include more oats in your diet:

Start at breakfast

Mix together oats, natural yogurt and a grated apple with a pinch of cinnamon and leave to meld overnight in the fridge. The oats will soften perfectly and breakfast is ready in an instant in the morning (just remove from the fridge and drizzle with honey).
Choose an oat-based cereal. There’s a much wider choice on the market these days than just muesli; compare labels to find one that isn’t loaded with fat or sugar.
Thicken your smoothie with a spoonful of oats
Whistle up a batch of oatmeal pancakes topped with fresh fruit and maple syrup (or veggies if you prefer).
Bake your own oaty Wholemeal porridge bread and serve with poached eggs or baked beans
Another non oatmeal fan, Clotilde from Chocolate and Zucchini, has a recipe for an Oatmeal Breakfast Clafoutis (great made with raspberries and warmed through just before eating)
Love porridge but in a bit of a porridge rut? I've written before about some of my favourite porridge combinations which might give you ideas for new toppings.
And OMG, I can’t believe I nearly forgot the fruit, nut and tahini breakfast bars, a great idea from Cassie and perfected by Kathryn with her tahini twist.

The main event

Swop meatballs in marinara sauce for these fantastic Walnut pecan balls. Great with pasta and tomato sauce and the leftovers are handy in a salad or sandwich.
Use oats as an alternative to breadcrumbs to coat chicken or fish as in this Pan fried mackerel coated with lemon oatmeal
Oat groats can replace spelt, brown rice, buckwheat groats etc in cold salads or serve them warm like this Warm savoury oatgroats with kale recipe from Martha Stewart.
Scottish savoury oat dish Skirlie is quickly prepared and can be used as a side dish or a meal in its own right topped with a poached egg.
This savoury crumble recipe has the added benefit of being packed with vegetables plus canellini and kidney beans.

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Skirlie - fast savoury oats

2009-06-01T19:00:45Z

Skirlie is an old-fashioned savoury oat dish from Scotland made with oats and onions cooked in butter or dripping. I’ve been experimenting with this again recently made with olive oil, fresh herbs and a few extra veggies. It’s ridiculously easy to make, healthy and far easier to wash up than porridge.

Skirlie has a different texture to porridge; it’s a little moist but also chewy, more like the consistency of cooked brown rice. Ergo, if you aren’t keen on porridge in all its gloopiness you may find that you enjoy skirlie. Likewise die hard porridge fans may find it takes a few mouthfuls to get used to.

That gelatinous wobble of properly made porridge comes from the beta glucan in the oats, a type of soluble fibre that becomes jelly-like when moist. Large amounts of this soluble fibre is root of many of those health benefits ascribed to oats. It can keep you feeling full through an ability to swell up dramatically when moist and also because it causes the energy from the oats to be released very slowly into your bloodstream (oats are low GI) . Soluble fibre also seems to assist your body in getting rid of excess cholesterol, helping to protect against cardiovascular disease (and in case you wanted to know but didn’t like to ask, yes soluble fibre helps to keep you regular too). Skirlie contains just as much of this beta glucan as porridge, it’s just that it is less physically apparent than in porrdige because the dish contains so much less liquid. Instead all of that that expansion of the oats will happen inside your stomach instead making skirlie a fairly filling prospect.

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Plum and cherry crumble, with an oat & spelt top

2009-05-21T20:24:05Z

We’ve just spent a few days in the glorious highlands of Scotland. Me with my camera and the triathlete with his bike, taking part in the Caledonian Etape. Or trying to anyway; the whole weekend turned out to be rather more eventful than planned when somebody sabotaged the event by scattering carpet tacks across the route, possibly in protest at the road closures put in place for the event (scheduled to last an incredibly inconvenient three whole hours).

The Scots as it turns out have a whole vocabulary to describe rain. After a dreich day, the rain upgraded its status to stotting down. The weather in England hasn’t been much better since we got back from our break (grey and distinctly chilly) so this seems an opportune time to share a crumble recipe.

I’ve dallied with ‘healthier fats’ in crumbles, but haven’t yet come up with a satisfactory recipe (oils seem to produce a dish more rubble than crumble). A compromise is to accompany the butter with a high fruit to topping ratio, not too much sugar and plenty of good stuff in the topping. Wholemeal spelt flour, whole oats plus roughly chopped hazelnuts for texture. Spelt flour has a toasty, nutty flavour and is my current favourite standby flour for all but the most serious of baking recipes. (Shopping note: as with the unmilled spelt grains, spelt flour comes in wholegrain and white varieties. Check the label to see which sort you are getting).

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Handpicked Links May 2009

2009-05-11T19:13:42Z

A bundle of lovely and inspiring finds for spring

Fresh young things - the French, with their extensive culinary vocabulary, has the designation Les Primeurs to describe those much awaited first vegetables of the spring. The San Francisco Chronicle has lovely serving ideas for those delicate early radish, lettuce, carrots, asparagus, leeks and peas. Now I'm just waiting for my garden to catch up.

Cereal offenders - The Tracing Paper has an interesting post on what is wrong with the breakfast cereals on offer in our shops and why it's so difficult to choose a healthy one. There are a few surprises in there, including the use of beef gelatin and other unexpected animal products in cereals. On a complementary note elsewhere, Chew on This makes the case for making your own breakfast cereal.

Walnut-Pecan Balls I think it was Cassie over at Veggie Meal Plans who pointed me towards these delicious savoury nuggets of oaty goodness. These walnut pecan balls are packed with fibre and protein and make a perfect accompaniment to tomato sauce and pasta. It's well worth making the full quantity to have leftovers for sandwiches, salads etc.

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Braised chicory with orange, honey and pepper

2009-04-23T20:17:58Z

One of the side effects of eulogising about seasonal food is that you can’t help feeling a little bit of a fraud writing about vegetables you’ve never eaten. Enter chicory, the one you might know as belgian endive or witloof. As soon as I had typed the word onto my spring seasonal fruit and veg guide I realised I'd better get my culinary finger out and actually try some.

For some reason we’ve just never gotten round to trying it, probably because of its reputation for bitterness. But the bitter taste isn’t overpowering and makes the perfect foil to a sweet dressing. Chicory is pretty readily available, though it seems to cause the shops a bit of confusion by not fitting neatly into any of the established groupings of vegetables. In our supermarket the chicory was nestled underneath exotic ginger and chillies from much farther afield. Despite chicory being in season in the UK at this time of year much of the stuff we buy in the shops is actually grown in France (around Calais). But as Rose Prince points out in her excellent New English Table book "...strictly speaking this is just 20 miles from Kent, so more local to people in the South of England than a Scottish raspberry."

Orange juice and butter is a classic chicory accompaniment. This braised chicory dish uses olive oil in place of the butter and has a plenty of flavour courtesy of the orange zest and a hint of honey. We had ours with roast chicken but it would go well with anything that isn’t too overpowering in flavour (pork, fish, a multitude of vegetarian dishes or maybe a grain to soak up the juices).

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How to eat healthily through the recession (& still have fun with your food)

2009-04-19T16:33:26Z

Last post we looked at the reality of how people's food shopping has changed during the recession. Some of it is good stuff like eating plenty of seasonal vegetables, while other aspects, like turning to cheaper cuts of meat are potentially less healthy. I've gathered together a few tips for turning those changes in food shopping and lifestyle into healthy ones.

Make staying in the new going out
Rustling up something wonderful at home rather than going out is a shrewd move for both health and wallet. Eating at home means that you have control over what you eat, how it is prepared and the size of your portions. And what better excuse to invite your friends over and use them as guinea pigs for experimenting with whole new area of cuisine? (I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at Japanese cooking but Mediterranean and Indian foods have a similarly strong reputation for combining nutritious ingredients in a flavourful way).

Replace those cheaper cuts of meat with non-animal protein
Casserole and stewing cuts, meat pies and sausages are all generally high in saturated fat and best kept as an occasional treat. More expensive cuts of meat such as lean beef and chicken breast are usually lower in fat which is better for your health, but reducing your total intake of meat seems the best overall strategy. Limiting meat to once or twice a week will save you money, be beneficial for your health and is gaining consensus opinion as the most important dietary change we can make for the environment. Foods such as tofu, beans and eggs can provide all of the protein, iron, zinc and other valuable nutrients your body would otherwise get from meat.

Find a comfort that isn’t food based
A lot of people are feeling the pressure and it’s easy to see why sales of comfort foods are on the up. The recession is likely to be here for a while (and even without it life tends to have a way of sending us twists and turns), so now is the time to start thinking about a few boosts that aren’t food based. Exercise is a fabulous way to improve your mood and there are few activities cheaper than a walk round the block, or or half an hour in the garden. Exercise can also help to ease the health effects caused by more serious financial worries such as depression, anxiety and lack of sleep. For more cheap exercise suggestions these posts on Digeratilife and Bankrate.com are good places to start.

If your comfort eating is more boredom based and you've already been out and exercised then consider finding some other (cheap) activities to do of an evening (it’s no coincidence that stay-home hobbies like knitting see such a resurgence in popularity in a recession).

Keeping up your fruit intake without relying on imported, tropical fruits
Tropical fruits are expensive and not sustainable after they have been pre-prepared, over-packaged and air-freighted half-way round the world,. But with the lack of locally grown fruit available at this time of year it can be hard to know what to eat instead. My compromise is to buy hardier, more locally imported seasonal fruits (such as European citrus) as well as nutritious frozen summer berries and canned fruits.

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The reality of recession eating

2009-04-16T18:22:58Z

The last few months have seen endless talk about what will happen to our diets in the recession and the potential impact this will have on health. There is a worry that people will turn to unhealthy processed foods which are often (perceived as) cheaper to buy, increasing intakes of empty calories, sugar, saturated fat and salt.

Last year most of these kinds of articles were pure conjecture, a few weeks ago saw the release of some interesting real figures from the British Retail Consortium. The report showed that UK spending on food in January was actually up 5.1% compared with January 2008, while spending fell in all other areas of retail including clothes, homewares, health and beauty all fell.

Increased prices account for some of this increased spending but the rise has also been fuelled by the trend for staying in, now the new going out. There were other notable trends in food purchases besides eating in, some of which are healthier than others:

Totally unsurprisingly, comfort food has become popular (maybe also have stimulated by an unusually cold, snowy Winter).
Sales of cheaper cuts of meat such as casserole meats and sausages have increased.
Seasonal produce is “in”, particularly root vegetables such as parsnips and carrots, but also the much maligned brussels sprout.
Expensive, imported tropical fruit is decreasing in popularity.
Home baking is catching on in a big way, and with it the potential to increase sugar, fat and energy intakes.
Happily the recession is not stopping people from shopping ethically, with Fairtrade and Higher Welfare meat sales both keeping their ground

The figures suggest that the recession isn’t too heavily affecting the quality of food and drink people are enjoying at home, while spending in other areas have taken a bit of a bashing. Obviously this wont be true for everybody and some families will have been financially much harder hit and may have had to change their food spending considerably. But overall, for a country so often lambasted for the low priority we give to food (both financially and in other ways) I think these findings are great news indeed But there are a few things in this list that aren't necessarily all that healthy but that could become healthy with a bit of thought. Some thoughts on making the most of your diet in a recession are on the way in my next post.

Seasonal Fruit and Vegetable Guide - Spring

2009-04-05T14:42:16Z

This post is the second in a set of seasonal guides on Mostly Eating. The guides are quarterly, aiming to accomodate those uncertainties induced by geography and climate which easily throw growing schedules out by a few weeks.

Here’s what you will find here:

a list of fruits and vegetables in season between late March and early June. I’ve developed my list from a consensus opinion across a variety of sources including Eat the seasons, River Cottage and the Scottish What’s on your plate guide. It’s good for the UK and also for much of Northern Europe and the less sunny parts of the USA (for a State by State guide check out the Sustainable Table). For you antipodeans, Kathryn usually has a list for New South Wales.
Recipe and snack suggestions that center around using the seasonal produce listed to help you to base your diet around fruits and vegetables.
There's a pretty PDF version of the list to stick on your fridge, or tuck into the front of your favourite vegetable cookbook as a quick reminder of what to look out for when you go shopping. The Spring recipe and meal suggestions are on the back.

Spring produce guide
Spring has to be the most anticipated of the seasons, particularly after the unusually cold and snowy winter we've just had. Many spring vegetables are brief visitors (blink and you'll miss the asparagus and purple sprouting broccoli) but all the more appreciated because of this. With the exception of rhubarb, local seasonal fruits are few and far between - we have been supplementing our kitchen with delicious frozen berries, canned soft fruits.

Seasonal fruits and vegetables for Spring

asparagus, broccoli, brussels sprouts, mushrooms, potatoes, chicory, cabbage, rhubarb, leeks, spinach, spring onions, purple-sprouting broccoli, new potatoes, cauliflower, radishes, carrots, watercress

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Italian lentil and chestnut stew

2009-03-26T20:21:28Z

This lentil and chestnut stew is a traditional dish in Italy and the epitome of the Mediterranean diet in Winter. The main ingredients here are lentils and many different vegetables, with porcini mushrooms for a depth and chestnuts for a hint caramel sweetness. I use pretty lenticche umbre (you can see their gorgeous colours in the photograph) but any lentil that holds its shape will do such as green or puy lentils.

The finished dish keeps well in the fridge or freezer and is wonderfully versatile; I cook up a really big batch of this ready to serve in a variety of ways.

Serving suggestions

Serve with a simple bruschetta; sliced bread rubbed with garlic, lightly toasted and topped with a drizzle of olive oil.
For additional luxury, top your bruschetta with cheese and grill until melting (the strong flavour of stilton works well).
Mix a helping of the stew with additional hot water, vegetable stock and / or canned tomatoes to make a rustic soup. Stir in a swirl of balsamic vinegar before eating.
Cook a batch of pasta in boiling water (chestnut flour pasta is lovely if you can find it). While the pasta cooks, scoop out a little of the cooking water with a mug. Drain the pasta and return it to the hot pan, tossing it with a little olive oil, a small handful of grated parmesan and a slosh of the retained cooking water. Top a serving of the glossy, coated pasta with a ladle of the stew and a sprinkling of parsley.
Scoop a ladleful of stew over a fluffy baked potato.
Eat it on its own with a grating of cheese on top.

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What to eat now - a Mediterranean or Nordic style diet?

2009-03-22T18:23:51Z

Spring is in the air, which might seem an odd time to be writing about Winter, but what better time is there to reflect over what we have been eating over the last months? More and more evidence is gathering to support the Mediterranean diet for health and longevity, but there’s something in the mere mention of Mediterranean food that evokes images of sun-loving plants and al fresco eating. Is this a diet we can keep up through the Winter, or should those of us in colder parts be switching to a Nordic style diet?

Published in the British Medical Journal last year was a high quality research paper which suggests that sticking to a Mediterranean diet is even more beneficial to health than previously thought. The article was a systematic review and meta-analysis, a way of pooling the results of a number of studies together to give a result that is more accurate and more reliable than those from the individual studies alone. Its findings gave some convincing evidence that closely following a Mediterranean diet can enable you to live for longer and significantly reduce your risk of developing heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

A Mediterranean diet as defined by this Florence University study involves building your diet around these food groups:

legumes (beans and peas)
fruit and vegetables, in all different forms
cereals such as bread and pasta
fish (including but not limited to oily fish)
a moderate amount of wine with meals
a high ratio of monounsaturated fat to saturated fat

It doesn’t sound so much like health food does it, just good eating? There are two valuable messages buried in this research paper. Firstly, the “Mediterranean diet” [in research terms] is relatively un-prescriptive one. You don’t have to eat tomatoes and peppers; other vegetables count, and you can substitute that olive oil for another fat with a similar nutritional profile (such as rapeseed oil). The second point is that the results are all about adherence; the more Mediterranean your diet is, the greater the health benefits.

Trying to muscle its way into the Med diet's much coveted "optimum diet" slot this week has been a newcomer, the new Nordic diet. There’s an intriguing argument emerging advocating that some areas of the world (the UK included) have a climate much more akin to that of the Nordic countries than those of the Mediterranean and that we should be a Nordic style diet, including ingredients such as barley, oats, rye, cabbage, cold pressed rape oil, sea foods and fish, berries, wild game and freerange meat products. Newspaper headlines (“Nordic diet as healthy as Mediterranean foods”) as usual suggest that we should all be making a wholesale swap to the Nordic diet.

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How to make a quick stir-fry from your store cupboard

2009-03-08T16:51:03Z

Making a quick lunch from your larder needn’t be a big deal. As a food fanatic it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-thinking your next meal, deliberating what to make for so long that eventually you are so hungry you’ll eat anything. Sometimes it’s good to remember that you are just getting yourself something to eat, grab a few nutritious ingredients and get on with it.

Everybody has (or can plan to have) some combination of these ingredients in stock and use them to knock up a quick lunch. Unlike most stir-fries, this is a true one-pan meal because it doesn’t require you to cook a separate grain (thanks goes to Nigella Lawson for the nifty idea of using a can of drained beans instead of cooking rice or noodles). With the step of boiling water neatly side-stepped, your lunch really can be ready in ten minutes.

This recipe is just a template, a broad list of foods into which you can substitute whatever you have available. The recipe given is a template from which you can experiment and find your own favourite combination:

Frozen meat substitute
Quorn, seitain, tofu, vegetarian “stir fry strips”, “chicken style pieces”
All of these ingredients are a good source of protein, lower in saturated fat than most meats and can be cooked straight from the freezer.

Canned legumes
Chickpeas (garbanzo), butter beans, red kidney beans, cannellini beans, flageolet beans, borlotti beans, mixed pulses.
Legumes provide fibre, carbohydrate and protein as well as providing a useful vegetarian source of iron. Contributes towards your five a day.

A flavoursome paste
Thai curry pastes, indian curry pastes, sun dried tomato paste, pesto, tapenade
These ingredients can be high in fat but a small amount can provide heaps of flavour.

Fresh green leaves
Baby spinach, kale, rocket, green cabbages, watercress, chard, spring greens
Rich in vitamins, minerals and fibre, counts towards your five a day.

A crunchy, quick cooking vegetable
Bell pepper, courgette (zucchini)
Rich in vitamins, minerals and fibre, counts towards your five a day.

A cooking oil
Olive oil, rapeseed (vegetable) oil
These oils are high in monounsaturated fats, thought to be beneficial for heart health.

Between the beans, green leafy veg and peppers a portion of this stir-fry provides at least two of your five a day.

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In praise of pisto and a perfectly balanced meal

2009-02-22T10:19:32Z

There’s a recipe that keeps popping up and I’ve been trying to ignore it, because surely something that simple isn’t going to make a decent dinner? It’s called pisto, a kind ratatouille that is a regular feature in Spanish home kitchens. Having given in and tried it, I’m now completely sold on the idea. It’s not the pisto alone that has entranced me, but the traditional serving suggestion; the familiarity of rice with a homely, tangy tomato sauce and topped with a perfect runny egg. Pisto is a new stock item on our list of easy weeknight suppers but don’t let me limit your ideas. For starters I’m sure this would make a perfect weekend brunch.

As a meal this is environmentally sustainable, nutritionally well balanced and stress free to make. What’s not to like?

It’s so darn easy
This is not an instant dinner (a misleading term if ever there was, as we discussed last week) but it is a forgiving sort of a meal to make, with very little active input required and little that can go wrong. Ximena Maier of Lobstersquad explains the attraction of making pisto “What I like about it is that it has a very relaxed rhythm. You only have to follow the order of ingredients, and throw them in the pan as soon as they´re chopped. There´s no anxiously waiting for something to be just right, no stressful wild chopping while something may burn. Things will happen while they must, and a minute up and down isn´t a big deal.” In fact if you have a rice cooker then cooking dinner becomes a very leisurely affair indeed.

The eggs are gently cooked in little dents made in the pisto with the back of a spoon. This results in all of the gooey loveliness of a poached egg but with none of the scariness of egg poaching for the uninitiated (though there are many reasons why it is worth learning how to poach an egg if you haven’t already).

Nutritional balance
Pisto with brown rice and an egg is the very model of a well balanced meal. Vegetables predominate the dish and are there in a range of colours which intimates that you are about to eat a good variety of vitamins and antioxidants. Eggs provide low fat protein and are cooked without the addition of any extra fat. The carbohydrate source is wholegrain. The total amount of fat used in the recipe is small and monounsaturated in nature. And there is synergy between the ingredients too with the brown rice, egg and vegetables combing to give a reasonable hit of iron and the added benefit of vitamin C from the peppers which enables your body to better absorb these vegetarian iron sources.

Flexibility and Flexitarianism
I’m bound to offend some (Spanish) people with my messing about with the basic pisto recipe (then it’s not pisto, right?) but another very pleasing quality about using this as the inspiration for a meal is that you can adjust it a little according to what’s in the fridge. If you want to make your pisto more seasonal and local you can; as it is mid Winter here I compromised with canned tomatoes in place of the traditional raw but used imported organic peppers. An official common variation in Spain is to use eggplant (aubergine) instead of courgette but a carrot works just fine too. And if you’ve got half a bag of spinach or another greeny leafy veg in the fridge then why not chuck some of that in too (I also keep frozen spinach which you can just chuck straight in from the freezer).

Brown rice is my accompaniment of choice but try experimenting with other wholegrains like buckwheat groats or quinoa.

This is definitely a no meat required dish adding to its sustainable credentials but the flexitarian among you might enjoy a bit of chorizo sausage for an occasional variation.

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Handpicked Links February 2009

2009-02-17T17:21:48Z

A selection of online finds that have caught my eye recently:

Spicy Chick-Wheat Savory Muffins from Have Cake Will Travel are very cute and would make a great breakfast on the go, snack or lunch accompaniment. These savoury muffins are made with chickpea flour, wholewheat flour and tahini, spiced to taste with cumin, masala and chilli flakes.

Sarah Raven’s seed catalog - I’ve wondered for a while now where people get those appealing and unusual heritage vegetable varieties like candy stripe beetroot, purple french beans and 'Turks Turban' gourds. Gardener and cookbook author Sarah Raven stocks many of them in her wonderful online seed shop . If, like me, you aren’t very green fingered and have no idea where to start try Seeds to sow now or the Beginner’s Vegetable Collection.

How to Eat Less Meat from Shauna over at Dietgirl is full of practical tips for vegetarian wannabes on approaches like making vegetables the center of your meal, veggifying your old favourites and making use of big and bold flavours.

The 20 Healthiest Foods for Under $1 over at Divine Caroline. Normally I’m not big on list posts but this one reinforces an important point. You don’t need to spend lots of money on goji berries or pomegranate juice or whatever is superfood of the month. You just need to avoid high fat, high sugar junk and choose good, nutritious normal foods like oats, apples, bananas, nuts, beans, sardines and spinach.

How long does it take to prepare an instant meal? is the question posed by Kathryn Elliott over at Limes and Lycopene. She asks if us nutritionists and recipe writers should lay off the “instant”, “quick” and “easy” adjectives when it comes to recipes and just admit that if you want to eat well then you have to put a little bit of time and effort into it.

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Spiced Winter Pavlova

2009-02-11T17:28:04Z

This pavlova is a serious pudding, not a health food. The meringue is fudgy with brown sugar. The fruit topping is vanilla and honey scented and textured with fig seeds. The cream layer is a blend of whipped cream and greek yogurt. It’s really good though, so I thought you wouldn’t mind the brief deviation from all that nutritiousness.

The pavlova was supposed to be the caramel apple pavlova from the Riverford Farm cookbook. We had friends coming to dinner and I promised myself that I’d stick to the recipe, just this once. And then when I made the meringue the night before the dinner I figured swapping in a little bit of muscovado sugar couldn’t hurt, but that I’d stick to the plan with the caramel apple topping. And then our friends had to cancel because of the heavy snow we’ve had...

Inspired among other recipes by Stonesoup’s version of Maggie Beer’s fig pavlova I made a winter fruit compote with plums and dried figs, spiced with vanilla, cinnamon, star anise and honey. A compote based on dried and (gasp!) canned fruit neatly skirts round the problem of the lacklustre fruit available in the UK at this time of year and gives the whole dish a decidedly seasonal feel. You can use fresh fruit by all means but just think about it; nutritionally you’re not really missing out, it is environmentally sound at this time of year and you won’t be infuriated by fruit that doesn’t ripen in time for your guests. Mixing whipped cream with a helping of lower-in-fat greek yogurt is a worthwhile twist that gives a contrasting sour note in the middle of all that sweetness.

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Super Natural Recipe Search Engine

2009-02-08T20:45:18Z

Supernatural Recipe Search Engine is a new search engine for finding recipes that utilise natural, minimally processed ingredients. It's such a lovely and useful idea that I wanted to write a quick post to let you know about it.

I'm sure many of you will have found your way over to the site already as the Super Natural Recipe Search is the creation of Heidi Swanson of the popular 101 cookbooks site and author of one my favourite cookbooks, Super Natural Cooking. You can give it a try at www.supernaturalrecipes.com. The distinguishing feature that really makes it is that the links included are all handpicked right down to the level of the individual recipes, immediately adding a whole heap of value to the results returned.

Here's what Heidi has written about how the search engine is populated:

"This search engine will not query each of the sites in its index in its entirety. Instead, I went through each site page by page, cherry-picking the recipes I could imagine cooking in my own kitchen - again, the ones highlighting whole grains, natural sweeteners, a wide range of flours, and plenty of fresh produce."

The SuperNatural Search Engine has a number of different widgets so that you can add a search facility to your site; I've added one to Mostly Eating to try it out as I'm sure this will turn into an extremely useful resource as more and more recipes are added. Now to see if I can find out what to do with that millet I bought...