Buffets and Parties

Buffets and Parties

The party season is upon us, with lots of opportunities for gatherings with food and drink to enjoy. Having recently arranged a party, I discovered how tricky it is to get a caterer that will do real food and it got me thinking about how wildly variable the quality of party food can be.

I was also musing on some business events I went to this year. Some were dire – classic corporate carb fests (and in anticipation I had taken some food with me) but I won’t name and shame.  Tables full of processed padding to push you towards weight gain and T2diabetes. I wonder how many of those that ate them were still sharp (or even awake) in the afternoon.

A shining contrast was at the Torpenhow Organic Cheese Farm. Delicious, nutritious, colourful.

Here are a few pics – from the truly terrible ultra-processed offerings in the supermarkets’ party sections, through buffets I’ve seen at business events and finally a fabulous social event.

On sale now:

-some better of course, like cheeses and cold meats

– others ultra-processed and loaded with seed oil; best left in the shop.

Monochromatic beige feast:

Sandwiches and chips.

Has potential:

There’s some protein in the sausage rolls, sandwich fillings and quiche. Other than the pickled onions, almost no plants in evidence – even the salad is mostly pasta. Everything on the table came with carbs.

Better but nutritionally lacking:

Salad and chips with veg soup – 100% carbs with no protein or fats – luckily I had some cheese in my bag 🙂

Key survival tips for buffets like these – eat the fillings from the sandwiches and any salad garnish, go easy on bread, chips and crisps, and skip any cakes – especially doughnuts. Or, knowing what these dos are usually like, take some emergency supplies with you. Unfortunate but necessary unless you’re happy to suffer the after effects.

And the best which I will name and celebrate:

Torpenhow Organic Cheese Farm

Finally, a gathering of retired colleagues.

Caterer – Lizzie from Seascale bakery; a lady who understands real food – I’ll use her again!!!!

Top tip: Even at parties, eat real food

Special Christmas Treat

What you really want for Christmas might not be something you wrap up under the tree. You might want to feel better, have more oomph, enjoy better health.

This Christmas, treat yourself to a personal consultation with me. You’ll love it when you learn how to eat well for a more vibrantly healthy life.

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The Terrible Truth about Treats

Once upon a time in the merry, 3-meals-a-day, real-food land of Britain, we didn’t snack and were slim and healthy. We farmed the earth and ate its good plants and animals. Then they invented ultra-processed snacks, manufactured not for their nutritional value or because we need them but for the sole purpose of making money. The damage to our health is well established so they’re marketed as ‘treats’ or ‘fun’ and the £££s roll in as we stuff our faces.

Adverts stick in your subconscious: Milky Way “the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite” (1970) “A finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat” (1979) “Have a break, have a Kit Kat” (1958). “A drink’s too wet without one” Rich Tea (1985). And I bet you know who makes exceedingly good cakes.

The culture shifted from occasional treats to snacking every day. There’s no escaping temptation, unhealthy nibbles constantly surround us. They’re at work, in town, thrust at us when buying a newspaper, alongside us as we queue to pay for petrol. The young people have noticed and are rightly angry (@BiteBack2030).

Autumn is a danger to our health.

• September – The Macmillan coffee morning
• October – Halloween
• November – Bonfire Night
• December – Christmas (although the chocolates have been on sale since summer).

Halloween masks, costumes and pumpkin lanterns are scary enough, but read the ingredients lists on these products for a real fright. How weird that we “treat” our kids (and ourselves) with health-damaging sugar and chemicals.

For better health

• Only eat when you’re hungry
• Eat high-nutrition, satisfying meals so you don’t get hungry
• Snack on healthy real food like nuts, cheese or a piece of fruit.

Top tip – Avoid terrible treats

If you’d like to clean up your habits, book a consultation.

jackie@learntoeatwell.co.uk

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Cheese Farm Visit

I’ve just been on a Cumbria Chamber of Commerce visit to Park House Organic Cheese Farm at Torpenhow (pronounced TrePENa).

Mostly I dread (and avoid) the food at business events as it invariably consists of tables laden with processed beige – a health-damaging carb fest guaranteed to send everyone snoozy afterwards.

Not at Park House Farm. How fabulous is this?

And of course their milk to drink. (Plus some Zingi Bear organic ginger switchel – but I’ll tell you about that another time.)

Park House milk is the real thing. Creamy and delicious with all the nutrition that should be in milk.

(Timely perhaps that this piece on ‘not milks’ popped on Twitter the other day.)

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Mark and Jenny told us how they had come to run this inspirational farm the way they do.

Mark and Jenny

When the milk price crashed in 2015 and it was costing 28p/l to produce milk which they could only sell for 15p/l, they realised that they would need to change direction or go bankrupt.

They decided to go organic and to work with nature instead of battling against it. No fertiliser. No herbicides, no pesticides.

They split their fields into smaller paddocks, replanting hedgerows removed decades before during the time of intensification. They removed the problem of slurry by keeping the cows outside instead of indoors making Park House the only 100% pasture-fed farm in Cumbria. They use mob-grazing to move the cows around the paddocks. They embrace weeds and use lots of different types of plants in their grass – especially clover which is a natural nitrogen fixer.

It took time for their artificial-nitrogen addicted grass to get over the shock, but now it is the lushest, healthiest grass I’ve ever seen and took quite some effort to wade through as we walked up the field to see the cows.

And what beautiful cows they were. So healthy and content, fed only on grass and organic silage.

Living at the mercy of the milk buyers was a stressful life so Mark and Jenny started to make cheese with their milk. You can buy it at the farm, locally in good food shops like Shill’s of Cockermouth and from the farm’s online shop. There’s cheddar, the nicest brie I’ve ever eaten, a crumbly Lancashire, one oak smoked and Binsey Red which I particularly enjoyed. And I await with eager anticipation the return to production of their blue.

You’ll be hearing more about the Torpenhow Cheese Farm later.

Top tip – Treat yourself to some Torpenhow organic cheese.

PS – there’s a petition asking the new PM to work for nature by supporting organic farming.  Here’s the link to sign.

 

Scary Times

Halloween is coming up soon. It’s the evening before All Saints’ Day, literally, all hallows even. Houses and shops are currently festooned with scary stuff. But for me there’s something even more scary.

I got this flyer through the post – encouraging me to spend money on sugar and chemical laden drinks and snacks to damage the health of children.

Junk foods are often advertised as ‘treats’. Something special to be enjoyed. It’s true I am a grumpy old woman these days but it makes me angry that they take advantage like this. Here we are in the European country that eats the most processed food and has the worst health and they want to profit from making it worse!

The biggest cause of child hospitalisation is for surgical tooth extraction – sometimes because teeth are so rotted by sugar they all have to be removed.

Rather than clamp down on manufacturers or adopt policies to help with teeth cleaning (like the Child Smile programme in Scotland where fluoridation is illegal), the Government now wants to put toxic fluoride in all of England’s water. Most countries of the world do not do this and rates of tooth decay are the same as countries that do.

Fluoride is very poisonous and damaging to health in many ways, particularly the brain. Applying it directly to teeth may be helpful (eg in toothpaste, which you may or may not have noticed comes with warnings against swallowing it!). Taking it systemically does not have the same effect. Water fluoridation is unethical mass-medication without informed consent and with no dose control. And it brings a host of problems including reduced IQ in children. I’ve signed the Government petition against it and you can too here.

So back to the Halloween sugar problem. If you want a fun time on 31st October, look for other ways to provide treats.

What about going on a nature walk and looking for the scariest insect or creepiest tree branch? You could hold a party or play some games, do something crafty, make some tasty pumpkin soup or roast what you hollow out from your lantern.

Top tip – find better treats than junk food.

Keep Calm and Soothe Your Immune System

Christmas is only days away but due to the restrictions it won’t be the merry one we know and love. I’d be grateful for any ideas on how to hold a large family party on Zoom!

We’re coming to the end of the worst year most of us have ever experienced. A world-wide annus horribilis. And it’s taken its toll.

In the summer I spoke to someone who does thermography scans. She has noticed that all the scans this year shown people’s immune systems were over-stimulated. She thinks it’s a result of all the anxiety.

What can we do?

Your nervous system has two parts.

• One part responds to threats using fight, flight or freeze.

• The other part deals with rest, repair and digestion.

We need both in balance.

The threat response part is only supposed to work in short bursts -followed by recovery. This hasn’t changed from ancient days when we had to run from danger.

This year our threat response has been in action big-time, for months. We feel that we’ve been under threat this whole year.

Fear of the virus; fear of lockdown consequences like job losses, business closures, home losses, inability to pay bills, uncertainty over the future; stress from being physically cut off from those we love and who support us emotionally; stress from being shut in with those who abuse us; stress from children being out of school and all the exam chaos; stress from losing trust in the government and its actions; grief for the loss of friends, family and the things that enrich our lives like sports clubs, choirs, restaurants and theatres; misery for not having anything to look forward to and no end in sight.

The list is endless and the fall-out is only just beginning to emerge.

It’s no good pretending that everything is fine.

It isn’t.

All is not well.

And it’s right to acknowledge how you feel at each moment in time.

It’s also good to do things, even little things, that help in any way.

Here are some ideas:

When we get stressed, our breathing changes. Fortunately this works both ways so deliberately changing our breathing can make us become calmer. By using the link between your breathing and your nervous system you allow your body to do some resting, digesting, healing.

Here’s a nice breathing exercise (it’s part of a talk on the body-mind connection from the Public Health Collaboration Virtual Conference).  Start at 28minutes 30 seconds to hear the explanation then do it for a few minutes a few times a day, perhaps even more slowly than Joe’s description.  Try it just before you eat so you get maximum nutrition from your food.

Chronic stress increases the hormone cortisol. That makes us hungry so some of us have put on weight. When my Father was dying in the spring, I wanted to eat all the time. I called it my ‘grief gut’. You can get back to proper appetite balance by calming down (as well as ditching junk and eating real food of course).

You will have some personal favourite activities that get you into a relaxed state. You’ll know when you’ve found what’s right for you – time will cease to exist, you’ll feel in the zone, you’ll be so absorbed you won’t notice anything going on around you.

I’m a fan of mindfulness, which is all about noticing how things are, moment by moment, without trying to change them (see this little mindfulness video).

Most people feel good doing yoga or T’ai Chi. It’s necessary to be fully engaged in balance and movement when you stand on one leg – or you fall over!

TV can veg us out but often doesn’t calm us; it’s too passive and lots of programmes feature people being unkind or shouting which will trigger your subconscious defences even more. Try Slow TV, listen to the birds in your garden or mellow out with a nature video – here’s one of a woodland stream (with no birdsong – videos with birds are available!).

The right music works magic too. If you’re up-tight, your brain might reject gentle music, so start with something quite fast, easing it down gradually.

Visually relaxing activities include jigsaws, art and needlework. Stick a bird feeder on your window for delightfully entertaining action to watch.

Getting physical with exercise, gardening, walking the dog or even cleaning the house might work for you. (Take care not to do too much; extreme exercise is like another threat and depresses your immune system.) Gentle stretching helps release muscle tension. Mindful walking in nature gives you physical, mental and visual calming in one.

Waft away and be relaxed by scent – in the bath, as an aromatherapy massage or in a diffuser (always use essential oils, not factory-made perfumes).

Losing yourself in a good book can take you to another place entirely.

Being creative in the kitchen engages all the senses and you get to eat something wonderful at the end!

Top tip: Ramp up whatever calms you.

I wish you a peaceful, if far from normal, Christmas.

Get Cooking For Christmas

Have fun with home-made this Christmas.

Yes, creating decorations and cards is fun – but I mean food! Are you like me, rather free and easy in the kitchen? I rarely weigh or measure anything and often play fast and loose with recipe ingredients and methods. Or you might be like my friend who puts a recipe book on a stand to follow everything to the letter using measuring jugs and scales for each ingredient. I suspect she has few disasters!

I love Emma Porter’s recipes and she has an ebook just for Christmas.

So leaf through your recipe books or browse the internet.   Here are a few from my own recipe book:  

Apple sauce

Peel, core and chop a cooking apple.

Put in a pan with a drop of water, some lemon juice, a pinch of salt and a pinch of nutmeg or mixed spice.

Cook until the apple is soft.

Beat in a teaspoon of butter.

Put in a hot clean jar, lid and allow to cool.

After the jar is opened, keep in the fridge and use within a week.

Mince pies

For a rich pastry:

8oz flour, ½ tsp salt, 4oz butter – rub together until resembling breadcrumbs.

Lightly beat together an egg and 20ml water. Sprinkle on and mix using a knife. Draw together and knead briefly into a smooth dough then put in the fridge for ½ h (covered).

Roll out the pastry on a floured surface and cut your tops and bottoms.

Grease a bun tin (not muffin tin) with butter and assemble your pies, putting a teaspoon of mincemeat in each. You’ll use a small (410g) jar of mincemeat for this much pastry and it makes about 20 pies.

Put two knife cuts in the top of each one and brush with milk.

Bake in a preheated oven at 220 degrees C for 20 minutes or until golden brown.

These will last a couple of weeks in a tin. They freeze well too and are great warmed up with some cream on.

For Gluten free, low-carb, use a mix of 4oz ground almonds, 2oz coconut flour and 2oz tapioca to give some elasticity. 4oz butter, ½ tsp salt and one egg as above.

 

Sardine pate

The world’s 2nd most nutritious food (after liver) but not everyone is keen on them on their own. This very simple recipe gives a fresh, clean taste and with a bit of salad would make a tasty starter for Christmas dinner. It will keep for a few days in the fridge.

4oz butter

4oz cream cheese

2 tins sardines

Juice and zest of a lemon

1 teaspoon mustard

1 desert spoon fresh chopped parsley

Salt, pepper

If you have a food processor, you can whizz it in that. Other wise, use soft butter, put the all ingredients in a bowl and beat with a wooden spoon.

 

Rum truffles

220g dark chocolate

100ml single cream

12g butter

Drop of vanilla essence

15ml rum

A saucer of dry coating of your choice – eg cocoa powder, desiccated coconut, sesame seeds, chopped nuts.

Heat the cream and butter to a rolling boil, then allow to cool and add the vanilla essence.

Break the chocolate into small pieces and melt gently in the microwave.

Mix the chocolate and cream and add the rum.

Pour into a shallow tray or dish lined with greaseproof paper and put it somewhere cool, uncovered for 24 hours.

Take about a teaspoon at a time and form into balls.

Roll the truffles around your saucer until they are coated and not sticky to touch any more. You can pop them into individual sweet papers.

Keep in the fridge. (no pic – I haven’t made any yet for this year!!!)   Top tip – Enjoying cooking up some goodies for Christmas.

Engage You Cumbria

This week I appeared as a guest on the weekly show

Engage You Cumbria

a community support YouTube channel which Kathryn Jackson and Claire Bull started to keep us all positive, healthy and entertained during lockdown.

In this week’s episode, Claire talked about kindness (but check out her exercise tips in earlier episodes too) and Kathryn led us through how we can reflect on the last 10 weeks and where we are in different areas of our lives.

My message was #EatRealFood with some ideas for breakfasts to keep your blood-sugar stable so you improve your health and reduce your risk of a serious outcome should you catch the dreaded virus.

Here’s the video. Enjoy!

Immune System Boost

I hope all of you are OK and managing to stay safe and sane at home in this weird world. Here are some tips to help your immune system:

Most of your immune system is in your gut so it matters what you eat and drink. Eat more:

• Oily fish and eggs for vitamin Dwhich has many health benefits, including priming our T cells

• Vegetables which give you lots of vitamins, minerals, enzymes and antioxidants plus fibre to feed the good bacteria in your gut.

• Live natural yoghurt, kefir, lassi and fermented vegetables to repopulate your good bacteria.
• Coconut oil which has anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties.

Supplement with:

• Vitamin C (it’s quickly flushed out of your body so take some every day)
• Magnesium (most people are deficient)
• Selenium (2 or 3 Brazils nuts a day is plenty)
• Zinc (good food sources are seafood, lamb, turkey and pumpkin seeds)
• Vitamin D (most of us are short of this unless we supplement – especially at this time of year when our skin hasn’t seen sunshine for so long)

Avoid:

• Sugar – it feeds bad bacteria, unbalancing your system.

• Processed food – you want your body to cope with the virus, not use all its energy fighting bad food.
• Alcohol.

Other tips:

• Eat right for your metabolic type (I’m now offering testing by Skype/telephone).

• Get lots of sleep to make the powerful anti-oxidant melatonin.

• Exercise, especially out in the fresh air (only with members of your household of course!). It will help you sleep better too.
• If you smoke, give it up now.
• Wash with actual bar soap whenever you possibly can. Coronaviruses are in a fatty ‘envelope’ which can be destroyed by soap. Also soap won’t damage your own protective bacterial like antibacterials do. Joanna Blythman retweeted this Tweet thread on why soap is so good.Solutions of ethyl alcohol and isopropyl alcohol at between 60% and 80%, plus 3% hydrogen peroxide are effective for cleaning surfaces
• Manage stress and prioritise self-care. Your mental health, physical health and immune system are connected so it helps to keep a sense of purpose and optimism. We won’t get back to normal for some time yet so look after yourself and do things that relax you and give you joy.

Puddings – a poem

PUDDINGS

Treacle Pud, that’s really good,

Arctic Roll, says it all.

Raspberry Ripple, goes well with a tipple,

Wobbly Jelly, shakes in the belly.

Currant Cake, with a cup of tea to take,

Black Forest Gateaux, makes you fatto.

Sticky Toffee Pudding, that’s a real good un,

Banoffie Toffee, yummy with coffee.

Sago, Tapioca and Rice, old fashioned but nice.

Treacle Tart and Lemon Meringue,

So many puddings, I could go on and on.

Yum, yum, puddings galore,

Like Oliver Twist, I want more, more, more.

Jennie Doran

From the book of her poetry

Poems on Life, Faith and a Widow’s Love

just published and available here.

Soup to cheer your lunchtime

Salads are out and we want a warming soup to cheer our lunchtime.  Luckily it’s easy to make your own with hundreds of recipes on the internet in every flavour you could wish for.

Home made soup is cheap, delicious, nutritious and fresh. It’s good for your health to eat a wide variety of foods and soup is a good way to ‘hide’ those you’re not so keen on and wouldn’t eat on their own. Use your imagination and be a bit free and easy when creating your soup.

My standard recipe goes something like this:

(All ingredients should be cut small before they go in the pan.)

Cook an onion in butter until transparent.

Add a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, a carrot and couple of sticks of celery and cook for a couple more minutes.

Add 1/3 tin of tomatoes, handful each of cabbage stems and cauliflower leaves (for the waste-not-want-not generation you can save these earlier in the year; just wash, chop and pop in the freezer), stock or bouillon to cover, a squirt of tomato puree, salt, pepper, 1 tsp dried oregano, 1 tsp dried parsley (or fresh if you have it in which case you’ll need about 1 tbsp).

I often add saved ‘juices’ from beef stew for a richer flavour. You could even cut up cooked meats to put in. Deli counters often sell cheap mixed offcuts.

Bring to the boil, simmer for 5 minutes, add some green beans and peas. Simmer for another 10 minutes. Tip in a small (300g) tin of mixed pulses. Use a stick blender to whizz it smooth. Freeze in portions for use on other days.

Following my principle of plants, protein and fats, to make a more nutritionally rounded meal from this almost all carb soup, skip the bread and serve with a slice of cheese.

This one’s pumpkin.

Pumpkin Soup

Just chop the flesh of a 2-3lb pumpkin into cubes, put in a large saucepan with 3/4 pint stock, salt, pepper, fresh thyme and parsley.  Bring to the boil then cover and simmer for 30 minutes.  Add a tin of mixed beans and simmer for another 10 minutes.  Whizz with a stick blender then stir in a 1/2 pint tin of coconut milk.  That’s it!

I’ve also looked at what’s available to buy.

As far as possible, try to avoid unhealthy ingredients like sunflower oil, sugar and MSG that are so often used in manufactured food products. Look out too for misleading labels on products containing only tiny amounts of the most appealing bit yet naming it in big letters splashed across the front. (This applies to food, shampoo, you name it.) Always check the ingredients list on the label, they appear in order from most to least.

‘Fresh’ cartons and pouches – found in the cold aisle. The New Covent Garden veg based soups look pretty good but the Smoked Haddock is mostly potato and with only 5% fish has a disappointing nutritional profile for a fish chowder. Similarly, Naked’s Vietnamese Fiery Beef Pho contains no beef, just beef stock (only 5%) plus loads of spices to give it flavour.

Tins – most supermarkets sell a huge array of tinned soups including own-brand and many manufacturers. Usually these have a dozen ingredients (excluding water and any added vitamins/minerals). The best I found was Crosse and Blackwell’s Roast Chicken and Vegetable which has all real food ingredients in respectable amounts, as has Baxter’s Super Good Pea, Broccoli and Pesto soup.

Free and Easy soups – are useful if you have food allergies/intolerances.

Packet soups – can be useful at the office or if out and about but you don’t want your flask tainted with last week’s lunch.  They usually have about 17 ingredients but this varies widely. Surprisingly, Batchelor’s Minestrone Slim a Soup, at a whopping 27, contains 10 more than their Minestrone Cup a Soup. Batchelor’s Chicken and Leek is another misleading name with only 1% chicken. The Morrisons Golden Vegetable with Croutons is one I used to have sometimes but nowadays, for the sake of my health, I prefer to cook than buy.

Top tip: Get soup making.