BBC Good Food Cinnamon porridge with banana & berries

After at least a week of unhealthy eating, I'm going to slowly start preparing the husband for his new diet regimen when we get home.  He's doing this new hardcore exercise plan (he'll last about a week) and it comes with one of those diet plans that revolves around oats and fish with brown rice and veggies.  None of which he'll eat.  So this morning, as we're in Scotland, I thought I'd try convincing him to at least give porridge a go.  I doubt that he'll even look at it.  Normally he can't bear to be on the same floor as it, let alone in the same room. And we're in a single storey log cabin, so he may have ended up sitting outside in the rain whilst I made this.

Will update with the tale of how it went later as I'm assuming we have no mobile signal and pre-authoring this post.

Loving the retro Blue Willow Ware china

Recipe can be found here

Updated: 05 July 2012 @ 19:58 

I must have been seriously deluded when I wrote the bit above, thinking that he husband would even be present at the breakfast table at the same time as everyone else, let alone that he might consider eating porridge.

Maybe he knew what I was thinking and purposely avoided getting up until Miss A and I had finished breakfast so that I couldn't try and force feed him porridge.  Or because he was on holiday, he got to have a lie in every single day where I was up at 6am, which I guess is a lie in for me as I'm normally up at 5 and off to work at six.

Enough of our marital discord.  There's not too much to say about this recipe.  I enjoyed it enough to make it two days on the trot.  The second day, however, I managed to burn the porridge to the bottom of the pan whilst dealing with a Cheerio-related crisis (I hate stainless steel pans on electric hobs) so I've not made it since.

Cooking the bananas in the porridge meant that it needed minimal sugar for sweetening - I normally use maple syrup - so it's a fairly good and filling diet option.  Definitely one for a weekend breakfast when I've got the time (and the non-stick pans) to make this.

Updated: Skinny Peanut Butter and Banana Bars

You win some, you lose some.  And for me, this recipe is definitely a lose.  A couple of weeks ago I was in conversation with another blogger about writing a guest series of posts.  The series had to have a theme to it and I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do and what my first recipe would be.

Doing a bit of idle research a little later, I happened across this recipe which I hoped would be an inspiration for my first post.  I had really been looking forward to giving it a go but days turned into weeks and suddenly nearly a month has passed without me making it.

Today, however, despite the husband insisting on an impromptu shopping trip (I'm rubbish at shopping in company), I still found time to finally whip up a batch of these healthy little treats.

And I wish I hadn't bothered.  The ingredient list had it all.  Nuts, oats, honey (I substitued maple syrup), brown sugar, spices, rice krispies, peanut butter, chocolate.  And still less than 150 cals per piece.  Bargain.

Ugly blighters didn't photograph well...

I even got a kick out of using my finally procured set of measuring cups - I hate American recipes the way they measure everything in cups.  Is it a tightly packed cup or a loose cup?  I know it's a throw back to the days before scales were invented.  But seriously?  With baking being such a precision art, surely in this day and age you would think that scales would be the order of the day.  But thanks to Sainsburys, I have my own set of cups, thus opening up a whole new world of recipes to me.

The end result had a disappointingly soggy bottom.  I know not why.  I followed the recipe.  It said they'd be moist and chewy.  Which they were.  But the bottoms are resolutely banana-soggy.  I don't see the point of the puffed rice as the sog from the bananas has obliterated it.

I think it's something that I might become accustomed to if I ever get my sorry backside back on the diet wagon (severe relapse into piggy-hood this week in response to a ridiculous bout of endometriosis pain - won't go near the scales for at least two weeks now!)

I was looking for a healthy snack.  I think I'd rather stick the component parts (minus the egg whites) into a little tub and just eat them as they come rather than all mushed up and cooked together.  Instead, I shall just stick with my rather over-priced little Graze snack pots that arrive through my door on a weekly basis.  I've now fallen in love with the giant plain chocolate buttons that ocassionaly find their way through my letter box.  There's something rather decadent about eating chocolate in amongst all the healthy snacks that they send you.  And not that I've been paid for this, but if you use this code (2DF7LP8D), you can get a free Graze box from them.

If you do want to give the recipe a go, then you can find it here.

Personally, I'd rather stick with the Guilt Free Brownies.

Update 13th Feb 2012 - well after dissing these little bars, I did a 9.5 mile run yesterday morning.  Came in, the child was awake so after a quick shower and change, I got up and into a round of making everyone breakfast, whilst slowly expiring from lack of carbs myself.  So I picked up one of these and honestly, it is the best post-run food ever!  Exactly what the doctor ordered with the combination of carbs and fast and slow release sugars and protein (bananas, peanut butter, brown sugar etc).  Going to try to refine the recipe and maybe drop the bananas as I wasn't a fan of the strong banana taste.  They're down, but definitely not out!

Breakfast Bars

So no 'Bread of the Week' this week.  Oops.  Well I might give naan bread a go later today now I have a grill that works.  I usually buy the packet mix but was thinking to myself, how hard can it be to make your own?  Watch this space.

Anyway, healthy has to be the watch-word now.  I *still* have to shift my last stone of baby weight.  Personally I blame my gynaecologist.  He told me a few years ago to run less and put on some weight if I didn't want to go down the IVF route.  That was the best thing I ever heard.  I ran less, I put on weight (btw, I was hardly skinny at 10.5 stones!) and hey presto, free baby!  But that was nearly three years ago and now I have to get back to running and eat less as there will be no more little Crowdeys.  Ever.

Losing weight (for most people) is a simple case of calories in < calories out.  It's hardly rocket science.  You just have to know that your healthy looking salad may just possibly have copious amounts of calories and saturated fat lurking behind that innocent looking rocket leaf and maybe you should eat something else instead - and Bob's your uncle.

And because I'm such an early bird where work is concerned, I really have to watch what I have for my breakfast.  Given all the time in the world, I'd eat porridge or granola and yogurt or Bircher muesli every day.  But I leave for work at 6am so if I ate that early, I'd be hungry again by 8am, thus defeating the object of a good breakfast as I'd be at the vending machine or over at canteen eyeing up the bacon butties.  Nom...nom...nom.

So I try to be good and take breakfast to work and as a rule never eat before 8am no matter how hungry I may be.  This week, I'm out and about so need something portable.  I used to have a good recipe for granola bars which I've lost (it may be on my old blog actually) so I found a new one on the BBC Good Food website.  Very tasty although I would definitely add a pinch of salt to the ingredients if you use unsalted butter like what I do as it cuts through the sickly sweetness of the syrup.  I also found them really hard to cut without falling apart (them, not me!) so I stuck the tin in the freezer for 15 mins to make sure they were properly chilled and it worked like a charm.

Also pretty healthy - here's the skinny: 244 kcalories, protein 3g, carbohydrate 28g, fat 14 g, saturated fat 6g, fibre 2g, sugar 17g, salt 0.18 g

One final note - always line the tin.  I managed to wreck the non-stick on the base of my favourite cake tin with the palette knife.  Really fab product for lining is the Lakeland parchment lined foil.  I have a huge roll in my cupboard and am kicking myself for not using it.  It's great as you can actually fold it into shapes that keep their structure and won't keep curling back on itself once it's in the tin.

Bircher Museli

Thankfully, I rarely travel with my job these days.  In fact, this is the first trip outside of Bristol in three years.  To Tamworth.  Rock and Roll!

Of course, it's made me have to do some strategic thinking about what new recipe to try today.  I am sure that by the time I get home, I won't be in the mood for cooking, let alone cooking for someone who doesn't like change.  So I figured that breakfast was the way to go.

Like my picnic fantasies, I often dream of lazy breakfasts, of eggs benedicts and baskets of freshly baked pastries, in bed.  But even pre-toddler, the closest I got to that was a couple of croissants and some jam on my birthday and I even had to go and buy those myself.

My normal breakfast is porridge in winfrey and today with peanut butter in summer - a runner's breakfast. And not very exotic.  So today's recipe is Gordon Ramsay's Bircher Museli, taken from Gordon Ramsay's Greatest Hits.  It serves 4. Not bad for cold porridge :-)

200g rolled oats
400ml semi skimmed milk
1 apple, coarsely grated
4tsp honey or maple syrup
fresh berries
handful chopped nuts

Place oats in a bowl and cover with milk.  Refrigerate overnight.

Stir the yogurt, honey and grated apple into the mixture, adding a little more milk if it's too stiff.

Top with the nuts and berries.