17 Jan, 2012
Reader’s Recipe: Nanazolie’s ‘Holier Than Thou’ Lasagne
Posted by: jean in: Main Meals | Recipes | Vegetarian
We put the call out for interesting but healthy recipes last week and a few of our commenters came back with some real gems. Lovely long time reader and commenter Nanazolie shared this delicious veggie lasagne recipe with us. It’s hard to imagine a lasagne being healthy, but if you use wholemeal pasta and go easy on the cheese and heavy on the vegetables, this will be both nutritious and very satisfying.
Courgette and Mushroom Lasagne, by Nanazolie
You can add some minced turkey if you must have meat, you’ll end up with a bit more sauce that will be lovely with spaghetti for another meal.
Ingredients
- 8 sheets of “no precook” lasagne
- 1 onion, chopped
- 3 courgettes, grated
- 250 gr mushrooms, finely chopped
- 1 garlic clove, crushed
- one tin chopped tomatoes
- 1 stock cube dissolved in 200ml boiling water
- 60 gr grated Parmesan
- Dried herbs de Provence (oregano, thyme, marjoram)
- 250ml low fat milk
- 2 tbsp corn flour
Open fire in Arthur's
I was torn about whether to write about and recommend Arthur’s on Thomas St. It’s a thoroughly lovely pub and you all deserve to know about it. But there is a part of me that selfishly wants to keep it a secret, so that it’s always peaceful and I can always get the seat by the big open fire.
Arthur’s is at the corner of Thomas St and Bridgefoot St in Christchurch, just two blocks down from Vicar St which makes it a very good spot for a post-gig pint. It has an unusually spacious, tasteful and uncluttered interior for a Dublin pub. There is an open fireplace, friendly staff and delicious pints of Guinness.
Nope
A question for y’all: can anyone recommend a good brand of gherkins or cornichons? I’m looking for a good spicy / sour variety in a jar, to keep in the fridge to have on hand to accompany sandwiches, pate on crackers, etc. I’ve tried some from Lidl and Marks & Spencer but they’re just too sweet. Fallon & Byrne have fantastic sour cornichons at their deli counter, but they’re expensive and don’t keep as long as the jars.
The problem, I think, is the type of vinegar that the tiny cucumbers are pickled in. If it’s a sweet vinegar, they are sweet and nauseating (to me at least). If it’s sour, they are fiery and delightful. I thought I’d struck gold in my local Polish shop (Wisla on South Circular Road at Dolphin’s Barn) yesterday with the pictured pickles, but they turned out to be sweet pickles with chilli pieces in the vinegar. So, sweet and disgusting, but with an aftertaste of chilli. NO.
It’s a nuisance when you buy pickles, which only ever seem to come in giant jars, and then can’t eat them, and they sit there taking up valuable fridge real estate until someone eventually throws them away. Lidl and Marks & Spencer have disappointed me with their sickly pickles. Can you, our lovely readers, recommend some spicy brands?
13 Jan, 2012
Recipe: Black Bean & Butternut Squash Chilli
Posted by: jean in: Can of Tomatoes | Healthy Eating | Main Meals | Recipes | Vegetarian
Black beans: tasty AND good for you. Photo from sxc.hu
We’re all about the healthy eating here at the moment (except for the occasional lapses when we will be stuffing jellies into our faces, obviously). I am keen to expand my repertoire of healthy dishes this Spring, and have been poking around in both my store cupboard and my favourite food websites for new inspiration.
One of the things I found was a bag of dried black beans. They’re quite hard to find in Dublin and once I got them (in Liston’s on Camden St) I put them in the cupboard and forgot about them. Silly really, because black beans are one of the tastiest of all the pulses and are very high in fibre and protein.
I found an interesting recipe from Epicurious for Black Bean & Butternut Squash Chilli, and tried it out over the weekend. The recipe needed a little bit of tweaking – as with any site with user-submitted recipes, it’s always a good idea to read the comments on the recipe and pay attention to the person who points out that if you don’t soak the beans first, the dish will take seven hours to cook. Also, the original used bulgur wheat, which I didn’t have, so I left it out and served the chilli with brown basmati rice instead.
My version of the chilli is below – it turned out to be very satisfying and delicious, with the beans generating a gorgeous rich black sauce. Liston’s stock dried black beans and the Epicure food range does a canned version, which you can get in some supermarkets. If you know of any other sources, please comment below.
The first M&S Dine in for Two of the year kicks off today. We’re on a predictable but necessary healthy eating buzz at the moment, and this fortnight’s menu is a bit heavy on the melted cheese and cream. The topped plaice may be ok, depending on what it’s topped with of course, and there’s fresh vegetables and fruit salad available too.
The offer is dinner for two – a main, a side dish and a dessert – along with a bottle of wine for €12.50, and it runs until Tuesday.
M&S are also listing their other food offers (various two for one deals, etc) on their website. The prices are listed in sterling.
Come Dine With Me Ireland
A new series of Come Dine With Me Ireland will soon be filmed by ITV, and they’re looking for people in Cork, Kerry, Leitrim/Sligo, Cavan/Monaghan and Tipperary to take part. If you’re interested in appearing on tv to show off your cooking skills, your home’s tasteful interior and your grace under pressure, this is the perfect opportunity. Or you could choose to participate to show off your ghastly home and your chronic personality disorder – whatever works for you. It’s also a great chance to make new friends and/or lifelong enemies.
If you or anyone you know would like to take part, you can download an application form at www.tv3.ie/dine. Filming starts soon so they are encouraging quick applications.
What do you think? Tempted?
Our people use every part of the broccoli. Image by sxc.hu
A big part of eating healthily is cutting down on the food that we all know is full of saturated fat and/or carbohydrates. There are some very obvious substitutions such as using wholemeal instead of white pasta and switching to wholegrain bread.
There are others that are less obvious, such as the clever trick shared in the comments here by our reader SJ a while back – use the stalk from a head of broccoli as the base for a thick soup, providing a healthier alternative to cream or potatoes. There are plenty of ideas like this that will allow you to eat nutritious unprocessed food, rather than processed ‘low-fat’ versions of everything.
09 Jan, 2012
‘I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my clothes…’
Posted by: jean in: Healthy Eating | Recipes
Up with this sort of thing. Careful now.
‘…food was all around me, and now my belly shows.’ This Christmas was a particularly epic one on the food front for Peter and me, and now it’s time to look into smartening up our act and shrinkening down our Christmas bellies.
I’m not going to follow any particular diet as counting calories makes me feel miserable, obsessive and deprived, and turns my reasonably healthy relationship with food into something neurotic and unpleasant. I think a lot of people feel the same way while dieting, which explains the staggeringly huge failure rate of diets. It’s one of the boring but unavoidable realities of life that if we’re overweight or unhealthy, we really need to face up to long-term lifestyle change. Crash diets and ‘cleanses and detoxes‘ (medically meaningless and worthless procedures) will not do us any good. There is no better advice out there than Michael Pollan’s from this seminal New York Times essay: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The only thing you need to add to that is: do some exercise.
So with that in mind, I’m going to try to cut right down on sweet things, crisps, anything creamy or greasy, and pints. Good grief, that sounds so boring. The thing that should save me from complete misery is doing a good bit of home cooking and making sure that whatever I cook is very spicy and flavoursome. Chilli, ginger, lime, garlic and lemon are all magical ingredients that are delicious AND good for you, and they will feature heavily over the next month or two.
05 Jan, 2012
Special offers in supermarkets, 5 Jan 2012
Posted by: jean in: Bargains & Special Offers
Plenty of new offers for the new year in the supermarkets and convenience stores. How are you getting on with resisting the slashed-price Christmas chocolates?
Special offers at Aldi
Special offers at Lidl
Special offers at SuperValu
Special offers at Dunnes
Special offers at Superquinn
Special offers at Centra
Special offers at Londis
Special offers at Mace
Special offers at Spar
Special offers at Tesco (NB: Tesco’s ‘Price News’ publication has not been updated since before Christmas so many of the offers are likely to have expired)
Right, we’re off drinking and eating, and will be too busy eating and drinking to update this blog much between now and New Year – though we might put up the odd post if it takes our fancy.
Thanks to our lovely readers, friends, supporters, Cake Sale helpers and anyone who has advertised on the site this year. Whatever your budget, we hope you have a very fantastic Christmas and an incredibly merry 2012.
- Peter and Jean
Food Sites
Irish Consumer Blogs
Irish Food Sites
- Bibliocook
- Cork Food
- Daily Spud
- Dining Treats
- Dublin Gobbler
- Eat Drink Live
- English Mum in Ireland
- Find a Restaurant
- Food and Drink Ireland
- Food Lorists
- FoodFight.ie
- Georgina Campbell
- Good Mood Food
- GreatFood.ie
- I Can Has Cook?
- Ice-Cream Ireland
- Irish Food Bloggers Association
- Italian Foodies
- Just Add Eggs
- Just Eat
- Menu Pages
- Ommnomnom
- Quirky Kitchen
- Sour Grapes
- Stitch and Bear
- Takeaway.ie
- Tast.ie
- Taste of Ireland
- The Food.ie
- Toasted Special
- Val’s Kitchen
- Well Done Fillet
- What We Eat Blog
- Willie’s Wine Blog
site design by:
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Categories
Tag Cloud
Archive
