“It’s like kheer!”-Porridge with Dates and Walnuts

That is how one friend, Sarita, described this combination, after she tried it out.

It is what Indira and Noor used to eat for breakfast quite often when they were younger, and they really loved it.

When they were babies, too, their favorite food was cooked oats mixed with banana, and I even carried a box of oats with me(along with other cereals) as a standby option when we traveled, in case they did not like whatever was on offer. Oats can be cooked so easily and quickly as long as there is a microwave available, and banana is a fruit that is pretty ubiquitous.

I add dates now sometimes, instead of banana, to sweeten the oats and milk, and some walnuts and/or almonds.

This is another breakfast food that always puts a smile in my stomach !

Porridge with Dates and Walnuts

2-3 tablespoons of quick cooking oats

120-150 ml of skimmed or half-fat milk

4-5 soft, seedless dates chopped fine (or half a banana, chopped fine)

1 tablespoon of walnuts (chopped or in larger chunks, as you like them)

3-4 almonds,preferably soaked overnight, then peeled and either chopped or sliced(you could use them without soaking them first, too, though I believe soaking overnight makes them easier to digest. For more on that, see here http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060929121033AA7Lfj2)

Combine the milk and the oats in a micro-wave proof bowl and cook uncovered at 750W for 2 minutes. At the end of this time, the oats will have almost started to boil over. Watch out for this and take the oats out before this happens.

Turn the oats and milk mixture over in to a cereal bowl. Add the chopped dates and walnuts(plus the almonds, if you are using them), and a little more milk if the consistency is too thick. Stir to mix everything well.

Enjoy !!

It’s a warm, satisfying, delicious and healthy start to the day.

A variation -simply soak the nuts and oatmeal together in the milk for 20-30 minutes before you are ready to eat.

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Spanish Omelette(Tortilla)

All this last week, I have had a solitary red bell pepper sitting among the other vegetables in the fridge and  looking at me -I felt -reproachfully for being left unused.

I usually love red bell pepper in salads, but I haven’t felt like making salad since the weather has turned cold. So I decided this evening to make a Spanish omelette instead, since red pepper makes a healthy, tasty,colorful addition to it. I will use some of it for lunch tomorrow for Noor and me – it is a food she loves. This omelette, called a tortilla in Spain, luckily keeps well for a few days in the fridge, so the rest of it will be handy for dinner for the 4 of us one evening later this week.

You could add meats (such as diced ham) and vegetables to the basic egg and potato combination, to make different kinds of tortilla. Here’s the recipe for my version of it.

Spanish Omelette

6 medium sized potatoes, peeled and cut across in to very fine round slices( I use a food processor to do this; I’d find it a challenge to slice the potatoes as fine by hand)

6 eggs

1 large red bell pepper, cored and diced

2 medium sized onions, peeled and sliced fine

4 tablespoons of olive oil

Heat 3 tbsp of the olive oil very slightly in a large, fairly thick-bottomed frying pan. Add the onions and the potatoes, cover, and leave to cook till the potatoes are soft, over moderate heat. Turn the mixture gently from time to time with a flat/wide cooking spoon, taking care that the onions and the potatoes don’t brown or burn. Try to separate the fine slices of the potatoes – which tend to stick to each other because they are so thin – each time, so that all of it gets cooked. Half way through, add the pepper.

When the mixture is cooked (the potatoes should be soft but not lose all form and become mushy, though they will be smashed up a bit), take it out in to a large dish, and allow it to cool.

Break the eggs in a separate bowl, and season with salt and pepper. Add to the first mixture when it has cooled and stir gently to mix evenly.

Return the frying pan to the heat. Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil, turn the egg and potato mixture back in, cover, and leave it to set, on moderate heat. When the mixture is almost set (this will take about 10 minutes;the middle won’t yet be set but don’t wait for this to happen else the other side will get burnt), turn the omelette over by sliding it on to a large plate, and then leave the other side to set. This will take just a few minutes.

Take it out when it is cooked on to a large serving plate and when it has cooled down, wrap it in cling film to store in the fridge.

This omelette makes a complete meal, with a green salad or soup, and some bread. And since it is easy to carry, sliced up, it is a great picnic food as well. I also make it sometimes for an indulgent, leisurely sort of weekend breakfast.

I am looking forward to my delicious lunch tomorrow, already 🙂

On choosing breakfast cereals carefully

Remember that old adage, eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and so on?
There is plenty of scientific data out there to support that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

For many people scrambling to get to work or school on time each morning, a bowl of cereal with milk makes for a quick, convenient and filling start to the day. But is it always as nourishing as it ought to be?

There is of course a dazzling array of choices in the cereal aisles of food stores and supermarkets.

But a closer glance at what is on offer would reveal that instead of a product that in an ideal world would be nutrient rich and based on complex carbohydrates, what is on offer is often an unhealthier option, with excessive amounts of added sugar, hydrogenated oils and too-highly-processed grains.

The added sugar usually appears on the list of ingredients of most cereals in more than one avtaar – sugar, dextrose, fructose, corn syrup and maple syrup, among others. The choice of your breakfast cereal becomes significant when you consider that the amount of sugar permissible each day on a 2000 calorie diet (make that around 1500 for children) is a mere 40 g and many popular brands fulfill 25-50% of that amount. So eat breakfast like a king, yes, but like a wise one, not a hedonistic one.

Hydrogenated oils too are bad news when you consider that they are linked to coronary heart disease, diabetes and other chronic health conditions. So why do manufacturers use them, instead of healthy polyunsaturated fats, in the processing of their products? Because hydrogenated oils increase the shelf life of these products and add to their taste and texture.

The third big source of trouble comes from the cereal or grain itself. Most commercially available cereal-based products use refined flours, since the oils present in the whole grain can cause rancidity, which would complicate processing, storage and transport.

But the milling that cereals undergo during refining, strips them of the bran and the germ portions of the seed, leaving only the endosperm. This means that vital nutrients such as fiber, vitamins and natural oils are lost in the process.

It is important therefore, to look beyond the marketing hype on the front of a box of cereal and to read the list of ingredients very carefully. The biggest ingredient is required to be listed first. So if this not “whole wheat”, for example, then you are not looking at a product that is made with whole grain. A common trap is a label that says “made with whole grain”. The loophole here for manufacturers is that the product is often made with refined flour, in the case of wheat-based cereals, with a little bit of whole wheat thrown in for effect, since they are not required to say HOW much whole grain is actually used.

So what is one to do? What is the alternative to the myriad ready-made delicious ways to start the day, with sugar, chocolate and honey added in rash abundance to all those pops, flakes, clusters, loops, krispies and cookies?

Make your own. Here’s my formula, which so far has worked reasonably well with both my daughters, aged 7 and 3 and a 1/2.

I keep a selection of the simplest -read no added sugar and not too highly processed -cereals like oatmeal, Weetabix, wheat flakes and muesli mixes, because these typically have a much higher percentage of unrefined grain as compared to the bulk of cereals targeted at children.

To make these staid choices exciting, I keep fresh fruit and nuts handy that can be chopped and added easily to any of these cereals. Some additions that I find they enjoy are soft seedless dates, blueberries, apple,banana, raspberries, apple or pear compote, raisins, almonds and walnuts.

The beauty of this is that most of the time, you don’t even need to add any sugar since the fruits bring their own sweetness and flavour to the cereal though a small spoon of honey or unprocessed brown sugar works well with some of those additions.

This is not to say that we deny ourselves the occasional treat from a box of chocopops or honey loops. But even there, I sneak in to everyone’s bowl a spoon of wheatgerm, commonly available in powdered form, to console myself that there is a smidgen of nutrition in what my girls are eating that morning.

Hey, what’s a mother to do – just trying to beat the cereal makers at their insidious game.

References
http://cspinet.org/new/sugar.html
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4776
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=532
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fats.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_grain

Muesli with Yoghurt

Now that summer is here, I am feasting on fruit yoghurt, especially the awesome mango flavor that Danone introduced a couple of years ago.

It is easy to make a simple but filling breakfast out of it, too, by mixing it with muesli.

The girls still prefer crunchy cereals to muesli, but I am hoping that this will bring them around.

What I do is that 20 to 30 minutes before I want to eat, I put 2-3 tbsp of muesli in a bowl, mix in the contents of a 125 gm pot of fruit yogurt , and then leave the mixture in the fridge for 30 minutes.

It’s a breakfast that always puts a smile in my stomach 🙂