Nutritious Winter Warmers

It is freezing cold as I am writing this, the heater in the office was off all weekend and it takes hours before it gets to a nice temperature. I am warming myself at the moment with a hot cup of lemon myrtle tea and haven’t taken off my jacket because it is so cold.

I guess we are all in the same boat, we try to eat healthy all year, but comes winter all the salads and fruits don’t quite cut the mustard. We need something to warm us from the inside. So traditional we eat a lot of roasts, and snuggle up at home in front of the TV or if lucky the fireplace. This is why so many gain weight in winter. We eat more and richer, fattier food and get less exercise. We have a cookie or two with a hot cup of tea or chocolate, maybe some coffee to keep us awake because we feel sluggish and tiered. It takes some real effort to go outside and exercise or even meet up with friends for a night out. All we seek is a bit of warmth…

One of the best winter warmers are soups. Key ingredients are vegetables, which will make it healthy. Try a traditional vegetable soup, with carrots, potatoes, celery, cabbage, onions and the like; it will really warm you up. I also like to spice my winter foods with a bit of chilli which heats up from the inside as well. One of my favourite dishes for winter is a traditional German dish my mum used to make. We used to call it ‘Lumpe mit Speck’, which means rags with speck (pork belly). I have changed the traditional recipe as it used a lot of saturated fat from the pork belly and is not as healthy as I wanted it to be. So I now use lean minced meat instead of the speck and it is just as nice, if not nicer because there is no ‘guilt’ added.

Steffi’s Rags n’ fleas (like the name?)

This is a recipe for a whole cabbage, you can half it if you are cooking for a smaller family, but it lasts 5 days in the fridge, and tastes even better the second day.

2 onions diced or sliced

4-5 cloves of garlic chopped

750g of minced meat (I prefer to half beef and pork, but just one or the other will do)

Brown these ingredients with a spoon full of olive oil in a very large pot, then add

2 bay leaves

3 cloves

1 teaspoon Cumin seeds

pepper

Add 1 white cabbage (sliced finely) into the pot and top it up with enough water to cover the cabbage.

Salt to taste and let simmer till the cabbage reduced in size.

Add 5 finely diced potatoes and simmer till the potatoes and the cabbage are soft.

Serve hot- bon appetite

Growing your own herbs

One main fact of having tasty delicious food is using herbs; you can buy them in the supermarket either fresh, as a paste or dried. I prefer fresh and love to use them straight out of my garden. If you don’t have your own garden, you can still grow your own herbs in a pot, maybe on the kitchen windowsill close to where you will use them…

Easy herbs to grow are parsley, basil, chives, rosemary, sage and thyme.

They all have very distinctive flavors and go with a great range of foods.

Sage is very delicious tossed and fried in some olive oil till it goes crisp and stirred into some freshly cooked pasta. Serve it with a generous serving of salad or veggies.

Basil is great in any tomato dish but not limited to only that. You can also make a fantastic pesto out of lots of basil, lemon juice, salt and pine nuts. Chop it all very finely in a food processor and serve with pasta.

You can see I really like the Mediterranean kitchen.

Rosemary is a must on lamb or even pork….

Herbs are very easy to grow; start small and don’t overfeed them with manure, they will grow very fast but loose flavor if you give them too much fertilizer.

All the instructions will be on the back of the seed packet but just make sure you water them well, especially if you are growing them in a pot, where water dries out faster. If your herbs are growing quicker then you can use them, you can wash them; hang them upside down in a shady spot on a hot day and let them dry out completely before making them into fine powder in-between your fingers for later use. They also make a great gift for friends if you present them in a nice jar…

The most important thing is to experiment with different herbs, try new recipes and not give up if your herbs didn’t survive the first time around.

Enjoy the wonderful varieties of herbs