Food Revolution Day Success

FRD2013Hello hello!

Just a few photos here today to illustrate Food Revolution Day. I organised a food tasting with a friend at our university and it went really well. No one had heard of FRD before but people tried our salads, took the leaflets with the recipes on them to try make them at home. So for an event that is meant to promote healthy eating and keeping cooking skills alive, I think we did well! Really looking forward to next year’s Food Revolution Day!

What about you? Send me the links to your page if you celebrated FRD2013, I’d love to read what you did! :)

P.S: Might be worth mentioning the recipes: Summer Quinoa Salad and Wholewheat pasta salad (find the recipes on the recipe page!)

FRD2013FRD2013 FRD2013 18FRD2013 19

Summer Quinoa Salad for Two

INGREDIENTS

160g quinoa

1 medium tomato, finely diced

1/2 avocado

1/3 cucumber, diced

½ small red pepper (use romano pepper for a sweeter taste), finely chopped

1 tablespoon of fresh lime juice

1 ½ tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil

½ tablespoon of red wine vinegar

Sea salt and pepper

a few coriander leaves

INSTRUCTIONS

Boil the quinoa for 20 minutes or as instructed on packet.

Meanwhile, chop the tomato in small cubes, peel and slice the avocado, dice the cucumber and chop the red pepper.

Drain and rinse the quinoa and leave to rest for a few minutes then add all the previously prepared ingredients. Add olive oil, lime juice and vinegar. Finish with salt, pepper and coriander.

The one on the left

 A SALAD FULL OF GOODNESS !!

QUINOA provides a vegetarian source of protein. It is also a good source of wholesome carbohydrate and fibre.

TOMATOES contain vitamins A and E and the antioxidant Lycopene that is known for its anti-cancer properties.

OLIVE OIL is a monounsaturated fat. It means it is heart-friendly.

AVOCADO is amazing for heart health, weight management, and for good health overall. It contains B-vitamins, vitamin E, folate, potassium and many more.

LIME is a fantastic source of vitamin C!

CORIANDER must be good for something too, I’ll let you guess!

Food Revolution Day, what will you be doing?

Hello my dear friends and followers who I feel I’ve let down lately. It’s been hectic here at Fitting-50-hours-in-24 headquarters! Exams, work, side projects… Poor abandoned blog. I must apologise.

A little while back I mentioned something about diet related diseases and how they have become the biggest killer of this century. This is why I am supporting Food Revolution Day, the day we will share our recipes and knowledge to keep cooking skills alive and promote healthy eating. It’s next Friday, May 17th, anyone can get involved, at home, by organising a cooking party with friends or neighbours; at school, teaching how to cook to children, showing how vegetables grow; in the park, organising a picnic with home made food only; at your local farmers market; where ever you feel enthusiastic about really. Hundreds of people have already registered their activity on the website here http://www.foodrevolutionday.com. It will be so big, the press will talk about us! Things are changing, and I want to be part of it.

How to get involved? Check out Jamie Oliver‘s special page (yes, him again) ‘Food Revolution Day’ http://www.foodrevolutionday.com to find ideas and download guides and posters to use as support for your event.

If you follow my blog, you must know by now about Jamie’s Food Revolution, but for the newcomers, here is a link to the Food Revolution website:

http://www.jamieoliver.com/us/foundation/jamies-food-revolution/news

Check out my posts called ‘Celebrity Chefs and Food Politics’ and ‘New Year’s Resolutions: February update’ to find out what Jamie Oliver does to make this world a better place. I don’t know how to link things (IT and me = not friends) but click here, it should work:

http://eatingwellin2013.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/celebrity-chefs-and-food-politics/

http://eatingwellin2013.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/new-years-resolutions-feb/

I haven’t uploaded my event on the interactive map yet because I am still in the stages of hoping it will happen but I’m currently waiting for a few emails to find out if it will come to life. I have teamed up with a friend from my course at uni to have a stand on our campus offering food tasting. As the university is organising a 10K race that day, it will be buzzing with students and staff so we are hoping to give samples of our healthy recipes to at least 70 people! Scary! We are making two salads, both easy to make, rather cheap and so tasty! We will show the ingredients we used and give leaflets with the recipes and their nutritional information to take home. I’m so looking forward to it! Fingers crossed!

What about you? What will you be doing?

Spread the love!

Cooking

Papaya For Breakfast

Papaya

Papaya

I was feeling thirsty and found myself dreaming about fruits I eat in the south of France: apricots, white peaches, watermelon… They are so sweet and refreshing.

But well… I live in London, so I went to my local supermarket hoping to find something that would make a fresh and tasty alternative to my French fruit dream. And I bought a papaya.

I’m sure many of you have had papayas before but I didn’t and I had to look online how to prepare a papaya. And for those of you who, like me, didn’t know, it’s easy.

  1. I peeled the skin off and sliced the papaya in half
  2. I removed the seeds with a spoon
  3. Then sliced it
  4. And I squeezed the juice of half a lemon

Papaya slicedImage

I tried it without the lemon but I think the lemon gives it a nice sharper flavour.

Trying new foods is now part of my goals and this one is a winner! I ate it in no time! Now to enjoy a sunny day of revision in the garden with a big jug of water with lemon and orange slices :)

The confusion between being healthy and being on a diet

I used to find there was a thin line between being healthy and being on a diet, and I think there still is for a lot of people. So I have thought deeply about it and here are the differences to me:

               BEING ON A DIET BEING HEALTHY

So it appears there are more things to think about when trying to be healthy, but in my opinion it is worth it. You may have noticed these two lists I made don’t mention every food groups. I wanted to focus on the differences between dieting and being healthy. I haven’t directly mentioned protein, but it goes without saying that any meat eaten should be organic and grass fed for best quality. This way it shouldn’t have received hormones and other crap. Fish should be organic too or wild, but I know there are some wild fish that we shouldn’t be fishing for ecological reasons, however I don’t know much on that subject. I usually buy organic fish. Same goes for eggs and pretty much everything.

Nuts and seeds (brazilnuts, pecan, walnuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, etc.) should be an important part of a healthy diet too as they provide nutrients that other foods don’t. It’s easy to introduce them to your diet by adding them to porridge, yoghurt, and salads.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that it is important to eat a wide variety of foods, it’s the best way to get all the nutrients we need for optimum health. I will never diet again because I’m worth better than that, and eating healthily won’t make me put on weight!

One last thing, I know buying fresh and organic is expensive. I spend a lot of money on food and I understand some people can’t afford it. But I need to say it, I don’t earn much money, but I made my health a priority and decided to be ok with spending more money on food than the average consumer. It’s my choice. I spend less on shopping.

P.s: If you’re wondering why I am focusing on eating healthy and natural food so much, it’s because diet related diseases are the new epidemic of this century. They are caused by eating too much sugar, the wrong fats and processed and unhealthy foods. I will write something about that later, probably this month, because it is really important that we try to improve our diets. Eating well can make a difference to our lifespan, and help avoiding diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes and even some cancers. Food can be our fuel for long and healthy life, why not make the most of it?

Why Should I Try Coconut Oil?

Reblogged from One Regular Guy Writing about Food, Exercise and Living Longer:

Click to visit the original post

That's what I was asking myself the last time I was in Costco and passed one of their giant displays of 3+ pound jars of it. I could see the white substance inside that was solid at room temperature. Oil?

Coconut oil is a saturated fat and we need to avoid saturated fats, right? I can't count the times I have written in negative terms about the saturated fat content of various food items.

Read more… 538 more words

New Year’s resolutions: my tips to keep them up

Mixed salad - find it on the recipe page

Mixed salad – find it on the recipe page

Hey there!

If you are doubting your ability to keep up with your New Year’s resolutions, read my tips!

1. Going public! Writing a blog and telling people is a way to keep the pressure up. When other people know about your resolutions, it somehow makes you want to succeed more. Maybe it’s because you are setting a good example? I don’t know for sure. When I proudly write about how healthy I am and how happy that makes me, people start looking at me differently. I met up with a friend not long ago who told me they thought I was so healthy they looked up to me. I was shocked! I didn’t realise that writing about my healthy recipes made me appear like a health coach. I think my friend felt like they were not as good as me. I need to make things clear here, yes I post the healthy recipes I make on this blog, and I write about how happy I am to be healthier and to exercise, but it doesn’t mean in any way that it’s how I am every day of the week!! Some days I just have enough of the cold weather and working from home. I feel isolated or tired and that’s when chocolate and other comfort foods come into the picture. My eating habits are not perfect. I don’t spend my days cooking and singing in my kitchen a la Bree Van der Kamp! But knowing that I connect with other bloggers and that I have been read and watched through the Food Revolution website always reminds me of my resolutions. I want to be honest and true to people and to myself. Ultimately, I want to be healthy and feel well. I think, and I might be a little over excited by it, but I think I am inspiring other people who are also aiming to be healthier. Just the way they inspire me. It gives me wings and makes me want to carry on.

2. Be open to changes. Things don’t always go according to plan. Life brings ups and downs, so expect it, and don’t let it discourage you. You need to see the bigger picture! It’s not about being thinner next month, or running further next week. It’s about building a healthy routine with the long term in mind. If you look at the whole year, you can see your achievements better. You won’t become unfit just because you don’t exercise for two weeks. It’s the same for food.

3. Speaking of changes… I started running about a month after the resolutions. It just worked out well with eating well. I have now registered for a 10 km race. It encourages me to train and eat well in order to perform well on the day of the race. It’s almost as if the New Year’s resolutions have evolved throughout the year, and I’m okay with that. They might change again later in the year, I’m looking forward to see where it will take me.

4. The key word for me: ACHIEVABLE. Small achievable resolutions are more likely to be kept than big ones. Again, think in the long term. What matters to me is how healthy I will be for the next 20 years. This year, I eat less refined carbohydrates. By the end of the year, I should be used to this new lifestyle and find it just normal. Next year, I can focus on something else. It may take time but the aim is really to become healthier for good.

I see it like this:

One main goal = eating well and be healthy

Several small achievements will help reaching that goal. One at a time.

I hope my tips will help at least one person, please get in touch if you want to share your own experiences of keeping up your resolutions. Would love to hear them!