Following on from what we were talking about this morning, about nutrition and eating being a mindful act, I wanted to show you what I made with those thoughtfully chosen ingredients.
As discussed, every thing we eat has either a positive or a negative effect on our health, so we need to make the majority of our choices good ones.
Here is my dinner, let’s have a look.
Looks pretty good hey? And it tasted just as good too! Under all of that shrubbery is a baked potato and so this is where we begin.
I rubbed a couple of nice baking potatoes with a touch of olive oil and popped them into the corner of the oven in the Cookie House while I was making quandong pies, after about 30 minutes I added three cloves of garlic with their pyjamas still on. I let them bake for another 20 minutes (the oven was only ticking over at 170 degrees C), and then I slipped in five little cherry tomatoes, still on their truss.
With about fifteen minutes to go until that was all ready I created my dry slaw.
You can see here that I have spring onion, red cabbage, carrot, red capsicum, water cress and coriander. Combine that and set it aside.
I have added a small portion of steak here, a scotch fillet the size of my palm, so I pop that into a hot pan now to fry in a smudge of oil.
I give my potato some chops so it lays flat on my plate and then I take the garlic cloves, snip off the pointy top bit and squeeze them out onto my potato, don’t be afraid that this is too much garlic, garlic done this way is very mild and nutty.
So we have our protein and our carbs, what else do we need? Well, a little bit of fats will keep me full and not reaching for the snacks. So I add a good heaped tablespoon of coconut cream and drizzle with some American mustard, purely because I am not adding any salt to this meal and the mustard adds another flavour dimension.
Now pile on the dry slaw and then, as we are not adding cheese, for good fats and for a nice savoury crunch we top with pepitas and chopped pistachios.
Squeeze your steak and your baked tomatoes in alongside and enjoy!
We have been talking a lot about nutrition and the balanced meal, for me this is about going through peri-menopause, but really, this is a meal that is going to be good for the vast majority of us, so let us call this the round meal number two (number one was our beef stirfry) and step back and have a look at it.
We have our protein and importantly our haem iron in our beef and actually a bit of steak like this is a powerhouse of vitamins and minerals, which provide building blocks for repair and maintenance of our bodies. We have our tomatoes, dry roasted to boost the lycopene, lycopene is a powerful antioxidant and can help to protect us against many illnesses and diseases and also helps us resist premature ageing.
We have our potato, skin on, no added salt or oil (other than the drip I rubbed the skin with), that provides carbohydrate and also some good minerals like potassium, sulfur and chlorine, it is also going to give us some good insoluble starch, which the body uses like fibre. Our vast array of dry slaw is giving us vitamin C, beta carotene, lots of antioxidants, vitamin K, calcium, phytochemicals, sulfur compounds, iron and more. The pepitas are adding a whack of non haem iron, which the vitamin C in our capsicum will help us absorb and the pistachios are rich in copper, B, A and E vitamins and magnesium.
Before we go, let’s have a chat about the two ingredients I haven’t mentioned yet, the mustard and the coconut cream. Mustard can join the good guy list as it is high in sulfur, calcium, selenium and phosphorus, it also contains a host of antioxidants, just be careful and read the label, make sure you are not getting too much salt, sugar or additives in with your mustard.
Coconut cream is a trickier one. The jury really is still out on this one. It is made up mostly of saturated fat, there is some evidence that it can help raise HDL (good) cholesterol, but that it can raise LDL (bad) cholesterol too. For me, this is an acceptable alternative to a dairy derived sour cream on my baked potato, I will leave that one up to you.