Stewed fruit is an old fashioned dish, and I don’t like the name, it sounds yukky and grey and sour. That said, it does have some really good nutritional benefits, especially when done this way with some of the fruit stewed and some raw, and really, some things just need to be cooked, case in point, raw rhubarb, YUK!
The other day I was telling you how we had to do a quiz to evaluate our diet in Human Nutrition 1 and how it was very generic and one size fits all and how the thing it highlighted the most was how many of us have food intolerances, which the quiz did not take into consideration.
The two intolerances that were remarked upon most in the forum were gluten and dairy, and anyone with these intolerances scored poorly on the quiz.
Our dietician lecturer (lovely lady) put up a slide for us on dairy free, calcium rich substitutes and some of them were a real surprise, like rhubarb. Did you know rhubarb was rich in calcium? Neither did I. So I thought we would make a lovely calcium boosting meal that would make an ideal breakfast (or meal one for those of us who eschew the rigid labelling of our daily meals), or light lunch or dessert.
That looks so good! I regret giving half of mine to Emma as she was running late for work.
Ingredients
Makes enough for two
1 apple, peeled, cored, quartered, thickly sliced
1 stick rhubarb, stringed (go have a look at the rhubarb post to see what this is), cut into one inch chunks
1/2 cup water
juice of half a lemon
7 strawberries, halved
1/2 cup blueberries
1 tablespoon honey (or sugar if you can’t eat honey)
Dairy free yogurt (I like Nakula coconut yogurt)
1 tablespoon Sesame seeds
Pop a small pot on your cooktop and tip in the sesame seeds, toast at a low heat (I used heat setting 2 of 9) until golden and crunchy, keep giving them a shake, don’t burn them. Set aside in a small bowl.
Tumble your apple, rhubarb, water and lemon juice into the pot and cook gently for about 15 - 20 minutes, until the rhubarb collapses, it will go from this -
To this -
What we are wanting is for the rhubarb to be mostly collapsed, depending on what type of apple you choose that may collapse too. If it looks a bit dry while it is cooking add a splash more water, but we don’t want it swimming, this here is what it should look like when it is done. Lovely, tip that into a bowl, set it aside to cool to room temperature - don’t be tempted to taste it yet, rhubarb unsweetened is a horrible thing, we have something special in mind for this though.
Yesterday my good buddy Jo, dropped me off a little bucket of filtered, live honey from a beekeeper who lives just down the road, I have been suffering from really bad hay fever this year, so I am hoping that some claims I have read about how eating live local honey can help ease localised hayfever are true. I will let you know. Anyway, the beneficial compounds in honey are quite volatile, and many of them can be adversely impacted by heat, so we are waiting until this rhubarb mix is at room temperature and then....we stir in our spoonful of honey. Okay, now you can have a taste, if it is still too tart add a little more honey, but not too much, the tartness of rhubarb is its signature, let’s respect that.
Stir in the fresh berries, spoon into two bowls.
Top with a couple of spoonfuls of dairy free yogurt and then dust with your sesame seeds. I also added a shred of mint because I like the surprise it brings.
Lovely!
Okay, I am going to talk about nutrition again, so anyone who just wants the cooking can go now. For those of us who want to know the why, not just the how, let’s have a look at this dish.
Remember way back in the post Acceptance and Alternatives, how we talked about how if you are going to remove a really key component from your diet, like dairy, you must replace the nutrients lost with other things. This is what this dish is about. Calcium. Really important for growing bodies, for functioning bodies and for ageing bodies. I think that means all of us. According to reading I did in my Biological Foundations class, 60% of adult humans worldwide are lactose intolerant, 60%!!! So that 60% must all be careful to get adequate calcium from other sources or we will end up as fragile as champagne flutes.
So rhubarb is high in calcium, strawberries and blueberries will also contribute a bit, sesame seeds are high in calcium and my dairy free yogurt is also a good source, and here is another surprise, the mint I added for a surprise is also a good source of calcium, so I think we can call this meal a bone booster!
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