Category Archives: Snacks

Spoiling

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Peaches 2When a child throws himself on the floor and wails because he cannot have what he wishes for, we wrinkle up our noses and mutter to ourselves disapprovingly, “spoilt brat”. This is no compliment; look up “to spoil” in the dictionary and you’ll find “to diminish or impair the quality or character by excessive indulgence.” But why the lesson in language?

Cast your eye over your Facebook feed until you find that frequently used post-birthday refrain, “Thanks everyone, I had a lovely day and feel well and truly spoilt”. In being spoilt, it seems, we feel loved and cherished. The act of spoiling is something to be celebrated – and it’s this new, positive use of the word, which I believe is so revealing about our relationship with food. Continue reading →

Tales from the soda stream

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Apple on desk

In the office space I share with a collection of other freelancing nomads, we are equipped, beyond the desk and chair, with a soda stream and a coffee machine. There is a small kitchen too, but here I am mostly concerned with the gadgets.

From my modest desk in the middle of the room, I have observed an interesting and perhaps more than anecdotal trend. To excuse my apparent lack of attention to my work, I should add that both machines whizz and fizz so loudly that they are near impossible to ignore. Crouch behind my laptop and stare furiously at the screen as I may, I cannot help but notice the comings and goings. Continue reading →

Chia and me

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Solitary woman

When I started this blog at the beginning of the year, I was full of ardent intent to create a simple and sensible guide to eating and living well. It started off as planned: alongside the blogging, I ate three sensible and delicious meals a day with the odd nutritious snack (almonds, an apple, a couple of dried apricots) thrown in for good measure. Generally, I felt light and happy.

But at some point between then and now, I became seduced, and utterly so, by the roguish promises of health food blogs. Admittedly, this fate is hard to avoid if you spend your evenings scouring the internet for interesting and nutritious recipes because most of these are on health blogs promoting (probably paid to promote) all sorts of faddish ingredients. Both my ongoing penchant for ‘clean’ foods and hard-to-shake-off habit of looking for magic-bullet foods had weakened my resistance. Continue reading →

A bad habit turned good

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Tea and biscuitsWhen we talk of habits, mostly we mean bad ones – not quite so bad as the excessive consumption of narcotics, more the as a one-off harmless, but done every day pretty harmful type, so engrained in your behaviour you barely notice it.

A few food-related (as befits this blog) bad habits? Sugar absent-mindedly stirred into your morning coffee, a croissant on your way to work, the crisps you don’t need but free with your sandwich at lunch, a Twix dipped into a mid-afternoon cup of PG Tips, that splurge of ketchup next to your sausages and mash, or the two glasses of wine you don’t mean to but will inevitably drink in front of the telly.   Continue reading →

A sense of ceremony – or bananas on sticks

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Busy lives

My three-and-a-half year old daughter has a penchant for sweet treats. Hard as this may be to believe, she appears not yet to recognise the benefits of her sage mother’s ascetic approach to food – perhaps because she is growing as fast as a bean-shoot and constantly darts between her two favourite activities of bouncing on the settee and jumping on our bed, or possibly just because she’s three-and-a-half. Anyway – I digress.

This results in a persistent clamouring for “something sweet – no, something really sweet,” said in that typically three-and-a-half year old, utterly resolute voice. And because she eats a (reasonably) balanced diet the rest of the time – with plenty of protein, healthy fats and wholegrains – I give her craving some credit and usually try to find something acceptable both to her and me; though not always an easy task. Continue reading →

Lavish dinners in moderation

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January

Poor dark, cold January has become a time for rather miserably hiding away and cutting back on life’s excesses – almost like an entire month of hangover – following a lavish Christmas. But I find it hard to advocate the practice of such punishing abstinence.

This excessive detoxing seems too short-term and painful to me. What if your best friend’s birthday in January, or indeed your wedding anniversary? What if you get to February so fed up of your steak-for-dinner diet that you go on a three-day baguette-feeding frenzy? Or you celebrate your month of dryness with a whisky drinking night out on the town? Surely, anything so far removed from your normal life is almost doomed to failure, or, at best, only very fleeting success. Continue reading →

The active life

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TennisI am no revolutionary when I say that the benefits of healthy eating are greatly enhanced by physical exercise. I know I feel like a caged animal if I haven’t had at least one chance to run around outside for a while each day. So it’s not just about looking good but about feeling good too.

To counter our ever more sedentary lifestyles, sitting as most of us do for hours each day, we pound the pavements, invest in expensive all-weather cycling gear, spin like hamsters on wheels in extortionately expensive, sweaty basements, and stack our bookshelves with yoga videos which promise us the flat stomachs of our teenage years. Continue reading →