Bean & Rainbow Chard with Spaghetti

May 24, 2012 //
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Rainbow chard, bean with pasta
This was our dinner yesterday, bean & rainbow chard with spaghetti.
I soaked quite a lot at of cannellini beans at the weekend and I’m using them the whole week… well there’s no way I would soak beans several times a week! There are limits!
This recipe was a re-worked version from here.
The reason I’m using dried beans all of a sudden is that i would like to limit the amount of animal protein we eat to maybe 2-3 times a week. (looking forward to all the shoes I’m getting due to reduced food bill :) ).

 Ingredients:
2 cups of cannellini beans
1 bunch of rainbow chard
1/2 cup sun dried tomatoes (I like mine dried, soak for 15min then chop them up)
coconut oil to fry in
1 chili (not for the kids)
2 garlic cloves thinly sliced
olive oil
salt, pepper
brown rice spaghetti

Directions:
Heat the coconut oil in a large pan , add garlic, chili, salt and pepper, then the cut up rainbow chard, use a tong to mix the chard with the oil and garlic. Cook for 3 minutes, add the sun dried tomatoes and the cannellini beans, cook for another 3 minutes. Place the mixture over the spaghetti. Drizzle some olive oil all over.

Some health benefits:
cannellini beans: cholesterol lowering fiber, molybdenum
Rainbow chard: one of the most nutritional vegetables, good antioxidant, anti-flammatory and good detoxififyer. High levels of Vitamin K, A, C
Tomatoes: antioxidant, Vitamin C, beta carotene, Vitamin E, manganese, full of phytonutrients
Garlic: sulphur for glossy skin and hair :) anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial
Brown rice spaghetti: high fibre, no gluten

Spaghetti with rainbow chard and beans

♥L

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Categories Recipes, Vegetarian

Whole Foods Market Piccadilly

May 22, 2012 //
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Yesterday I was invited for a tour of the new shiny Whole Foods Market in Piccadilly and I can’t tell you how excited I was.
This store is replacing Whole Foods Soho around the corner on Brewer Street and it’s a big upgrade!

It’s airy and light with a lot more space. On the ground floor there’s the food market, and plenty of delish and healthy lunch options like the salad bar Greens Grains & Beans and hand rolled sushi.
There’s also a very well stocked wine and cheese area where you’ll find some interesting  local produce like Hackney Gold beer and even english bubbly. And then there’s Jade’s station, she’s there to inspire and help with healthy cooking tips and demonstrations.
The seating area upstairs is great for people watching, my favorite pastime, and there are toilets and free WiFi, so you can basically spend the whole day here :)

The Whole Body department is spacious and stylish and stocks interesting lotions and potions. I have a feeling I will spend a lot of time here!
They also have a VISIA machine. This is a contraption that will do a reading of your skin and tell you what you need to do/apply for a more healthy and beautiful visage. I’m so booking this!!
I used to pop into the Soho store for a rest/lunch/shop when I was in the area for work, (I do Voice Overs for a living) and now I’m really looking forward to drop in for a smoothie or a Monmouth Coffee at the Piccadilly store.

♥L

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Categories Health

Asparagus & Pepper with Brown & Wild Rice & Cannellini Beans

May 20, 2012 //
0

Canneline beans, brown & wild rice asparagus and pepper

I’m going to post some more über healthy, easy and cheap recipes.
This is what we had for dinner tonight:
Brown & wild rice with cannelloni beans, asparagus and yellow pepper.
I found the recipe here but I have changed it slightly to make it fit in with my family (fuzzy eater, nut allergy).
I bought the dry cannelloni beans yesterday and soaked them for 24 hours.
Ingredients for 4:
1 Cup Brown rice
1/4 Cup Wild rice
1 Cup Cannelloni beans
2 Bunches of Asparagus
1 Yellow Pepper
1/4 Cup Olive Oil, Lemon Juice, Fresh Thyme. Salt & Pepper.

Directions:
Cook the rice and the beans according to directions.
Cut up the asparagus in 2,5cm long pieces.
Cut the pepper into the same sort of size.
Add the vegetables to boiling water, leave for about 5 minutes. Drain and pour into a bowl with cold water and ice cubes (this will keep them crisp & crunchy).
Mix it all together.
Whisk olive oil, lemon juice, fresh thyme, salt pepper together and drizzle over the food.

Some Health Benefits:
Brown rice: high in fiber, you feel full for longer, has B6
Wild Rice: high in protein, Vitamin A, Folate, some Omega 3
Cannelloni beans: high in fiber, Iron, magnesium, folate, molybdenum
Asparagus: great detox vegetable, potassium, vitamin A, folate
Yellow pepper: Vitamin C, B6
♥L

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Categories Health, Recipes, Vegetarian

Gusto Energy Drink

May 20, 2012 //
0

My 8-year-old is asking for coca-cola on special ocassions…grrr!
Thankfully he really likes Gusto energy drink, full of apples, ginseng and guarana.
Obviously I like the name.
Gusto is actually not my real surname, It’s Gustafsson.
It’s not the best travelled name, nobody can spell it or pronounce it.
Gusto has been my table-booking surname for over 10 years now and I’m starting to get used to it.
I’m in good company wanting to off load my cumbersome surname. Greta Garbo was also a Gustafsson before her lover/mentor/director Mauritz Stiller asked her to change her surname to Garbo.
♥L

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Categories Health

D The Sunshine Vitamin

May 15, 2012 //
2
© Copyright Graham Loveland and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Photo: Graham Loveland

I can’t remember a wetter and gloomier spring in London.
It’s so depressing.
We need sunshine!
According to The American journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vitamin D deficiency is now considered a pandemic, God only knows what they will call it in Europe after this grey dull spring!

We need sunlight to produce Vitamin D for absorbtion of calcium and phosphorus.
We have all read about soaring rates of rickets in children, and lack of Vitamin D is also associated with tooth decay in kids.
But we don’t only need it for strong bones and teeth, deficiency can lead to an array of illnesses and disorders like heart disease, MS, osteoporosis, gum problems, depression, lowered immunity, fatigue and even cancer.

The absolute best way to get your daily dose of vitamin D is sunshine, but vitamin D can also be found in foods like fatty fish, liver, egg yolk, butter and tiny amounts in sun flower seeds.
Vegetarians are quite often deficient in this über important vitamin and should take extra care.
Some foods are fortified with vitamin D, like cows milk, juices and cereal, but it’s obviously not from a natural source.

So how much do you need?
The recommended levels of Vitamin D are :
Men-women 19-50 years of age: 200IU (International units)
51-70 years of age 400IU
70 and over 600IU
Kids, adolecents 400IU

But these recommendations are constantly debated.

Some health practitioners argue that those levels are way to low and only for preventing rickets, to keep healthy and happy we need far more!

A figure that’s mentioned is 2000-3000Iu a day, or 1000IU per 25 kilo.

To put this figure into perspective: an egg contains 25 IU and a glass or fortified milk around 100IU, whereas the sun together with our cholesterol makes thousands of IU in only 10-20 minutes!

Exposing your face and hands for only 10-20 minutes a day is normally enough, but it’s of course depending if it’s a cloudy or smoggy day or if you are covered in sun cream. It also depends on your skin, the paler skin the less time you need in the sun.

But what sun!!??
We have not seen the Sun since about err, forever and this horrendous weather is suppose to continue well in to June!

So if like me you haven’t been on a sun drenched holiday for quite sometime you might want to get a supplement. But read the labels all vitamin D’s are not equal!

There are two types of Vitamin D that you can get. D2 and D3.
D3 is the type the body makes when it’s exposed to the sun and it can also be found in animal products like oily fish and egg yolk.
D2 is found in plant-based products, and D2 is also used in fortified milk and cereals. If you’ve been prescribed vitamin D, it’s almost always in the form of D2.

I personally get the D3, it’s the sunshine vitamin I need!

I spray Dlux 1000 (from BetterYou) under my tongue on grey days like this, it tastes of sweet mint and it goes straight into the blood system without having to pass through the digestive tract.

♥L

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Categories Health

Healthy Teas

May 12, 2012 //
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Tea List:

* Matcha tea
* Genmaicha
* Tulsi tea
* Ginseng
* Pau D’arco tea
* Yogi tea : Licorice egyptian spice, Sweet Chili, Rose
* Tea pigs: Liquorice and peppermint, Rooibos- Honey Bush
* Star Child: Aphrodites Cup
* Pukka: Cleanse, Detox
For sweetnes: Stevia white powder and Stevia green powder from a herbalist.

♥L
*

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Categories Health

Growing Basil

May 4, 2012 //
3

I’m dreaming of having a vegetable patch and a herb garden were I can saunter around on sunny afternoons.
I would grow all sorts of interesting herbs and mix them up to make lotions and powerful potions.
Apart from only having a small roof terrace to grow on, there’s another big obstacle  -my not so very green fingers!
I gave up on anything in a pot by the time I had my first baby 8.5 years ago, I only do cut flowers now.
But hey hoo, It’s time for a change and new skills!.
I’m taking baby steps with the above (foolproof?) grow-herbs-in-a-bag thingy,
You basically, buy a bag, cut it up, plant the seeds, water, put in a window and if you’re lucky BASIL will appear!
Wish me luck!

grow herb in a bag

♥L

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Categories Health, Recipes

My 1970′s Chairs

May 1, 2012 //
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lisa gusto

My 1970′s chairs, upholstered in orange plastic that I picked up for not-very-much, in an antique shop in Fulham, have finally been delivered.
I went for a plain charcoal-y wool fabric. Normally I would have chosen a more popping colour, but we are moving and I have no idea were they will fit in the new place.
The fabric is from Bute, a Scottish contemporary textile company, they are all about colour, texture and performance. Bute have designed and woven wool since 1947 on the  Isle of Bute and now they collaborate with designers such as Matthew Hilton, Jasper Morrison and Tom Dixon.
Dixon made a greeny bobbly wool fabric I can’t stop thinking about!

bute fabrics

♥L

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Categories Interior

Health Benefits: Coconut Water

April 28, 2012 //
1

Coconut water

I absolutely love anything coco-nutty.
I cook in coconut oil, use it in my hair, eat the ice-cream and I drink coconut water. Often!
It’s deliciously sweet, low in calories and packed full of goodness and you can get it anywhere nowadays.
Coconut water is the clear liquid from young green coconuts (not the brown small ones in the picture, but they don’t sell the green ones in my supermarket) and they can contain up to one liter in a nut.
It’s full of health promoting vitamins like the B’s and vitamin C and important minerals like potassium, magnesium, sulphur, chlorine and also plant hormones called cytokinins that have anti-aging and anti disease fighting properties. It also stops me raiding the biscuit-tin mid afternoon.

Apart from plain water, it’s the only drink I reach for after exercise, due to its high content of electrolytes, it’s especially high in potassium.
It’s quite common to be a bit deficient in potassium, and especially teenage girls might need a potassium boost.
It’s been suggested that because we used to eat a potassium rich diet, low in sodium, the body held on to the sodium and is still doing this even though nowadays, it’s the other way around.

Coconut water is apparently also an excellent hangover cure something I’m about to find out Tuesday Morning :)

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Categories Health

Healthy Emergency Handbag Snack

April 26, 2012 //
3

Dried fruit and veg

What sort of snacks are you carrying around in your mistreated handbag for when the kids go mental?
I used to have a lot of seeds and nuts and oat crackers at the bottom of my battered bag, and when they were younger Ellas Kitchen’s squeezy fruit mixes was a staple.
Now it looks like my 8 year old has  developed a nut and seed allergy, (he had his blood taken for analysis at the hospital yesterday) so seeds and nuts are a nono until we find out.
Thankfully I’ve found a new healthy snack. Slow dried organic fruits, vegetables and berries from a Latvian company called Straumeni.
What I like about this product, apart from it being organic, is that it’s been dried at 38 degrees so a lot of the vitamins, minerals and other goodness have been preserved.
We tried apples with raspberries, rhubarb, quince, beetroot and carrots. The kids loved the apples and the quince most, I thought rhubarb and carrots were the best.
“Why don’t you just cut up some carrot sticks to carry around” said the Mr, hmmm, in that sentence he reviled just how much looking after the kids he does…
By not cutting up carrots every morning I  A. saves about 15 minutes a day. B I’m not poisoning the kids with old rotten carrots.
These bags can stay in my long-suffering bag for weeks on end and I don’t have to rely on unhealthy treats at Starbucks or worse when hunger strikes.
♥L

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Categories Health
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