Aubergine with buttermilk and pomegranate

Aubergine is quite versatile and has a 'meaty' texture to it. Try this delicious recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi. Very filling and good both on its own, as a starter, lunch or with meat. The za'atar makes the whole difference. Obviously buttermilk is just some milk with butter in it. I use almond milk with ghee (clarified butter). 

Chicken with rhubarbs, almonds and spices

I just love rhubarbs and I just discovered that they suit chicken and some of my favourite spices very well. Allow about 0.5 hour for prep and 1.5 hour in the oven. I promise you it is worth it! As usual the spices should be used after taste but remember to balance them.

This recipe really deserves a good quality chicken. I know they are a bit expensive but it's really worth it. Avoid corn fed chickens. I recommend you use almonds with their skin on and remove the skin just before you use them as they have a much fuller taste. You can store almonds in the freezer or the fridge to keep them from going rancid if you as me buy them in bulk size...

Turn on the oven on 225 degrees. Take 2 handfuls of almonds and put them in a bowl. Cover with boiling water and leave to soak while you cut 1 large good quality chicken into smaller pieces; I split the leg pieces in two and the chest down the middle and then each in four pieces. I also use the back and the wings. Leave the bone on as that adds to the taste. Put the chicken pieces into a large pan skin side up and sprinkle some sea salt over it. 

Take 1 bunch of rhubarbs and cut them into bite sized chunks. Put into the pan with the chicken. Cut 3-4 cloves of garlic into quarters and add them as well. At this point you should be able to remove the skin from the almonds. Put them into the pan. Take an orange and use the peeler to get a couple of strips of zest which you also add to the pan. Cut the orange in half and squeeze the juice over the chicken. 

Sprinkle with the following spices: 2-3 sticks of cinnamon, freshly grounded cardamom, allspice, pepper and coriander seeds.

Put the chicken into the oven, leave for a couple of minutes and then reduce the heat to 175 degrees to slow cook the chicken. Leave for about 1,5 hour and enjoy the smell of spices :-)

Keep the side dish very simple like sliced red cabbage or grated carrot in order not to mess with the lovely spices and rhubarb sauce. 

Bon appetit!

Scrambled eggs with smoked salmon

1 whole egg + 2 egg whites
40-50 g smoked salmon cut into small strips
a bit of water
chives/spring onions
salt/pepper
cumin after taste

Combine the ingredients in a large bowl. Pour into a large saucepan and scramble. Don't overcook the eggs. Serve with tomato and cucumber.

Aubergine rolls with pesto

Cut the aubergine horizontally into thin slices. Sprinkle with salt and leave for about 15 minutes to remove the bitter juice.

Prepare some pesto while you wait for the aubergine: Blend some basil with pine nuts, a bit of olive oil and some parmesan cheese.

Turn on oven - 180 degrees.

Turn the aubergine slices over and sprinkle with salt. Wait another 15 minutes. Rinse thoroughly in cold water and dry on a kitchen towel.

Heat some coconut oil in a big frying pan and add some pressed garlic. Fry the aubergine slices on both sides and dry on a kitchen towel.

Add pesto to one side of the aubergine slices. Add some salt and pepper and roll the slices. Secure with a tooth pick.

Bake the slices for about 10 minutes and serve while hot.

Tomato, avocado and mozzarella salad with olives

Avocado are incredibly good for you. So are tomatoes, olives and apple-cider vinegar. 

Slice some ripe large tomatoes and avocado into bite sized pieces. Rip the Mozzarella also into bite sized pieces. Add some black olives and salt and pepper to taste. Sprinkle with olive oil and apple-cider vinegar.

Poached eggs

In my childhood home we kept chickens so I have always been used to having fresh eggs around. I still love eggs and I panic a bit when I have less than 3 eggs left in my fridge (3 eggs = a life-saving omelette when I get home late). I struggle a bit with throwing the yolks away but do it when I make omelettes or scrambled eggs. Not with poached eggs though.

Poached eggs
Fill a sauce pan with at least 2 cm of water and bring it to boil. Crack the eggs into the water and watch them carefully until the whites have set. It's important that the water is boiling when you add the eggs but make sure it doesn't boil too hard. Anyway - try a few times and you'll get the hang of it.

You can add poached eggs to pretty much anything. Here is one example:

Poached egg on green salad

Why you should eat non-starchy vegetables

There are 3 macronutrients: Carbohydrate, Protein and Fat.

All vegetables are carbohydrates and carbohydrates turn into glucose. Protein also turns into glucose, but through a much longer process. Fats turn into fatty acids.

Here are two really important facts:

1. Glucose requires insulin to be stored as body fat. 
2. Fatty acids require glycerol-3-phosphate to be stored as body fat. 

In other words: If you avoid eating foods that contains glycerol-3-phosphate and foods that causes your insulin levels to increase, your body is unable to store body fat. As I said, pretty important facts.

You might have heard about glycaemic load (GL). GL is a measurements for how quickly the carbohydrate in a particular food will cause your blood sugar levels to rise, or how aggressive a food is.

Here is another important fact: Starchy vegetables are quite aggressive foods and they also contain glycerol-3-phosphate, that is, the two substances that the body needs to store body fat. That is a really good reason to avoid them, I think.

Let's focus on what we can eat instead: You can eat all the non-starchy vegetables that you want. It is not possible to over-eat non-starchy vegetables because they are so filling and you want to eat so many of them that you are too full for starch and sweeteners (more about those soon).

So, just in case you are still not convinced, here are some of the reasons for eating lots of non-starchy vegetables:

1. you avoid gaining more body fat
2. you heal your body fat metabolism so that it works to keep you slim
3. you reduce the risk of becoming insulin-resistant (type 2 diabetic)

You can read more about the two first points here, more about type 2 diabetes here and you can find a list over non-starchy vegetables in the Food list.

The above is based on Jonathan Bailor's brilliant book "The Smarter Science of Slim: What the Actual Experts Have Proven About Weight Loss, Health, and Fitness" (2012). Here is the link to www.thesmarterscienceofslim.com - it's never too later to reverse the damage to your body.

Fat metabolism and hormones - why we get fat

Without food we die. But we also die if we eat too much of the wrong food. Not easy being a human. Particularly when our bodies have not evolved at the same speed as our technical and creative skills. Today we can buy all sorts of processed food that are really (and I mean *really*) bad for us.

This also means that a lot of different people (most of them trying to make money of you) will tell you, what you should and shouldn't eat and how you can lose the body fat you accumulate eating the wrong kind of food. Typically they will tell you to eat less and exercise more. But this is treating the symptoms, not the cause. And does it really work?

Like me you have probably been taught that the amount of body fat is determined by how many calories you eat and how much you exercise. Because the law of thermodynamics says so! But this is actually wrong. It is our hormones that determine whether we store or burn body fat. And we can improve our hormones by eating the right kind of food and plenty of it. 

I'll repeat that because it is really important: Your body does not count calories but reacts to hormonal signals. If the hormone levels are off and/or your body is unable to respond appropriately to the hormonal signals then you will gain body fat.

The human body is not a machine (or a temple!) but a complicated and delicate organism with a multitude of interconnected systems designed to keep equilibrium. One of those amazing systems is our internal calorie controller: the fat metabolism system which automatically balances out what we take in and what we burn off to keep us at our set-point weight (metabolic homeostasis).

The hormone insulin is responsible for getting energy into our cells. Without insulin the body cannot utilise the energy from the food you ingest. This is the problem for type 1 diabetics. Their body is unable to produce insulin and without insulin injections they would starve to death no matter how much they eat because their body is not able to access the energy.

In a normal functioning body insulin is activated as part of the digestion process to communicate to our body that energy is on its way and that we therefore do not need to use any stored energy in form of body fat. When we have finished eating the insulin disappears from the blood stream again telling the body that if it needs more energy, it will have to use the stored energy, i.e. burn body fat.

Quit the sugar

Basically you should avoid sugar, sweeteners and starch (anything turning into something that ends on -ose). Our bodies do not need it and a surplus of these removes our ability to burn fat. Think about it: For about 99.8% of our evolutionary history we did not eat any starch or sweeteners. We have evolved to eat non-starchy vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes, seafood and meat.

If we reduce the intake of insulin-triggering food and drinks we remove the hormonal clog and lower our set-point weight because there is no insulin to communicate to the body that it should store body fat. Let me repeat that, because it is so beautifully simple: If you avoid food and drinks that trigger insulin your body will be able to respond properly to hormonal signals, your set-point weight will be lowered and you will *automatically* burn more body fat.

When we eat sugar our blood sugar level shoots up and extremely high amounts of insulin are triggered. If we eat starches and sweets regularly these abnormal high levels of hormones makes the fat metabolism system think that abnormal high levels of body fat are normal. This leads to a raised set-point weight, the body's homeostasis is set too high. It also makes our fat metabolism system unable to respond properly to the hormonal signals because the gauge is off. And if the insulin stays in the blood the body never gets told that it needs to burn body fat, again because the fat metabolism only looks at hormones - not calories. We then say there is a metabolic dysregulation or a hormonal clog. It is this clog that we want to remove so that we can burn body fat.


Read more: "The Smarter Science of Slim: What the Actual Experts Have Proven About Weight Loss, Health, and Fitness", "Escape the diet trap" and "Why we get fat and what to do about it" 

Sugar makes you fat

Without food we die. But we also die if we eat too much of the wrong food. Not easy being a human. Particularly when our bodies have not evolved at the same speed as our technical and creative skills. Today we can buy all sorts of processed food that are really (and I mean *really*) bad for us.

This also means that a lot of different people (most of them trying to make money of you) will tell you, what you should and shouldn't eat and how you can lose the body fat you accumulate eating the wrong kind of food. Typically they will tell you to eat less and exercise more. But this is treating the symptoms, not the cause. And does it really work?

Like me you have probably been taught that the amount of body fat is determined by how many calories you eat and how much you exercise. Because the law of thermodynamics says so! But this is actually wrong. It is our hormones that determine whether we store or burn body fat. And we can improve our hormones by eating the right kind of food and plenty of it.

Basically you should avoid sugar, sweeteners and starch. Our bodies do not need it and a surplus of these removes our ability to burn fat. Think about it: For about 99.8% of our evolutionary history we did not eat any starch or sweeteners. We have evolved to eat non-starchy vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes, seafood and meat.

If you need to add some sweetness there are other sweeteners you can use instead of sugar.

The above is based on "The Smarter Science of Slim: What the Actual Experts Have Proven About Weight Loss, Health, and Fitness", "Escape the diet trap" and "Why we get fat and what to do about it"