Recipe: Red Pepper, Sweet Potato and Chickpea Frittata

It was a chilly Friday evening with the prospect of a cosy night in in front of the telly and a fire when suddenly, hunger struck!! I went to the fridge to find it practically bare...the devastation!! Again, here I am being dramatic :) but this is really the way I feel about food, and I know I'm not alone in this!! So, what to do? Order takeaway or get creative with what was left of the week's groceries? I'm going to Portugal for a short break in a week so I decided to get creative mainly because I wanted to keep my money and also because I wanted to eat something I wouldn't be regretting next week when I'm walking around in my Summer clothes again! Now, bear in mind that I do my groceries on Saturday mornings and usually eat out or get a takeaway on friday night so there really was very little left to work with. Also, I'm really not creative...but I tried my best!

The result: a red pepper, sweet potato and chickpea frittata.

The verdict: unbelievably tasty...frittastic even!! (apologies for the terrible joke!)

Here is the recipe for this amazing frittata, and, as always, I hope you enjoy it!! :)

Ingredients

1 tin of chickpeas

1 sweet potato

1 red bell pepper

1 clove of garlic 

4 eggs

4 egg whites

Feta cheese

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp paprika

Salt and Pepper

Method

Preheat the oven to 220deg Celsius. Chop and fry the sweet potato and red pepper for approximately 10 minutes until they start to soften. 

When the vegetables are soft, drain and rinse the chickpeas and add to the pan. 

Whisk the eggs, egg whites, garlic, cumin, paprika (and a splash of milk if you want) together in a bowl, then add to the pan. Season and put into the oven for 15-20 minutes. You can top your frittat with some feta and spinach, like I did, if you wish!

Then sit back and relax, and be really surprised at how tasty this simple dish is!! 

Niamh xxx

Recipe: Fry-Up Breakfast Cups

These mornings I find I'm rushing out the door, bag hanging off my elbow, travel mug clutched desperately in my hand and an apple shoved in my mouth while I struggle with my bunch of keys to lock the front door.....it's all very dramatic really!! I'm fairly certain that I'm not the only one who ends up rushing in the mornings because bed is just too comfy!! After getting dressed and brushing your teeth, breakfast should be a top priority in the mornings, especially if you are following a heavy-weights training programme. Even if you are not though, protein as part of your breakfast is a fantastic way to help you feel full while you start your day. I made these "fry-up breakfast cups" at the start of the week and they are amazing!! I pop two of them in the microwave for 60s and I don't feel hungry again until lunchtime! I have posted the recipe below and I hope you enjoy them! These are fantastic as a quick and easy breakfast or as a post-training snack.

Ingredients

Frylite or any low cal cooking spray

12 rashers or 12 bacon medallions (1 per bun so it depends on how many you want to make)

4 gluten free sausages or 4 turkey sausages (turkey sausages are not gluten free)

2/3 of a bottle of O'egg liquid egg whites

1 handful of spinach

Pepper

Instead of eggs I used the O'Egg egg whites. I had seen them in the supermarket and on instagram but never used them before. They are fantastic in this recipe as there's no egg shells and no whisking eggs; you just pour them straight from the bottle into the bun tin. They are naturally fat free, low in calories and high in protein. As well as that, this is an Irish food brand and the only ingredient is egg whites!

1 bun contains approximately 100 calories, 5.4g fat (1.6g saturated), 1.8g carbohydrates (0.6g sugar), 0.1g fibre, 9g protein

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180degC.
2. Spray a bun or muffin tin with the low cal cooking spray so that the buns can be easily removed when they are cooked.
3. Trim the fat from the rashers and use one per bun. Try to make a cup out of the rasher so that the egg will stay inside.
4. Cut each sausage into six pieces and put two small pieces into each bun.
5. Pour the egg whites into each bun.
6. Cover each bun with black pepper and some chopped spinach. 
7. Put in the oven for approximately 20 minutes.

They don't look very pretty but they taste amazing!! The buns will keep in the fridge for 3-4 days when stored in an airtight container. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

Niamh xxx

Hotel Room Mini Workouts

I was in Berlin recently for a week to present at a conference. I've been really lucky while doing my PhD to have had the opportunity to go to three conferences in different countries; the first was in Copenhagen, the second in Tampere (Finland) and the third was in Berlin. I really enjoyed the conference and I got a few days to see the city as well which was fantastic! There was one aspect of going away for work that I was a little worried about and that was absolutely undoing any improvements I had made in terms of diet and fitness while I was away. When I went to Berlin, I had only been trying to get into a routine of exercising and eating right for about 3 or 4 weeks so I knew that if I was going to spend the week eating what I wanted and doing no exercise it would be really difficult to get back into the swing of things when I came home! After all, this wasn't a holiday, it was for work.

I can imagine that it must be difficult to maintain a healthy diet and regular exercise when you have to travel for work so I have decided to post about the workouts I would do in my hotel room whenever I got a spare 20-30 minutes to make sure I stayed focused. I found it very hard to find time to exercise while I was away so my aim was to pack as much into as little time as possible so that any exercise I did do was short but effective. I have included them here as images; if you plan to travel soon and you don't want to put your workouts on hold, I hope that you find this post helpful!! They are also a fantastic addition to finish a workout session, even if you aren't travelling. For any arm workouts that require weights just buy two 2l bottles of water; you can use them as weights and to stay hydrated!

I have given an approximate time for each workout. I used to do to 50-40-30-20-10 workout before I had a shower and I think that's a routine I'm going to try to keep!

Tabata is a very short high-intensity workout so it is ideal when you are stuck for time. Depending on how much time you have you can either pick two or four exercises and repeat each set of a pair of exercises four times.

AMRAP - As many rounds as possible is like a Crossfit workout. Try beat your score every day you are away! You can increase or decrease the time limit depending on how much time you have to exercise.

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In this mini workout you have to complete each exercise as fast as possible...it's in the name really! Another great one for the competitive people!!

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I absolutely hate this one! It is so tough, but you really do feel the benefit from it. I have included legs, arms and abs versions in the image.

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The circuit training workout is fantastic if you have about 30 minutes to spare. It is quite tough but a very effective 30 minute full-body workout.

Set your timer and every time it passes the minute mark perform 10 reps of each exercise.

I hope you find these mini workouts effective! I'd love to hear if you try them!

Niamh xxx

Recipe: Healthy Bread and Butter Pudding

I recently watched “The Hundred Foot Journey”, a movie about an Indian family who set up an Indian restaurant directly across the road from a French Michelin star restaurant in a small French village. It’s a good movie – funny, light hearted and feel-good and Helen Mirren is in it, I love her! 

One of the quotes from the movie is “food is memories”. I couldn’t agree more with this!! I learned to cook from my two grandmothers and my mother, though I’m still nowhere near as good as them! One of my grandmothers died three years ago and there is one dish especially that always reminds me of her. My grandmother had rheumatoid arthritis; it’s a type of arthritis that seriously affects your hands (as well as the rest of your body of course). Despite all this, she was tough and a true lady! When I was young, she taught me how to make bread and butter pudding. It was the first time I tried it and I loved it! Most people can take or leave this dessert but it’s one of my favourite comfort foods!  When I was in school and in college studying for exams, she would prepare the bread and butter pudding and drop it to our house so that I could put it in the oven and have it fresh! She always put cinnamon and nutmeg on top so the smell in the kitchen would literally make your mouth water. It always meant so much that she would think to do this for me.  

At the moment, I’m writing my PhD thesis while also working as a research assistant, so I am really feeling the “exam-time” pressure and getting cravings for comfort food. I want my body and brain working at their best so I can get all this work done, so I decided to substitute the ingredients from my grandmother’s recipe with healthy alternatives. Give it a try; it's really good and full of memories! <3

Ingredients

Recipe: A Healthy Option to Stop Those Pizza Cravings

Until recently, the weekend meant at least one pizza for me. I have a serious pizza addiction, pepperoni, always! So this weekend, while enjoying a relaxing night in after a difficult week of trying to adapt to a new way of eating, the pizza cravings hit me hard! I was absolutely determined not to give in, so I decided not only to save myself the bloating and sick feeling I get after a pizza, but to also save myself the money of ordering one in. I had a few things left in the fridge after the week that I wanted to use up instead of wasting them and I improvised this recipe. I really didn't think this was going to turn out as amazing as it was, but lets face it...if it has melted cheese, it's most likely good! 

I really enjoyed this, it was delicious, easy to make and I feel great after it! I made a carb free version using aubergine slices as the base, but if you aren't a fan of aubergine (like my fussy eater of a boyfriend) you can use a wholemeal wrap as the base instead. He loved this and even agreed that the sauce was "sauce-some"!!! I apologise, but I love terrible puns!! But to be fair, the sauce is amazing. The recipe makes enough sauce for two servings of pizza and you can put the rest in a jar and keep it in the fridge to use as a pasta sauce later in the week. I'm treating this as a little "cheat" as I don't think I should be eating melted cheese every day!! If you try it, I hope you enjoy it :)

Sweet Enough Already - Why I'm Cutting My Sugar Intake

Last week I posted about my exercise goals. I had intended to follow it up fairly quickly with a post on what I am aiming for in terms of healthy eating but work got the better of me during the week and I'm only getting around to this post now!

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A couple of days before I started this blog, I watched a documentary on Netflix called "Fed Up". Believe me when I say that this documentary changed my life! Now, I have been known to exaggerate from time to time, but this is nothing short of the truth! Fed Up is a documentary on the obesity problem in the US, specifically among young children. They begin by comparing the level of obesity in American children today (1 in 5) to 40 years ago (1 in 20). The number of cases of type 2 diabetes in children in the US today (almost 60,000) was also compared to 40 years ago (0). They also showed a surprising link between the rise in the number of people joining gyms and the number of obese people. Surely if one goes up, the other must go down? This is slightly reminiscent of my own problems with losing weight in the past, that I spoke about in my first blog post - I was eating what I perceived to be healthy food and exercising so why wasn't I seeing a change? With people becoming increasingly interested in losing weight in the 70's and 80's, companies began to introduce more and more "low-fat" and "zero-calorie" products to the market. But, if you remove the fat from food you're also removing the flavour, and companies compensated for this by adding more sugar. 

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My Journey

This is my first blog post! I have to say it’s extremely daunting to actually put this online but it’s something I have thought about doing for a while and I’m going to give it a try! Honestly, I don’t expect anyone to read my blog but if someone does then great! I really hope you enjoy it!

There are two reasons why I decided to start a blog, the first being that I love to write and the second is that I really want to start looking after myself. At the moment I’m working as a research engineer and part of that involves writing papers to publish your findings. I complain a lot about this part of my work, but secretly I love it! I find that it helps me to understand my work so much more, you can’t write something down and then present it as fact without being 100% confident in it. So you end up spending an awful lot of time just reading around the topic to make certain that you know exactly what it is you’re talking about! This brings me on to the second reason for starting a blog – I really want to start looking after myself, but I haven’t a clue what I’m doing!! I want to lose some weight, get fit, eat right and take care of my skin and hair (who doesn’t?). A year ago, I had gotten very unfit and my clothes were either really tight or didn’t fit, my skin was starting to look dull, my hair…we won’t even go there… and I ended up being quite unhappy with myself. As well as that, I was often tired, had no energy and found it hard to concentrate. So, to try and make a change for a better me, I hopped right onto the health and fitness bandwagon and promptly fell right back off! I tried this a few times but it never seemed to stick and I couldn’t understand why. I blamed myself for having no will-power but this isn’t me; when I put my mind to something there’s usually no stopping me! So why couldn’t I get the results I wanted even though I was so determined? 

Photo cred: Sparkpeople