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

Recipe: Spicy Sweet Potato and Coconut Soup

I absolutely love the weather we are having at the moment; sunny, but cool enough that you have to wear all those lovely autumn jackets, boots and jumpers. We officially had to turn the heating back on in the house again in the evenings and in my mind, that means it's time to start making soup again!

I am a big fan of soup, but I rarely order it in a restaurant or buy it ready made as you never know what's in it and it could be loaded with salt, cream or oil. So it's a good thing that soup is so easy to make at home yourself and requires only a chopping board, one pot and a hand blender. I'm sure there are tons of different ways to make soup, but I have my way that I apply to any type of ingredients and I always end up with a thick and tasty soup that's perfect to warm yourself up in the evenings. I'd heard about sweet potato and coconut soup before, and I thought it sounded amazing! I've never actually tried it before now, so making it today was a little bit of a gamble! I decided to make it on a whim and I really had no clue if it would be nice, especially as I made up the ingredients and the recipe (something I'm not great at)! However, I'm glad to say it was delicious and definitely worth posting about! Here is my recipe for spicy sweet potato and coconut soup, I hope you like it! 

Ingredients

1 medium onion

2 cloves of garlic

1 tin of coconut milk

1 large sweet potato

1 tbsp coconut oil

2 tsp ginger

2 tsp cumin

1 tsp chili

1 tsp turmeric

Salt and Pepper

Makes 4 servings

1 Serving contains approximately 254 calories, 18.6 g fat (16.2 g saturated), 20.2 g carbohydrates (6.3 g sugar), 2.9 g fibre, 2.9 g protein

Method

1. Heat the coconut oil in a large pan with a heavy base and fry the onion and garlic for approx. 5 minutes.
2. Roughly chop the sweet potato into cubes, add to the pot and fry for a further 5 minutes.
3. Add the ginger, chili, cumin, turmeric and coconut oil. Fill the empty tin of coconut oil with water and add this to the pot too.
4. Bring to the boil, season and leave to simmer for around 20 minutes.
5. Using the hand blender, blitz the soup until it is smooth.

The soup can be kept in the fridge in an air-tight container for 2-3 days.

I hope you enjoy this soup if you try it!

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!

Photo Cred

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. 

Photo Cred

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