Healthy food

Healthy food is low in refined carbohydrates (white flour and sugar), low in saturated fat, high in complex carbohydrates (whole grains and legumes), high in fibre and high in vitamins and minerals.

If I have doubts about what to eat I go for the safety of unprocessed plants: fruit, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and nuts. This is what the recipes in this website are based on.

White sugar is unambiguously bad for you. The less processed sugar you can eat the better for your health. You can take your favourite recipe for biscuits, cake or a sweet desert and cook the recipe as normal sans sugar but the problem is it will not taste very nice and be difficult to persuade people to eat it (irrespective of how healthy it is).

The problem is that the routinely used plain white flour has no flavour but it teams up very well with white sugar. The two combine beautifully. If you want to cook without sugar then you also need to jettison white flour. White flour (and I don’t know why) without white sugar does not taste very nice.  If you replace the plain white flour with flour made from whole grains (wheat or rolled oats) then you find you can finish up with something healthy, flavoursome and popular.

Another thing you can do if you eliminate sugar from a recipe is add extra essence or spices. Vanilla essence, orange essence, rose water, almond essence, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, star of anise. It doesn’t take long to change a sweet tooth into a tooth that appreciates and savours a multitude of flavours.

 I don’t like the idea of adding artificial sweeteners. It’s my experience that weaning people off a sweet tooth is possible and much preferable. The idea of replacing sucrose with fructose also doesn’t inspire me. Sugar is sugar. It doesn’t matter if it comes in the form of white sugar, honey or fructose it’s still full of calories (leads to weight gain, diabetes, heart disease) and will rot your teeth.

I also intend to include in these pages recipes for vegetables. The rationale is: fill up on healthy vegies and decrease or eliminate the need for sweets, biscuits, cakes and dessert.