New recipes: Beetroot Soup with Feta

I've had a bit of success with some candida diet-friendly recipes recently. First up is a truly heavenly Beetroot Soup with Feta, the recipe for which I cadged off the Abel Cole website and which gave me an opportunity to test out my new goblet blender (I've always used a rather messy and inadequate hand blender in the past). There's a link to the recipe here, but as the format has gone a little awry and it's not the easiest task to decipher it, I'll reproduce it below:

Beetroot Soup with Feta

(Makes around two hearty servings)

250g beetroot, grated coarsely (or ready-cooked beetroot cut into slices)
250g tomatoes, halved
1 clove garlic, chopped roughly
1 small onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 tbsp olive or sunflower oil
250ml stock (yeast-free stock cube will suffice)
salt and freshly ground pepper
60g feta cheese

Place the halved tomatoes in an ovenproof dish. Throw over the garlic and drizzle over half the oil. Roast them for 25-30 mins at 190 degrees until soft and pulpy. Rub through a sieve to remove the skin and pips.

Heat the remaining oil in a large saucepan and sweat the onion until soft. Add the beetroot and stock and bring to the boil. Season lightly with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Simmer gently for 7-10 mins until the beetroot is tender.

Stir in the tomato puree, transfer to a blender and process until completely smooth. Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary. Reheat the soup until thoroughly hot, but not boiling.

Divide between warm bowls and crumble over a little feta into each bowl.

Absolutely delicious. :)

More new recipes: Courgette rice with feta and olives & Spanish-style chicken

As promised, here are a couple more candida diet-friendly recipes:

The first, Courgette rice with feta and olives, I found on the BBC Good Food magazine website, so I won't reproduce it here. What's great about this one is that it needs no adaptation or substitutions. Just make sure the neither the feta cheese nor the black olives (Sainsbury's stoned black olives in a ring-pull can are fine) include citric acid and the stock is candida diet -friendly (i.e. no yeast, sugars or monosodium glutamate - try Kallo's 'Yeast-free Stock Cubes' available from Holland & Barrett and other Health Food shops).

The second recipe is one I made up, so as usual the instructions are bit a vague!

Spanish-style Chicken

Serves one

1 chicken breast (I'm enjoying Sainsbury's free-range, organic West Country chicken at the moment - it's a bit more expensive, but the texture and taste far surpass 'normal' processed chicken breasts)
half a can of chopped tomatoes (no citric acid)
half an onion, sliced
clove of garlic, chopped
oil (sunflower or olive)
a handful of black olives (use the leftovers from the courgette recipe above), sliced
half a red pepper, sliced
a dash of paprika
about a tablespoon of fresh parsley, finely chopped
seasoning to taste

Lightly fry the garlic and onions in the oil. Slice the chicken breasts into strips and add to the pan. Cook for a few minutes and then add the red pepper. Cook until the chicken is golden brown. Add the tomatoes and stir in the sliced olives. Add a dash of paprika and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for about ten minutes, and then add the parsley.

Serve with brown rice and a green salad.

Mother Hemp Red Pesto

Another of my finds at Tescos was 'Motherhemp' Red Pesto. It's fairly strong and flavoursome, so you only need a little bit to liven up pasta. For dinner this evening, I had it with oven-roasted vegetables (red pepper, courgettes, onion and aubergine) on Orgran Tricolour corn pasta, topped with crumbled feta for protein.

Here's a pic (from the Motherhemp website).

There was also green pesto version, but I believe that included Parmesan in the ingredient. Shame :(

Bty, the oils in hemp seed are supposed to be good for inflammatory skin conditions. And I'm sure we're all familiar with the sort of nasty inflammatory skin conditions Candida overgrowth can cause!