Delicious Parsnip and Ginger Soup

Freshly harvested parsnips, by Marj Joly

Feeling chilly in this wintry weather? Then try the Parsnip and Ginger Soup recipe over on the River Nene website. Instead of butter, I substituted half olive oil spread and olive oil, yeast-free stock powder and a splash of soy sauce, instead of Worcester sauce.

Delicious!

Recipe: Roasted Vine Tomato and Basil Soup

It's sweltering hot here at the moment (about time too!) and I really didn't feel like cooking (or writing) this evening. I fancied something light and fresh, and came up with this recipe, which made use of the lovely tomatoes and onions I received in my weekly veg box.

Photo by Zed.Cat

Roasted Vine Tomato and Basil Soup

Serves 1

4 medium vine tomatoes
1 medium onion
1 large clove garlic
half a handful of fresh basil leaves
1/4 pint stock (yeast-free)
olive oil
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Pre-heat the oven to 200C. Wash and quarter the tomatoes. Place in a dish, skin side up. Peel and quarter the onion, add to dish with clove of garlic (leave whole). Drizzle over a good slug of olive oil and season with pepper. Place in the oven for around thirty minutes until the tomato skins are wrinkly. Leave to cool for a few minutes.

When cool enough to handle, slip the skins from the tomatoes. Place tomato, onion and garlic, along with the juice collected in the bottom of the dish, into a blender. Whizz the mixture with half the stock until smooth. Add the basil and whizz until chopped.

Pour the mixture into a saucepan and stir in the remainder of the stock. Reheat gently over a low heat. Adjust seasoning to taste.

Serve with sourdough toast. Very tasty. :)

Recipe: Luscious Leek & Potato Soup

My own recipe, this simple soup has no added fat (someone is trying to lose a few pounds so she can fit back into her skinny jeans!) and is suitable for vegans, as it has no added dairy.

Luscious Leek & Potato Soup

Makes 3-4 servings

5-6 medium potatoes
1 large leek
1 shallot or small onion
1 tbsp Marigold Vegan and Yeast-free stock powder
freshly ground black pepper
freshly ground nutmeg

Peel and chop the potatoes into two or three pieces. Place in a large saucepan and just cover them with cold water. Cover and bring to the boil. Simmer until the potatoes are starting to soften, and then add the leek, well rinsed and chopped and the stock powder. Stir, re-cover and simmer until potatoes are cooked. Leave to cool for a few minutes.

Remove the vegetables and about two ladles of the cooking liquid to a liquidiser. Blend until smooth and return to the saucepan and remaining cooking liquid. Stir well and heat gently. Add pepper and nutmeg to taste.

Serve with sourdough drop scones (recipe to follow soon!).

Tesco Healthy Living Tomato and Basil Soup

I had high hopes for this one...ready-made tomato soup with no added sugar and available in small, one person/portion-sized cartons (300 g). Here's a pic, so you know what to look out for.



It contains:


tomatoes (59%)
tomato puree (30%)
onion
vegetable oil
cornflour
basil (0.6%)
garlic puree
salt
oregano - N.B. a powerful anti-fungal!
black pepper


Nothing that should antagonise (encourage?) any lingering yeasty-beasties. But, for me, the flavour was too sharp and slightly bitter (really needs sugar sadly), and I didn't get on well with the large chunks of tomato (I prefer a smooth texture). Still, others might disagree - it's worth giving it a go.

Soup!

I've discovered a new range of soups recently by Sierra Rica and available from Tescos (and quite possibly other retailers). They don't list the ingredients of their organic vegetable stock on the jars, but I'm trusting that they're yeast-free. I tried Chestnut and Carrot with Ginger and Tomato and Basil. Both very tasty.

Recipe: Marvellous Miso Soup

Just recently I've been loving miso soup for lunch. Here's my version:

Marvellous Miso Soup

(Makes at least two portions - depending on the amount of vegetables and noodles used)

miso paste
ginger
garlic
cabbage
spring onion
mushrooms (optional)
brown rice noodles
sesame oil
boiling water
freshly ground pepper

Grate a garlic bulb with a knob of ginger. Sweat in a saucepan with the sesame oil. Meanwhile, slice a couple of spring onions into rings (include plenty of the green part). Shred two-three cabbage leaves (savoy looks best). Add the spring onion and cabbage (+ a couple or three of mushrooms if using) to the pan and fry gently for a couple of minutes.

Add around a pint of boiling water. Throw in a handful of noodles (I have been using King Soba brown rice and wakame noodles - delicious). Simmer for a two to three minutes, until the noodles are tender.

Remove the pan from the heat and add a good squeeze/spoonful of miso paste (about 1 tbs). Stir to dissolve. Return to heat (reduced) for a couple of minutes. DO NOT BOIL - this will kill off the beneficial enzymes in the miso.

Taste and adjust miso/seasoning if necessary. Ladle into bowls, distributing the noodles and vegetables evenly. You may find it easier to eat the noodles with chopsticks!

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. :)

Asparagus Soup

As promised, I toddled off to Leicester market yesterday afternoon and purchased some new season asparagus so I could try out that wonderful sounding asparagus soup recipe I found via Cooking Cute. I made it this lunchtime. It is - in a word - AMAZING!! Fresh tasting with a real zing. I had to wrestle with myself not to scoff the leftovers I'd set aside for lunch tomorrow.

Overall the recipe is suitable for anti-Candida dieters with some minor amendments. I omitted the optional parmesan garnish (though I might have added a sprinkle of grated hard goats cheese, if I'd had some) and replaced the 'all-purpose flour' with wholewheat plain flour (I suspect cornflour would work equally well). And as I no longer drink soy milk, I used goats milk instead. The asparagus I used was young, so not too woody. If you were using older spears, you might choose to sieve the vegetable puree before adding the milk and yoghurt.

Quick tip (nicked off Jamie Oliver): To get rid of the hard, woody part snap - rather than cut - the ends off the asparagus spears. This will leave you with just the tender parts of the vegetable!

Soup, luverly soup!

Just tried another of Marks & Spencer's candida diet friendly soups: Spicy Red Lentil and Tomato. Not bad - bit lumpy for my taste. My favourite remains their Butternut Squash with Roasted Red Pepper Harissa, which is smooth and thick, but not too gloopy. Oh, and they've still got their buy-one-get-another-half-price offer on.

Recipe: Haricot Bean Soup

Just made this. Not bad. Kind of satisfied my strange craving for tinned tomato soup (weird - cos I never wanted it before I went on the diet). The recipe is adapted from one of those Australian Women's Weekly recipe books - Greek Cookery, I think.

Haricot bean soup

half a tin of haricot beans (in water)
olive oil
half an onion, chopped finely
1 clove garlic, sliced or crushed
1 stick of celery, finely chopped
1 tin of chopped tomatoes (no citric acid)
1 yeast-free, vegetable stock cube
2 tbsp tomato puree
500 ml hot water
handful of flat leaf parsley, chopped
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the garlic and onions. Cook until soft. Add celery and cook over a low heat for about ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Add tomatoes, the stock cube and tomato puree. Add the beans and simmer with a lid on for about an hour. Stir in the parsley and season.

Suitable for freezing.

One thing this recipe has taught me is that I really need to work on my culinary skills - my 'finely chopped' is more like 'great big chunks'! My nutritional therapist has recommended that I have lots of soups and stews to cut through catarrh (nice :S), so expect some more soup recipes soon...

Soup

I've bought a couple of nice fresh soups from Marks & Spencers recently. The best - a delicious and fresh-tasting smooth soup - was Butternut Squash with Roasted Red Pepper Harissa, which lent a spicy kick, just right for the cold weather we've been having recently. And if you get down there quick, they might still have their 'buy one, get one half price' offer on!

A quick round up...

...of candida diet friendly products and ready-meals to start the month of February.

As a quick aside, it's been wonderful and Spring-like here for the last couple of days - has done my prevailing mood no end of good. Though the weather man says we're set for frosty weather next week - hope the days stay lovely and crisp and bright. I feel like I can just do and cope with so much more when the sun shines. Got to get me one of those daylight lamps for gloomy days.

To start, my last couple of Waitrose finds:

• Aloo Gobi Saag ready-meal, chunks of potato, cauliflower florets and spinach in a tomato-y, spicy sauce. Lovely. :) It's a while since I ate this one (the packaging has been sitting on my desk waiting to be 'blogged'), and I can't remember how hot it was, but I do remember it was pretty good. Another great standby to have in the freezer.
  
• Another soup by the Really Interesting Food Company - this time, Sri Lankan Lentil and Coconut Soup. Now, this one was pretty powerful spicy-heat wise, as far as I can remember. In fact the rest of the tin is still languishing in the back of the fridge. Not because it wasn't good (it was!), but because I had friends to stay and never got round to eating the rest of it - shame (note to self: clean out fridge!).

And now for some new things from Sainsburys, my usual supermarket of choice:

• Taste the Difference Butternut Squash and Sunflower Seed Layered Dip - smooth, hummus-y chickpea dip topped with chunks of roasted squash and whole chickpeas. Makes a nice change from 'classic' hummus, and kind of looks home-made which is good. Has to be eaten within two days of opening though, and there's just too much there for little old me to eat on my own.
  
• Stamp Collection (as in Terence Stamp) Organic Wheat Free New York Deli Bread - sold in packets of six slices. Like a rye bread, but a little less dense and softer. More like 'normal' bread, though quite crumbly (doesn't make good sandwiches). Needs to be kept in fridge after opening. Advertised as containing no added yeast. Great!

Soup

As I type I'm trying out the tin of Suma Carrot & Coriander Soup I picked up at Waitrose yesterday. It's not bad; well seasoned, fairly spicy. Not as good as my own of course, but takes considerably less time to prepare!

It was, however, the only soup in their range available at that particular supermarket, that didn't contain any prohibited ingredients (I'm assuming corn syrup is a bad thing). Still, it is encouraging to note the increasing range and availability of Candida diet friendly products in British supermarkets. Food shopping is certainly much easier now, than when I started the diet in December 2004.

Convenience food

Apologies for my long absence. It's nearly halfway through the month already and I haven't yet posted anything for January. Part of the problem is that I'm still at home in Suffolk on an extended Christmas holiday. I'm being cooked for and not getting the opportunity to experiment with anti-candida recipes as much as I would normally. The other factor in my elusiveness is my limited access to the Internet. And when I do get a chance to get online, I'm having to rely on a painfully slow dial-up connection. The other stuff I blog for my Department tends to take priority, meaning 'The Cardboard Diet' gets bumped down the 'to do' list. Oh well, I'll do my best to rectify the situation in the coming days and weeks - promise!

So, until I get a chance to get back in the kitchen, here's the low down on a few anti-candida friendly convenience foods I've recently found in the supermarkets.

Tinned Soup

Sainsburys' So Organic Spicy Lentil and Mixed Pepper Soup - yet to try this. Sounds good, but I wasn't very impressed with the other soups in their So Organic range I've previously tried. But, I'm prepared to give it a go.

Heinz Special Root Vegetable and Barley Broth - now, I was AMAZED to find this. Not necessarily because it is an okay Heinz soup, but because - with it being a Heinz soup - it should be available from most shops, helping to make life that little bit easier. I tried it at lunchtime. It's really not bad. It includes big chunks of parsnip and swede and slices of carrot which make it look fairly 'home made'. Plus, the addition of the barley is lovely. Little on the gloopy side for my taste, but beggers can't be choosers as they say.

Rice

Have been meaning to blog this for ages. Uncle Ben's produce a microwavable wholemeal rice, with nothing in it except rice, vegetable oil and salt. A great store cupboard standby. The whole pack just takes a couple of mins at full blast in the microwave to heat through. It's hard to believe it would be as good as freshly cooked rice, but seriously, it is.

Tinned tomatoes

Equally I keep forgetting to mention Sainsburys' So Organic Chopped Tomatoes, which are thankfully free of citric acid and any other additive nasties. My only criticism is that you do tend to get a lot of 'end' pieces in these tins (y'know - the bit where the stalk used to be), but if you're not fussy, that shouldn't be a problem. And if you are as fussy as me, you can always fish the offending chunks out of the tin before you use them!

Watercress Soup

Apologies for my recent absence. I've been up to my neck in it recently and not feeling terribly positive, so I've been trying to cut back on the myriad of extraneous stuff I do just to relieve the pressure a bit; this blog being one one of them.

Having said all that, I had a bit of exciting news recently: I can have cakes and biscuits made with fructose now! Just need to find some good recipes and time to try them out now. Will post the results as soon as I'm able.

Continuing working my way through Miriam Polunin's book at the moment. Made Watercress Soup (p. 103) yesterday and about to have the second serving for my lunch. Pretty good, but quite gloopy, probably because I didn't add the soured cream recommended in the recipe. Perhaps a spot of goats milk will slacken the texture a bit...?

Book Review: 'Healing Foods: A Practical Guide to Key Foods for Good Health' by Miriam Polunin

I found a copy of Miriam Polunin's 'Healing Foods' in my local Oxfam for £1.99 the other day. It's packed with great advice on the nutritional and health benefits of different types of food and includes some fantastic healthy recipes designed to support the body and counteract the effects of a range of conditions (inc. candida overgrowth). Recently I've made Carrot and Corinader soup (good for heart health and the body's defences, apparently) (p. 100) and Dhal (which helps to protect against respiratory infections, anaemia and support circulation, heart and diabetic health) (p. 127). Both recipes were easy to follow and the results were very tasty. Looking forward to having a second helping of carrot and coriander soup for my lunch shortly!

Hokkaido-style corn, chicken and cabbage soup with miso

Have just made the most FANTASTIC soup for lunch, which is perfectly anti-Candida diet* compatible - courtesy of Maki at 'I was just really very hungry'. I substituted the chicken for firm tofu.

Highly recommended!

* just make sure that, if you're using tinned sweetcorn, it isn't sweetened.

Things for Lunch

Lunch is a fairly easy meal on the anti-candida diet, despite the lack of bread (so sandwiches are out). Here's a few quick and easy ideas:

• hummous ('friendly' versions available from Tescos, Sainsburys, Marks & Spencers and the Co-op - go for the plain, 'full-fat' option, 'diet' or flavoured versions are usually packed full of hidden nasties), spread on oat cakes (plain), or use as a dip for (plain, salted) tortilla chips, crudities, or - a recent discovery of mine - wholewheat chapattis (instead of the more traditional pitta bread). Make your own, or try Patak's version (sweetened with fruit juice, but I figure it must be a tiny, tiny amount), available from Sainsburys. Hummous has fabulous candida-fighting properties!
• salads (see my previous post on barbecue food, for a few ideas) - try adding tinned tuna, prawns or grilled seasoned chicken) for protein.
• eggs - boiled, scrambled or omelette-d.
• home-made soup (see recipe for my version of Onion Soup below).
• jacket potatoes with goats cheese (Sainsburys do a nice organic soft goats cheese without rind, or you could try grating a hard goats cheese), cottage cheese, or seasoned tuna mixed with yoghurt.

Onion Soup

This does take a bit of effort, but makes a smallish saucepan full, enough for two servings.

1 large onion
1 clove of garlic
olive oil spread
olive or sunflower oil
yeast-free stock cube (the only one I've come across so far is made by 'Kallo' - yellow box - and is suitable for vegans: available from 'Holland and Barrett' and other health food stores).
dried or fresh herbs (finely chopped)
salt & pepper

Finely slice the garlic clove and onion (in rings) and saute over a gentle heat for about 20-30 mins in a combination of the olive/sunflower oil and olive oil spread until soft and caramelised (this will add flavour and colour to the soup). Add the stock cube, a pinch of the herbs, pepper (the stock cube is already fairly salty) and about a pint of boiling water. Simmer for another 20 to 30 mins before serving. If the soup is too pale, you can add a splash of soy sauce or a teaspoon of miso paste (if you're allowed them) for colour.

More lunch ideas to follow...