helen-louise's journal

Or anyone else on a low fat diet.

I had a craving for instant noodles, but the noodles I have here (Sainsbury's vegetable instant noodles, suitable for vegans) are so high in fat that one packet gives you a staggering 26.6 grams of fat! I can't *eat* food that fatty without getting really ill. So I took the flavour packet from the noodles & made it up with normal spaghetti, broken into small pieces. It was good! Would've been even better if the flavour packet was fresh and not expired in 2006 (not a problem from the health point of view, because there isn't enough FOOD in those flavour packets to go off) ;). The original noodles, however, would've been inedible because they're all full of palm oil, which like all vegetable oils goes rancid after a couple of years.

YAY DELICIOUS JUNK FOODS!

Here is a plea. If you're taking homemade cakes to BiFest, please mark them so that those of us with food allergies, intolerances or preferences know whether the cakes are safe for us to eat.

Things you may want to mention include, but are not limited to:

• the type of flour used - wheat flour or gluten-free? If gluten-free, what cereal/s is it?
  
• presence of dairy products - check the allergy boxes on the back of chocolate and margarine to find out whether there's hidden milk content.
  
• eggs - mention their existence and also if they're free-range, perhaps?
  
• gelatine or marshmallows - instantly make the cake not suitable for vegetarians, unless you used Vege-Gel or vegan marshmallows.
  
• nuts - along with type. Many people are allergic to peanuts and cashew nuts but ok with hazelnuts, walnuts and pecan nuts, and vice versa.
  
• soya or soy protein - a fair number of people have issues with soy. Most of them are ok with soya lecithin.
  
• fruit - don't even get me started on the list of various fruits that people I know are allergic to. Some of them have the full anaphylaxic type reactions with lips swelling up and throat closing even to trace ingredients of cooked fruits. According to a list I have in a book for minimising allergic reactions, any fruit except pears can cause problems - except I'm sure one of my friends is allergic to pear! So, um, list your fruits and jams.
  
• non-obvious flavourings or ingredients - chilli? wasabi? peppermint? really large amounts of nutmeg?

If you really can't be bothered to write a full list of ingredients, please state who the cake was made by so anyone with food sensitivities can find you and ask questions. This is also a good idea if you wish to receive compliments on your excellent baking abilities!

In case you're interested, this is what I'm going to put on my cakes: ( Read more... )

Tonight's dinner: tricolore pasta twists with tomato, red pepper, zucchini and chickpeas, garlic oil, basil and black pepper. Yum.

Ingredients:
One average-size zucchino/courgette
One red pepper
One tin of chopped plum tomatoes in juice (400g)
Half a tin of chickpeas/garbanzo beans (drained weight 120g)
100g of fusilli tricolore per person
2 teaspoons of garlic olive oil
Sprinkling of dried basil
Black pepper & salt to taste

( Read more... )

Ages ago, I said I had a bunch of vegan very low-fat or fat-free recipes that I could share with the internet at large. Actually typing them in takes a lot of effort, because there are a lot of instructions that I carry around in my head that are difficult to translate into words. But I thought I probably "should" type some more in.

The recipes on this page are both insanely easy and could probably be made by people with comparatively little cooking skill.

( Vegan rice pudding (with cow variant)... )


( h-l's totally idiot-proof Sweetcorn Soup )


OK, I've run out of motivation here. But I'm getting there! 3 out of 17 recipes posted! :P

See also: Hot Fudge Brownies. Note I've changed some of the quantities from my original post. Having made them more than 20 times since the original post, I've refined the recipe slightly ;)

This rocks my socks: The Limoncelli Scale of Sexuality. Humour, but it makes some valid points (particularly wrt any scale where "0"=heterosexuality - I'm amazed I've never noticed the problem with that before).

Link from the lovely otterylexa.

In other news, I am waiting for the wuzzie to get back from the supermarket, so I can make moyashi soba with a modified version of the recipe in the Wagamama Cookbook. (Modified for fat content and to remove vegetables we don't care for). I am impatient to know whether it'll work, because I'm ravenous. Yesterday I made fatfree chips using the recipe on kake's site, and although the chips got burnt to hell in the grill owing to my lack-of-familiarity with our grill (I generally avoid grilling on the basis that combination grill-and-ovens are asking for trouble at the best of times, and our oven is fundamentally evil anyway) they were surprisingly edible when covered in a little salt, lots of black pepper and Heinz tomato ketchup. I now at least know what the timings for our microwave & grill "should" be, so achieving chips should be possible in the future. This is a Good Thing (not least of all because the Sainsbury's Be Good To Yourself "only 3% fat" oven chips made me extremely ill, and I'm sick of boiled potato).

All in all, it's been very weird having to almost-completely-remove fat from my diet. I figured that being vegan, I had a pretty low-fat diet already, but I've been horrified by how much fat is in almost anything preprepared. (I mean, yes - sausages, bacon, cheese - these things you know are high in fat, and it's unsurprising that the vegan alternatives are likewise. But oven-cooked burgers? Marinated tofu? Vegetable stews? Tofu should not contain 10% fat, even if it's been soaked in lard!).

The one good thing that'll come out of this illness is that I've learnt how to cook with virtually no fat, which'll be good for sustained healthy eating in the future. But it's annoying that I have no choice - right now, I can't even offset a high-fat food with salad or steamed vegetables at the same meal. Tossing a few nuts into my stir "fry" renders it inedible (the only concentrated protein sources I can eat are tofu and dehydrated soya protein chunks). Even if I have to do low-fat forever, I just want to get to the stage where I can eat some fat, so that I can eat out again. I like restaurants, and Richard & I have both missed eating out, but nowhere does food low enough in fat for me to be able to eat it.