What is the new, food related reason to worry? Oh yes, not eating enough fibre. Apparently it’s the new must-eat, life-prolonging nutrient, rather than something helping us go you-know-where.
I’m not going to make fun of it. I recorded everything I ate in a food diary for a long while (geek, moi?) and though on the whole my diet was pretty decent, my fibre intake was far lower than the recommended amount, which is about 30g. A mountain of lentils. Several loaves of brown bread. A bucketful of pasta and a whole market stall of fruit and veg. And yes – the problem isn’t that I don’t like the above, but that they are Scary Carbs.
And that applies to us all, culprits of fibre intake shortage. Solution? How about we cut out chocolate and alcohol and replace them with beans and kale? Hahaha. Indeed.
But here’s a bunch of dishes we could cook this week that may improve the fibre fiasco: breakfast to start off. Overnight oats with homemade yoghurt don’t require cooking and everybody likes oats. No, it doesn’t have to be homemade yoghurt but I suggest give it a try if you can. If you’re not keen on raw(ish) oats, go for baked buttermilk oatmeal; make a batch in advance and slip a portion into the oven in the morning.
If you’re a bread baker, try the wholemeal seeded bloomer; its seed content nearly matches the (wholemeal!) flour content. Or the seeded sourdough batons if you’re the kind of person that keeps tubs of starter in the fridge.
Make the crunchy cabbage salad to go with your suppers and/or lunches. Make a lot because it is still nice on the next day; it goes a little sauerkrauty in flavour. Or you can go the whole hog and make a batch of the genuine sauerkraut or even kimchi.
Cook brown rice with mushrooms. Make chicken alla fiorentina (spinach!) instead of a plain roast fillet. Eat your baked potato with the skin: if you don’t like it too crisp, bake it in foil. Don’t peel carrots for the zingy salad, just wash or scrub them.
Fibre-rich snack: oatcakes, very easy to make too. If you have a few for lunch with an apple and some grapes or another favourite fruit, it will kill almost half the recommended daily intake. It gets better: oatmeal raisin cookies are fibre for dessert, and you can win even with a cake – wholemeal ricotta cake is low in sugar to boot.
Eat well, cook more, boost the fibre intake. And subscribe to the newsletter!