Chicken Curry Night

Monday night is always curry night, it's one of my favourite meals of the week. I need comfort food on a Monday and this fits the bill. It's a recipe from my parents and I use it religiously every week.

Ingredients:
350g roast chicken
3 sticks of celery
Half a white onion
300ml chicken stock
Handful of sultanas
1 tbsp mango chutney
1 tbsp Sharwoods curry powder
Tomato purée

350g dry weight rice (I'm carb back loading tonight!)

Method:
Chop the celery and throw into a hot pan with the roast chicken
Heat up the chicken stock
Chop the onion and add to the pan
Add the curry powder to the chicken and veg and stir around coating all the ingredients
Add the stock to the pan and turn up the heat
Add mango chutney and stir in well
Add tomato purée and again, stir in well
Add the sultanas and stir in
Put rice on to boil in a saucepan until at desired consistency
Dry off rice either in an oven or microwave, keep an eye on the curry to make sure it doesn't boil down too much
Serve!

The mountain I made looked like this, but yours doesn't have to be so large.

Steak!

It's true what they say - steak is such a treat, it's the world's best meat!

I grabbed this from my local butcher. It's better to go to the butcher, particularly when buying steak - because you can choose the thickness. I like my steaks fat!

I decided to have the steak with egg fried rice, broccoli and kale. It's a bit of an odd combo but has all the nutrients I need and tasted great.

Tuna Omelette

Another day, another omelette!

Today is a gym day so I'm looking for something a little lower on fat than last night's spectacular. I've decided to go for a tuna omelette. This may sound like an odd combination, but it actually works really well. It's even better with cheese, but then that raises the fat content.

Ingredients
A small knob of Kerrygold butter
Tinned tuna (I use John West no drain tuna in brine)
4 eggs

Method
Melt a small knob of butter in a pan
Add the tuna to the pan and fry until the colour fades
Beat the eggs in a bowl
Add to the tuna making sure all the tuna is well covered
Cook for 2 minutes
Place the pan under the grill until the egg sets

Serve and enjoy!

Spicy Beef Omelette

Tonight I went large!

Ingredients:
1lb mince
1 small red onion
1 small red pepper
Chilli powder
6 "very large" eggs
Mature cheddar

Method:
Brown mince in a deep pan
Chop onion and pepper, add to pan
Cook for 5-10 minutes allowing veg to soften
Whisk eggs in a bowl and grate desired amount of cheese
Add eggs to the Pan and allow the under side to cook
Add cheese and put under the grill until eggs set and cheese browns

This will look quite runny until you put it under the grill. Don't worry because it will all set and make a thick pizza like consistency.

Here's how mine turned out - it wasn't as pretty as the last time because I struggled to get it out of the pan in one piece. This was all down to the sheer size of the meal I had made.

Dust off the cobwebs, let's get this back up and running!

I haven't posted in a while, and this is bad.

This is bad because things have changed, my diet is evolving and it's not being logged. I want to share the weird and wonderful foods that I consume every day!

This week has been very poor for diet. I was away on a business trip and had to rely on Nando's for my only decent source of protein. Although, saying that, I also travelled prepared with a big bag of beef jerky that my flatmate brought back from Florida.

It's a good thing this week is ending, because I hate going off-track!

Today is Friday, which means I am fasting. It's the best time to do it for me because it's a non-gym day, and it's always nice to cook something big up on a Friday to break the fast.

Tonight will be no different. I plan on making a big, beefy, cheesey, spicy omelette. When I'm fasting I always like to write about food!

My planned ingredients are:
Eggs (How many depends entirely on how I feel later, but it will be at least 5)
1lb mince
Small red onion
Half a red pepper
Chilli powder
Mature cheddar

Method

1. Brown the mince in a deep frying pan on the hob (I use a sautee pan)
2. While the mince is browning, finely chop the onion and pepper and add to the pan
3. Add the chilli powder and stir in
4. While the above ingredients cook and soften, crack your eggs into a bowl and beat them (it's also a good idea to turn your grill on at this point)
5. Grate your desired amount of cheese
6. Pour the eggs into the pan making sure all ingredients get a good covering of egg
7. Sprinkle your omelette with cheese and season
8. Wait 30 seconds for the under side of the omelette to cook, then place your pan under the grill for the omelette to set and for the cheese to brown.

Last time I did this, my omelette looked like this:

 

It's really beautiful, isn't it?

Now, many people make meatzzas, which I think are great. However, I think that this omelette satisfies the pizza craving much more effectively. For me I think it's the shape, but also the consistency is a lot more pizza like than my meatzza attempts.

Needless to say this is a very high protein dish, and high on fat as well. This is why for me, it's best reserved to being a fast-breaker on a rest day. It's because of this that no ingredients high in carbohydrates have been added.

I'll be blogging later to share how tonight's omelette goes - the beauty of this is that like a pizza, the topping/filling ingredients are flexible and entirely up to you.

Meatzza Recipe

On Saturday night I made my first meatzza, here's the list of ingredients.

1lb beef mince
1 duck egg (mixed with mince and used as base)
Half a red pepper (diced and fried)
1 chilli pepper
Pepperoni
As much cheddar as you can handle
1 small red onion (diced and fried)
1 400g can chopped tomatoes (blended with a bit of puree and boiled down)

Method

Mix together mince and the egg in a bowl. Once the mince is even coated with the egg, spread this into a baking dish, and put in the oven on a high heat (around 200c, or gas mark 6).

While waiting for this to brown, blend the chopped tomatoes with a little tomato puree (optional) and boil down in a saucepan until you get the thickness you want.

Chop the onion and red pepper, and fry in some lard.

Grate as much cheese as you desire, I went for lots!

Chop the chilli pepper into circles.

By the time your toppings are ready, your base should be brown. This means it's time for the fun part.

Spread your tomato sauce onto the base, and cover with a layer of grated cheese, don't use it all just yet.

Add the onion, pepper, chilli pepper and pepperoni, and then cover with some more cheese.

Pop the whole thing back in the oven and wait for your cheese to brown.

Mine came out looking like this:

It is a mess, there's no question about that. However, this is packed with all the right nutrients for me and tastes delicious. This will be a regular meal for me I feel, and will probably make this again on Friday to break my weekly 24hr fast.

The trick is in the ingredients

One thing I have found since cooking more regularly, is that if you use good ingredients you can't really go wrong.

If you are serious about diet, then the most important thing I would recommend is to look at where you are getting your food from.

Meat
For those of us chasing muscle gain, meat is really important. I've always loved meat, even before protein levels were of any concern to me.

It is tempting to buy supermarket meat. They have good deals, a large range and are a very convenient option. All this is well and good, but I would not recommend getting meat from the majority of supermarkets. Supermarket meat is watery, low quality and has additives to increase the shelf-life. This is not what you want.

One of the best decisions I made with regards to health and fitness was to visit my local butcher. The meat is higher quality, more pure with less water, and to top it off the service I get there never fails to put a smile on my face.

If you don't have access to a local butcher, or you just don't have the time, then the one supermarket I would recommend for meat would be Waitrose. This is the lesser of many evils, it's not quite as good as butcher's meat, but it's lightyears ahead of other well-known supermarkets. This brings me onto my next point, quite conveniently.

Other groceries
Another decision, made fairly recently in fact, was to start shopping at Waitrose. Shopping in Waitrose is a much better experience than other supermarkets I could mention, and the quality of the produce is way ahead.

The selection of veg is vast, and whenever I hear about the latest superfood you can almost guarantee that Waitrose will stock it. My first roast dinner I had with Waitrose ingredients completely sold me.

I should also take this time to dispell the ridiculous rumour that Waitrose is more expensive than other supermarkets. This is completely untrue!

I usually spend less than I did at the previous supermarket I frequented, and I'm getting a much higher quality of food for my money. If you visit Waitrose at the right time of day you will even find them reducing veg that will be good to use for up to a week after buying!

 I think that these simple life choices have proved extremely effective. I feel healthier, more alert, and I am getting leaner quicker. Remember, if you use good ingredients, you can hardly put a foot wrong.