The Sustain Plan
I’m a bit behind with writing this up as last Sunday the washing machine malfunctioned and I spent quite a lot of the day mopping the kitchen instead of writing. That and some work travel down to Slough meant that I am only just catching up, but never mind – I’ve still been cooking, just not writing about it very quickly.
This week we stayed with the healthy theme, but in contrast to last week’s old style wholefoods, we tried something more up to date. This is my younger son’s book which he got for Christmas. He’s into keeping fit, and although I would not encourage him to follow a weight loss plan and worry about how he looks in selfies, I think that learning how to cook some healthy meals and following the exercise routines in the book is great for getting him into healthy habits.
Joe Wicks has 2.6 million followers on Instagram and a website at http://www.thebodycoach.com where you can read about his diet and exercise plan. You may find the style of his writing a bit annoying if you’re not into everything being “banging” and him referring to broccoli as “midget trees”, but there is no denying that he’s successful and the recipes are tasty, easy and fun. My son helped me choose and cook these ones so it was more messy that usual, but also more entertaining.
The main course was sea bass with spiced pea and potato cakes. The recipe is supposed to only take 15 minutes, but that’s just for one person. We scaled it up for 4 and it took a lot longer. For one portion, the recipe says to cook the potato in the microwave, but for our large quantity we cooked it in a pan. That wasn’t difficult, but did take longer. We then mashed all the potato cake ingredients together and fried the cakes two at a time. The potato mixture was really soft and quite difficult to flip over in the pan and we also needed to keep the first cakes warm in the oven while we cooked the rest. It was a bit of a juggling act and it was just as well there were two of us.
The recipe said we should remove the skin from the cooked sea bass, but we left it on, partly because one of his other sea bass recipes points out that the skin is the best part so I’m not sure why you would want to take it off for this one.
It was very tasty anyway and my sons really liked it, apart from the cooked tomatoes which were “too squashy”. OK…
Dessert was peanut butter brownies. This made 16 brownies (well, 8 for us as we’re not into dainty portions) so there was no need to scale it up.
This was very easy to make. I did adjust the recipe a bit as it included chocolate protein powder which you can only buy in large tubs for about £30. I replaced that and the almond milk with some chocolate protein shake and added some ground almonds which seemed to work fine.
We had this with vanilla ice cream (definitely not part of the Lean in 15 plan) and strawberries, which are out of season but we found some quite juicy ones. The brownies were really good, especially served warm. They had quite a light texture and lots of chocolate flavour without being too sweet and sickly.
We all enjoyed this much more than last week’s meal. The other good thing is that my son spotted a few more recipes in the book he wants to try out. By the way I did drink wine with this, which seems wrong as I don’t think that is part of the plan, but I recently received a big box of free wine – I’ll have to write another post about that!
Apricots In Manchester 