Custard Tart Heaven

Another country, another rowing training camp!  In the past my rowing club visited Seville for a week over Easter every year to get some serious training in, with the coaches putting us through our paces.  But Seville is a long way to drive with a trailer full of boats.  So last year we tried the South of France, and this year was the turn of  Portugal, at a sweet coastal town called Figueira de foz, at the mouth of the Mondego river, the longest river located exclusively in Portuguese territory.
Figueira de foz itself was obviously once a pretty fishing town, but now the beach front has become a tourist's haven, with lots of high-rise hotels and apartment buildings.  Strolling around the back streets of the old town was much more fun, seeing the traditionally tiled houses in perfect tree-lined streets.
The place we stayed in turned out to be a bit of a disaster, but on Boat Race day we were invited to watch the huge TV at The Paintshop Hostel, run by a lovely English couple, and we all wished we had been staying there!
As training camp involves training three times a day for 6-7 days, there's not much time (or energy) to explore a town, but one of our girls had been before and had met the local rowers, so we were invited to have dinner with them before we left, and it was delicious - lightly battered and fried sardines (which you eat from head to tail!), followed by monkfish, prawn and rice stew, made with locally grown rice.  The locals also wanted to tell me about their traditional dishes, one of which is a dessert made from pigs blood (which I didn't try!).  Salted cod is very big here, as is great seafood, so we were not likely to go hungry, and certainly had a great supply of protein to keep us fit and healthy.
One thing I did become slightly addicted to though, was the deliciously tempting custard tarts (pasteis de nata), and found myself trying one from a different bakery each day until I had researched them all to find the best!
And as with most things I love, I then want to make them myself, as most things are better homemade, although on this occasion I think I have been beaten by the experts!  I chose to try a recipe by Diana Henry that was published in the Telegraph a few years ago, you can find it here.  As Diana so cleverly mentions, the bakers in Portugal having been making these for years, so don't expect that you will get it right first time!
One thing I would point out having tried to make them is that getting the pastry as thin as possible is important, and maybe after making your swirls it would be better to roll them out with a rolling pin before putting into the tin?  Apart from that, the custard was delicious and lemony, and the pastry beautifully flaky, so not bad for a first attempt.
I am scared about having another attempt though - who is going to eat them all?!!!

Happy Baking.

Joy x

How to start the day.....

Most of my friends who know me well will know that my favourite way to start the day is to take my sculling boat down to the river Thames and disappear for a couple of hours into my own little world of serene water, sharing it only with the water-land wildlife.  There is something very magical about being propelled by your own efforts. And knowing that I have the river to myself is such a treat (that normally happens only when I get out there before 6am these days!).
Apart from loving my surroundings, I also love returning to the boathouse to enjoy a breakfast that I know I have really earned.  
As a nutritional therapist I see a lot of rowers as well as other sports people, and I am constantly asked about breakfast and whether you should eat before training and if you are going out so early in the morning how is this possible (as you need at least one hour for your food to digest)?  As with all things related to us humans, everyone is different.  Some people can cope with eating a small amount before training and not suffer any effects, whilst others really struggle.

A lot of the scientific evidence points towards having fuel on board before training. But then there is the evidence of the hunter gatherer who certainly didn't eat before he left his hut first thing in the morning, the whole point was he was going hunting for his food, so he ran and hunted first, then he ate, and finally he slept (which also puts the post-Sunday lunch digestive walk idea onto the back burner - next time choose the sofa!).
So my advice is to find out what works best for you, but just be aware that if you don't eat before you train your training session should not be a hard one, and don't expect to reach any PBs - save those for later in the day.
What is important about breakfast though, is to make sure it's substantial - including good protein is important, not only for blood sugar control but also, if you have been training, to repair and rebuild muscles.  
Protein is also essential for making enzymes that are needed for virtually all biological processes that take place in the body, such as transmitting nerve signals or helping the immune system to work.  
The best foods to eat for protein are not necessarily those that are highest in protein as it may also mean they are high is saturated fat, such as beef or lamb. Eating a varied diet, including vegetable proteins such as rice and lentils, as well as fish, is ideal.
So if you are keen enough to get up early and start your day with a plate of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, you will starting your day in a great way.

Good morning!

Joy x

Cyclist's Palsy and Rempeyek!

Well, after a week of no cycling, my left hand is no better at doing up zips, or typing this blog than it was before, but at least now I know why - don't you just love the power of the internet!  A cycling friend called Ed informed me that I am suffering with cyclist's palsy (also know as handlebar palsy), a common condition in road cyclists covering long distances.  It is described as a nerve injury that causes persistent weakness and clumsiness of the hand and thumb, and may cause difficulty with fine finger movements such as operating a computer keyboard or playing the piano (so now I know why I can't play the piano!!).
Unfortunately there is no cure, but the nerve should regenerate itself and the function of the muscles will be restored within 3 months - a little longer than I had hoped!
One thing it does point out to me though is that my new bike was possibly not set up properly for me, as I had cycled Lands End to John O'Groats on my old bike with no hand problems at all - a lesson to be learnt here I feel.

Luckily I can still cook with a dodgy hand (don't ask me to ice a cake though!), so I have been experimenting with recipes of foods we had whilst cycling through Thailand and Malaysia.  When you are cycling between 80-110 miles a day your body just craves sugar for energy, so most of the day is spent taking in jellies, sweets and sweet drinks.  I also used Cliff Shot Bloks, that are like a gel but in a jelly - easier to eat while on the move, and actually quite tasty.  So by the time you get to late afternoon the thought of any more sweet foods is just too much, what you really fancy then is something savoury, and having sweated heavily all day, something salty.
Whilst cycling through Vietnam in December, I would visit local shops and buy random foods that I didn't recognise and insist on all my fellow cyclists trying them - sometimes they were delicious, sometimes they were disgusting, but it was great fun to try so many unusual ingredients.  On this trip, fellow cyclist Ray decided he would do the same to me, and in the first place we stopped near a lake he bought Rempeyek - biscuits made with anchovies and peanuts - this was early in the morning and none of us really fancied the look of them, and then we tried them - they were delicious and from that moment we were hooked, we had them every day!  Helmi, our local driver told us they were a local biscuit, so I asked him for a recipe.  This is as near as I can get with the ingredients not being quite the same over here and the translation difficult!

Rempeyek

Makes around 12

100 g rice flour
3/4 tsp ground cumin
3/4 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
500 ml coconut milk
10-12 anchovies
75 g peanuts
300-400 ml groundnut oil

• Place the rice flour into a bowl and mix in the spices and fennel seeds.
• Pour in the coconut milk and beat to give a runny batter, the consistency of single cream.
• Roughly chop half the anchovies and cut the remaining half into thin strips.  Stir the chopped anchovies into the batter.
• Heat the oil in a frying pan until hot.  Spoon desert spoonfuls of the batter into the pan, spreading it into a circle, to make it as thin as possible.  Place an strip of anchovy and a few peanuts in the centre of each one.
• Cook for 5-6 minutes, until just starting to turn golden at the edges.  Remove with a slotted spoon and place on a rack to drain and crisp up, then place on kitchen paper to take off any excess oil.

These are best eaten freshly made!

Bangkok to Singapore by bike

Well we made it - 1161 miles from Bangkok to Singapore, and no injuries apart from a dead left hand (which I am told will gradually be restored if I stay off the bike for a while), so even typing this is proving tricky!

 I thought the toughest bit of the challenge would be having to dismantle my bike to get it packed into the bike bag that looked far too small - if only I had known what lay ahead of me.

First obstacle over, the bike was squeezed in, padded shorts packed and off I went.  I safely arrived in Bangkok after two long flights, but unfortunately my bike did not - the airline had managed to break it beyond repair (place a fragile sticker on anything being put in the hold and it appears to be carte blanch for them to crush it).  So, with only a few hours to spare, my afternoon in Bangkok was spent racing around the bike shops of the city trying to find a bike that would fit me in a country where the average height is around 4'3"!  

So off we set in an overland truck to the start of our adventure - cycling out of Bangkok was not an option, so we started a few miles on the outskirts.  Within a few hours it was very obvious that the organisers of the trip (Kukri Events) had no idea how to support a cycling team - for starters not one of them had ever cycled - not a great start!  So not only did they not know how to handle our bikes (chucking them in the back of an overland truck seemed fine to them - I was not so impressed with my brand new bike being wrecked so early on, and others who had bikes that were clearly worth a few thousand were even less impressed), they were also intending to feed us along the way.  We were in Thailand which, in my mind, is one of the best countries to eat in the world.  So what are we fed at lunch time?  Boiled pasta, grated carrot, chopped tomato and cucumber and luncheon meat!!  Seriously!  It turns out that the driver of the truck is doing the cooking, and his idea of a great meal is KFC!  And if the food is not sold in Tesco Lotus, then it isn't possible for us to have it, as that is where they did all their shopping (we cycled through hundreds of acres of pineapples but when we requested them for breakfast where told we couldn't have them because there were none in the supermarket!

The final straw was a few days later when we had to sleep in a brothel - yes, I kid you not!

So, after one week, four of us left the group and went it alone - so the next challenge was to find our way from the top of Malaysia to Singapore (thank goodness for Google Maps!).  We hired a local mini bus and a couple of drivers to support us and carry our bags, and low and behold one of them was training to be a chef - how lucky were we?  Instantly the trip changed and became really exciting as we learnt about the food and culture along the way.  Malaysian food is a real mix between Malay, Chinese and Indian, so depending on where you eat will also depend on how spicy the food is.  Rice and noodles obviously dominate most menus, but there are some great foods to be had, like these crabs that were cooked in a little shack on the side of the road where we had stopped for breakfast - we did consider hanging on until lunch, but had 108 miles to do that day so were under pressure to keep moving!

Although the locals do not appear to eat many deserts, it's not because they don't have a sweet tooth as their coffee and tea is made with condensed milk - a thick layer of it at the bottom of each cup, which gives it a very sweet and creamy taste.

It is easy to eat quiet healthily in both Thailand and Malaysia, they don't eat dairy or bread and everything is cooked from fresh - they don't have convenience foods like we do.  So I did manage to loose weight, but would have lost a lot more if we hadn't have found Magnum ice-creams in a few garages along the way!

Two foods really stood out for me - a lemon grass salad that included deep fried shells of prawns and cashew nuts, and Rempeyek biscuits that are made with peanuts and anchovies.  I will be testing both recipes over the next week, so watch this space!

The Final Week....

For those that know me well you will have guessed that Vietnam was not a relaxing beach holiday, in fact what I failed to mention is that we covered quite a lot of Vietnam, from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi to be precise, with over 500 km of it done on bikes - definitely the best way to see a country.
But that was really just a warm-up as, in 7 days time I will be heading back out east, to cycle from Bangkok to Singapore - a few more miles this time - around 1200!
So on returning from Vietnam, my first thought was how could I train in such a short space of time for such a monumental bike ride?  Well, no doubt you will have heard of High Intensity Training (HIT) that is now becoming the norm - short bursts of flat-out training with rests in between, meaning that instead of spending hours on the bike, I can sit on the turbo trainer for less than one hour each day and hopefully get the same results.
  My aim on day one was to do 10 x 1 minute sprints - I managed 6!  On day three I managed to increase it to 8.  Today my bike has gone for a service and now needs a new wheel, so no bike for 3 days - training has all gone to pot!! 
The other thing I'm always aware of before travelling is to be sure my immune system is strong, to try to prevent foreign bacteria having an undesirable effect.  So as well as taking a probiotic and oregano oil (a potent germ killer)  for the past two weeks, I am feeding myself with all the healthy foods I enjoyed in Vietnam.  Can't wait for the Thai food to come!



Prawn and Vegetable Rice Noodles

This is really a 'make it up as you go along recipe', as any amounts of these great ingredients works.

Stir fry vegetable oil, sesame oil, chopped ginger, lemon grass, red chilli, spring onions and garlic for a couple of minutes before adding stock. Bring to a simmer and add chopped pak choi, beansprouts, cooked rice noodles and prawns.  Simmer for 5-6 minutes.

As with a lot of foods this tastes even better the following day!

Enjoy x

PS  This beautiful bowl was bought from Reaching Out in Hoi An, an enterprise that was established in 2000 showcasing high quality handicrafts made by disabled craftspeople in Vietnam

New Year, no news

Don't you just know there is no real news when the year is started off with all the newspapers and reporters talking about diets - how many New Years have started off this way?  I don't know about you, but I'm just getting a bit bored with it all.  And why now?  Why not lecture us all before we embark on the enormous Christmas blow-out to save us having even more to worry about?

How many times do 'they' need to tell us that we shouldn't eat so much sugar, fat, salt, junk-food?  How about instead they focus their efforts on the people who are making the disgustingly bad for us foods, selling them at huge profits - if the bad foods were not there, we wouldn't be tempted to eat them.  And I know that from experience, having just returned from a trip around Vietnam where for two weeks I didn't eat any stodge, dairy or chocolate (because there wasn't any on offer), and didn't see one overweight person (until I spotted a couple of obese Europeans at the airport).

The traditional Vietnamese diet is very healthy, based on rice, vegetables and fish, and using steaming and stir-frying as a gentle way to cook foods, therefore ensuring less nutrients are lost through harsh cooking methods.  Their idea of fast food is a big bowl of noodle soup, with ginger, spring onions, garlic, rice noodles, beansprouts, herbs and chicken or prawns - a little different from our fast food delights.  How pleased was I to be in a country where there is no McDonalds, I was very tempted to move there permanently for that reason alone!

The Vietnamese way of eating is so natural - if they grow it or can catch it, they eat it - it makes a mockery of all our promoting of eating local and seasonal - for them there is no other way.  Unfortunately times will change and with the onslaught of overseas visitors comes our unhealthy foods - McD may not have made it there, but KFC has -  and in the last  4 years the prevalence of diabetes has increased, and with that the threat of cardiovascular disease.

One thing that was a surprise is that Vietnam is the World's largest coffee exporter, surpassing Brazil by selling 800,000 kilgrams of coffee in the first 6 months of 2012.  I'm not a coffee drinker, but those that were said it was good coffee, although the way it is served may not be to everyone's taste - very strong small cup, with condensed milk.

Of course the other way they remain healthy is that they still work in a physical job - they are working the land so are constantly on the go, and not sitting at a desk - no trips to the gym needed for them.  And hardly anybody owns a car - bikes or scooters cover the roads (quite a scary view when you are trying to cross them!) in numbers it is hard to imagine - there are reportedly 5 million scooters in Ho Chi Minh City alone!

Eat, Drink and Be Healthy!

It’s that time of year again, when you will start to over-indulge and then regret it two weeks later, when your clothes are feeling a little tighter than normal.

Over the Christmas period, around 175 million mince pies are bought (this does not account for the home-made ones), and if they were stacked on top of each other they would reach approximately 3,262 miles  - around 600 times higher than Everest!

On average people consume 6000-7000 calories, more than three times the recommended daily allowance, on Christmas Day alone, and gain around 2kg (5 lbs) over the Christmas period.  But you don’t have to be one of them.

Christmas is also a time for stress levels to rise and this can be very bad for blood sugar balance, tempting you to eat all the things you know you shouldn’t.

There are a number of ways you can remain healthy over the holiday period without missing out on a good time and some great food.

Shopping

·      Never shop when you are hungry.
·      Always take a list and stick to it.
·      Do not over-buy – the shops will be open again in a few days, you are not going to run out of anything – don’t panic!

     Snacks

·       Stock up on unsalted nuts and seeds (pumpkin, sunflower etc) instead of salted nuts.
·      Serve vegetable crudités with dips rather than heavy pastry-based canapés.

     Drinks

·      Make some great tasting non-alcoholic cocktails for a change – i.e. Virgin Marys, and for a treat (and extra zinc) add a raw oyster.
·      Drink wine spritzers instead of wine (half wine, half soda water)
·      Alternate alcoholic drinks with a glass of water to help reduce your alcohol intake (and stop you feeling so dehydrated the next day).
·      The benefits of red wine diminish after two glasses, so don’t kid yourself!
Christmas Lunch
·      Turkey – plan for size – nobody wants to be eating turkey for the next 2 weeks!  Turkey is rich in great protein and full of B vitamins, but remove the skin to cut down on fat.
·      Stuffing – make a nut-based rather than sausage-meat based stuffing – chestnuts are full of potassium and low in fat so a great base for a tasty stuffing.
·      Roast potatoes – cut your potatoes into larger chunks to absorb less fat, or use half sweet potatoes, which are full of antioxidants.  Swapping roast for baked potatoes would be even healthier.
·      Vegetables – include lots of veggies with lunch, preferably steamed ones to help fill everyone up with some great vitamins and fibre.
·      Christmas Pudding – very high in sugar so swap the brandy butter for some natural yoghurt instead.
·      Make you own mince-pies using filo pastry instead of shortcrust, and substitute some of the mincemeat with some dried cherries or cranberries and flaked almonds – see recipe below.

Just remember that your digestive system does not change just because it’s the festive season, so give it a helping hand by; eating a good breakfast each day,  keeping your blood sugar balanced by eating little and often, eating good protein at each meal and snack, and not over-doing the stimulants (alcohol, coffee etc).
And if you need a good pick-me-up on boxing day, a great way to start the day is with a good breakfast and a vegetable juice that will help to support your liver -ready to face another day!

Filo Mincepies

Makes 12

300g mincemeat

25g dried cherries

25g dried apricots, diced

50g flaked almonds

6 sheets filo pastry

30g unsalted butter

 1 tbsp olive oil

icing sugar for dusting

1.     Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F) Gas Mark 6.

2.     Mix together the mincemeat, cherries, chopped apricots and flaked almonds.

3.     Lay the 6 sheets of filo pastry on top of each other and cut into 8 squares.
Melt the butter and mix with the olive oil.

4.     Lay one square of pastry on the work surface and brush with a small amount of butter and oil.  Place another on top, at an angle and brush with butter.  Repeat until you have 4 squares on top of each other at different angles.  Gently press the square into the hole of a 12-hole bun tin.  Repeat with the remaining pastry squares – at this point you will have 12 spare.

5.     Spoon the mincement mixture into the pastry cases. 

6.     Brush the remaining squares of filo with the remaining butter and oil and scrunch each one and place on the top of the mincepies.

7.     Bake for 15-16 minutes, until golden. 

8.     Leave to cool on a cooling rack.  Dust with icing sugar before serving.