Pan-Made Apple and Plum Sorta-Crumble

Back by not-particularly-popular demand, it's Man vs Gut! There's not so much gut to fight this time, but I reckon I might try to drop a stone or so over the course of training for Edinburgh Marathon at the end of May.

So, hopefully, I'm going to be posting a few recipes related to running and generally being good to your body over the next few months.

First-up: Pan-Made-Sorta-Crumble.

Dead straightforward: caramelised some old plums (four of them) and an apple in butter (good-sized knob), soft brown sugar (half a dessert-spoon full, but you could leave it out if you're feeling more wholesome than I was) and cinnamon (a teaspoon or two, but you don't need to be shy), put it with some home-made crumble-ish apple granola and yogurt. I'll post a recipe for the granola another day but you could, of course, use shop-bought (though it'll probably be more sugary) or muesli.

Advantages: oats are a great carbohydrate with low GI (obviously this serves you better if you're not using mega-sugary granola), yogurt packs in a bit of protein and the fruit content gets you two of your five a day. There's a bit of added sugar in there, but right after a big workout is when you could do to be squirting high-GI food into your body to replenish that glucose you just used up.

This took, in total, about nine minutes.

Smoothie Fun: Apple vs Cinnamon

I really, deeply, truly love smoothies. They're tasty as all hell, super-nutritious and slip one or two of your five a day down your neck before you've even noticed what's happened. And they're particularly good if you've got some exercising to be getting on with.

I've been told second-hand by someone Swedish that if it doesn't have yogurt in, it's just fruit juice, and I'm happy to go with that. Slopping some natural yogurt in there throws some protein into the mix, which is useful stuff for repairing damage post-workout. Fruit's good for you for all the reasons fruit's good for you. I like to chuck some oats in there, too, to bulk my smoothie up and add some extra carbs. Below's a rough recipe for apple and cinnamon smoothie. Apparently cinnamon raises your metabolism, so that's something, eh?

Ingredients:

Apple x 2

Banana x 1 or 2

Apple juice x 200ml(ish)

Low fat natural yogurt x 5 or 6 big dollops

Oats x some

Cinnamon x 1tsp (or to taste)

Method:

Blend ingredients together like a maniac. I like to put some more oats in once everything else is blended, since I like the texture.

All the quantities I stuck on the ingredients list are very rough guidelines. One of the beauties of smoothies is the fact that because there's no actual cooking involved you can keep adding to them until they're spot on. They're also dead easy to make and experiment with, as the flavours you're putting together make sense even if your cooking abilities extend to microwaving Chicago Town mini-pizzas.

Right, I'm off to try making pineapple and ginger smoothie, based on the fact that's a sauce used in Chinese takeaways. I'll let you know how it goes...

Pancake Day! Surviving it With Cinnamon Apple

So, Pancake Day happened. Pancakes are traditionally slathered in syrup or sprinkled with sugar which, I gather, is bad for you. This is the exact sort of stuff to be avoided when you're trying to kill your gut, but I looked it up and pancakes aren't inherently bad for you. You can make a pancake with something like 70 calories, 10g of carb and 2g of fat, if you stick to low cal sprays instead of oil. So that's liveable.

Then I got this recipe for caramelised apple to form the pancake's guts. This is, basically, one apple (fried) with two tsps of brown sugar and some cinnamon added about halfway through. The recipe recommends 1/4 tsp of cinnamon, but I've never been one to pansy about with flavour (to my own detriment, occasionally) so I just chucked some at the apple until I felt like stopping. The result was, I promise, quite delicious. The recipe says you get 210 calories, 29g of carb and 8.5g of fat. I reckon they've based that on tiny, tiny pancakes, so it might all be a bit more than that, but that's not too bad.

I enjoyed it so much that I shoved apple and cinnamon in my porridge when the Oat So Simple ran out and I had to switch back to regular oats this morning. That was pretty good, too.

Apple and cinnamon (and sugar) is pretty much a winner.

(I went and forgot to take a photo, so the pic above comes from the recipe page)