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...

Man Vs Gut vs National Pie Week and Millies

So, National Pie Week came along. Unhelpfully, it came along at the same time as pancake day in a manner that's not staggeringly helpful to a man who's trying to lose weight. But, I'm from Yorkshire and I'm not likely to back down from a national pie event, am I? So I made bloody well sure that I got a good run in on Saturday morning and took on a light breakfast to ready myself. For my one trip back to the world of pie, I selected Millies. I'd been tempted by Calls Landing (where I had a very good Cowboy Stew a couple of weeks back), but as Calls Landing was serving pies from Wilsons, which is a five minute walk away from my house in Morley, I thought I ought to try something that wouldn't necessarily be on offer the rest of the year round. Plus, Millies (evilly) tweeted the picture you see above at me earlier in the week.

Millies, if you're not familiar with it, is an organic food shop on Vicar Lane with a small cafe nestled at the back. It won me over when I went in looking for a healthy snack earlier in the year and came out with some very awesome soup containing blue cheese and chickpeas. The chap who made it was even kind enough to pass on the recipe over the phone. You can't moan about that kind of service.

The seating area at the back's a little no-frills, but I think there's more seating at the front and the emphasis does seem to be more on good quality takeaway than sit-down service. Anyway, I got there and was a little bit disappointed to find there was only one slice of pie left (Kirsty, my girlfriend, was with me and also in need of grub) but it was a hefty slice so we shared it and Kirsty got some banana cake.

Because the chap who made it (Sam?) was out there was a bit of confusion about what came with the pie, so I wound up with a portion of roast veg, heated along with the pie and served up in an environment-friendly card carton. The thick shortcrust top was perhaps a little tough and I managed to break one of Millies' wooden forks on an unidentified root vegetable that was in with the roast veg, but it was all undeniably tasty. The pie filling was rich and obviously made from good quality beef, and the whole thing was about eight cuts above the sort of pie-ish fare you can expect from a lot of places in Leeds on the go (Greggs, I do love you, but I'm looking at YOU). At £3:50, it certainly kicked the arse of a Boots meal deal.

Millies didn't do loads to help me get thinner this weekend, but I'm not going to moan at them about it. I figure: if you're going to have pie, you might as well have pie made with fresh ingredients and a minimum of additives and whatnot. It might not have been the lowest-fat lunch in the world, but it was still damn good food. I also reckon that (for me, at least) full on deprivation is going to result in a tumble off the wagon, and the pie came after a run and super-healthy breakfast and was later followed by a super-lean tea.

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)

My First Burgers! The Chilli Chicken Kind

Last night I made Chilli Chicken burgers. First ever burgers! They were a bit awesome and pretty easy.

I got the recipe from Ainsley Harriott's Low Fat Meals in Minutes. Basically consists of mashing up 500g of lean chicken (or Turkey) mince with a tablespoon of fresh mint, two tablespoons of fresh coriander or parsley, one chopped chili, Worcester sauce and salt and pepper. Then you grill them for about five minutes on each side. That's about it. I put them in granary baps I got cheap from the 'soon you won't be able to eat this' shelf at Asda with tomato, lettuce and ultra-super-mega-light mayo.

I did cock up and forgot to add the Worcester sauce, though. Ended up putting it on as they were cooking. They still turned out super-tasty, but I'd recommend bothering to put it IN the burgers anyway. I also used dried chili flakes rather than a fresh one, because Kirsty finds getting proper bits of chili in her food to be too hot. Honestly, I reckon you could use ground/dry herbs and spices instead of the fresh ones, too. Ainsley's a bit big on telling you to use fresh this and fresh that, but not all supermarkets carry fresh herbs and not everyone can get to the market for them.

I used the old fashioned grill, but I reckon my George Foreman would have done them. I was a bit worried it would squish the mixture too much, but I think it'd have been OK and, because I couldn't get lean chicken mince, there was a bit of fat the GF would have got rid of.

Still: very satisfying, easy meal!

Man Vs Gut: What's That All About, Then?

So, here's a blog about learning to be healthier. Or, learning to build a better body, if you're feeling that way out. About trying not to be a lard-arse. Because, guys, I'm a lard-arse. But I'm about 9% less of a lard-arse than I was a couple of months back. I've been a lard-arse for about as long as 84% of the people I know can remember, so I'm having to take a pop at NOT being a lard-arse from a standing start. It's a pretty steep learning curve and it's turning out to be a surprising one.

It's surprising because I like it. It's surprising if we ever met in real life because I like running now, and the only think I liked that didn't involve sitting down or a bedroom three months ago was snowboarding. And I'm learning to cook and learning about food!

So, this is a blog about learning all that (and not, despite the high recurrence of 'I' in the above two paragraphs, about me). I'd say it was a blog about lifestyle change if it didn't sound a bit wanky. (It totally is about lifestyle change, though.)

Some of it will be practical stuff I've learned (REAL practical stuff for people who work a fair amount and have too many DVDs to catch up on to go foraging for rare berries). Some of it will be recipes. Some of it will be reviews or pointers to useful books, apps, products and resources. If you already know a lot about food and exercise maybe you'll sit behind your monitor shaking your head in dismay at me. If not, maybe we can all learn along together like a big fat happy hippie family.

A large chunk of it will be more general posts about losing weight and running and food, the culture around those things and how they affect you as a human being, because I think there's more to be said about all the above than nuts and bolts 'how-to' guides. Yeah, I guess there might be some bleating about 'me', too. (Sorry about that). Hopefully there will be the odd guest post, too.

In short: here's a blog about learning to be healthy and everything that comes with that. Hope you like it.