Nick's Chicken & Spinach Curry

I've never been very comfortable with "creating" curry recipes. The sometimes complex interactions between spices, combined with my desire to tweak and refine, often leave me either adding too much of an ingredient that I like in an effort to "improve" a recipe (and completely pushing it off balance), or leaving out something that I don't like in isolation, only to find that it leaves the dish tasting flat. So when I thought about what I wanted to publish here as "my curry recipe", there were several factors to consider. I wanted something that could be hot or not (i.e. something that would still taste great even if you decided to dial down the heat), I wanted it to be indulgent and creamy to appeal to the widest audience (but not be bland), but most importantly I wanted to keep the flavours both basic and predictable, but also incorporate a lot of my favourite tastes. I also, of course, wanted to keep it as low calorie as possible.

What I came up with was this chicken and spinach curry. It has a great balance between rich tomato and creamy creme fraiche, complemented by the spinach and a base of turmeric and mustard seeds that really comes through and pulls everything together. The notes below the recipe give some tips on how to adjust to your individual taste.

Headline Statistics

• Serves 6-8 depending on portion size
• Each serving is 330 calories (six servings) or 250 calories (eight servings)
• If made without Creme Fraiche, each serving is 240 calories (six servings) or 180 calories (eight servings)
• Calorie counts don't include rice
• 10 mins prep. time, 60 mins cooking time (45 of which mostly unattended)

Ingredients

• 2 heaped teaspoons Turmeric
• 3 heaped teaspoons Garam Masala
• 2 heaped teaspoons Ground Cumin
• 3 teaspoons Mustard Seeds
• 2 Cloves Garlic, crushed
• 2-3 red chillies, chopped with seeds (about 30g)
• 250g Closed Cup Chestnut Mushrooms, chopped (or your favourite mushrooms)
• 400g Baby/Young Leaf Spinach, whole leaves (yes, that's a lot of spinach)
• 2 Medium Onions, finely chopped
• 2 tablespoons Olive Oil
• 2 x 440g cans of chopped tomato
• 30g Double Concentrate Tomato Puree
• 300ml Half Fat Creme Fraiche
• 500g Chicken Thigh Fillets, chopped
• 1/4 pint Cold Water

Method

• Heat the mustard seeds in the olive oil for a minute or so (I keep going until they start to pop - lets out some great flavour, but requires a lid for your pan)
• Add the garam masala, turmeric, cumin, garlic, and chillies and stir together into what should be a very thick paste (if you're not on a diet you can add more oil at this point to make a smoother paste)
• Add the chopped onion and soften the onion for a couple of minutes (if you didn't use much oil and it is very dry, stir continuously).
• Add both cans of chopped tomato the tomato puree and the quarter pint of water, and stir in.
• Add the chopped chicken thighs and stir in.
• Now add the chopped mushrooms and spinach, and carefully mix together. This is much easier in a large pan. The spinach leaves will be huge at this point, but over a couple of minutes they will wilt into the sauce and you'll have your pan back. If you only have a small pan to make the curry in, you could wilt the spinach before you add it.
• Season with a couple of teaspoons of salt and one of ground black pepper, stir and leave to simmer on a low heat for 45 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes or so.
• Finally, stir in the creme fraiche and season further to taste (you'll probably want a little more salt).
• Serve with rice.

Notes

• This makes a fairly mild curry once all the creme fraiche is added. You could happily double the chillies and get something with more kick, or just as easily halve it - the chillies are intentionally not a "structural" part of the curry.
• If you like the recipe and try it again, consider either adding half of the creme fraiche or none at all. These make some very different tasting but equally good curries (and if you don't do the creme fraiche, the calorie count gets *very* low).
• I've intentionally kept the spices quite simple and you should be able to taste them quite distinctly in the finished dish, so feel free to experiment with adding more of any flavour that you like.

Nick's Creamy Puttanesca

A basic Puttanesca is a very sharp, tomato based sauce with garlic, anchovies and olives. Some people also add some kind of cream cheese to make a milder, more creamy sauce. After we had an amazing Puttanesca in a restaurant last year, I decided that I needed to recreate the recipe and make it low calorie enough that it could go into our regular rotation.

Many Puttanescas/refinements/experiments later, I think that I've actually improved on the dish that this was modelled after, and with this being a complete meal when stirred into any kind of pasta, it is great for a tasty, spicy, low calorie dinner.

I make this recipe and spoon it into ice cube trays to make easy to use (and easy to calorie count) "Puttanesca Cubes". In my trays this makes 35 cubes, at 35 calories each (the whole recipe is very low for a creamy sauce - 1250 calories).

Recommended portion is 3 cubes per person with 80g (dry weight) of pasta per person, for a 330 calorie meal. Great for those days where you fancy something starchy, but don't have many calories left.

Headline Statistics:

• Makes approx. 35 cubes in a standard ice cube tray
• 35 Calories per cube
• If you're not measuring/storing this way, the recipe is 1250 calories and serves 10-12 when used as a sauce to lightly coat pasta
• 10 mins prep time, 20 mins cooking time  

Ingredients:

• 3 Cloves Garlic, minced
• 4 anchovy fillets in olive oil, finely chopped (about 25g)
• 2 x 440g cans of Chopped Tomatoes
• 320g black olives, chopped (drained weight)
• Two large red chilli peppers, chopped including seeds (about 25g)
• 30g Strong Tomato Puree (I use double concentrated)
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 300g Half Fat Creme Fraiche (with the one I use this is 507 calories)
• As little oil as possible to fry the onion (if poss. use 1 cal oil spray)

Method

• Soften the finely chopped onion in as little oil as possible for a couple of minutes
• Add the anchovies and garlic, and stir continuously for a minute. The anchovies should start to break down and dissolve a bit.
• Add both cans of chopped tomato, the tomato puree and chopped olives, and stir
• Add the creme fraiche and stir in fully.
• Taste and add salt as necessary (a bit of balsamic vinegar is also really nice)
• Leave on a very low heat for 20 minutes
• Stir into pasta, either as a light or heavy coating, both taste great.

Notes

• Feel free to go much bigger on the anchovies. My wife isn't so keen on them, so I've dialled it back quite a bit. A true puttanesca would have lots more than I use here.
• Feel free to go much lighter or even remove the chillies. I like the sauce to be spicy, but the chillies here don't form a big part of the taste of the sauce, so if you don't like hot food, you can reduce or remove (and maybe add some ground black pepper in its place for a bit of a kick)
• One of the nice things about this sauce is that you can taste most of the ingredients quite distinctly in the finished sauce, so you can quite easily identify the elements that you like and use more of them.

Daily Weighing - An Alternative Perspective

I'm going to suggest something that every personal trainer or weight loss expert you've ever spoken to has told you is a cardinal sin that should be avoided at all costs. I am suggesting that you weigh yourself every day. What? That's crazy! Surely you should only weigh once a week, or even "throw away the scales, it's just a meaningles number"? Well, let's look first at the very good reasons that your expert will tell you not to weigh every day:

• They know that your weight will fluctuate, possibly by quite a lot, from day to day due to factors such as hydration and even how much food happens to be hanging out inside your body. They don't want you to be demotivated when you gain weight.
• They don't want you to obsess over a number, when that might lead you to make choices that could compromise your overall health and fitness plan (like starving yourself so that you can lose that extra pound).

These are both good reasons not to weigh every day, but let me now give you some reasons why weighing daily and (very importantly) tracking and analysing it could help you out:

• While your trainer doesn't want your "meaningless number" to de-motivate you, that number (especially when you have a lot to lose) also has incredible power to motivate you.
• We've accepted that your weight can fluctuate a lot from day to day, so what if your one weekly weigh in is on a day that you have fluctuated significantly upward? Now you're demotivated for a whole week thinking that you're a failure.
• When you weigh every day, you'll see your fluctuations in intricate detail, so much so that you will expect them (and even predict them), and come to accept them as a natural part of your weight loss. You will no longer care that you have gained weight, because you know that it is only temporary, like it has been many times before.
• You can also get useful information from your fluctuations, for example if you lose a massive amount of weight in a single day then it probably means that you're losing too much water and can be a motivating factor to hydrate yourself properly.

Right, if you're convinced then let's start doing it, but there are some ground rules and tips that I think will help you along the way:

• Use a spreadsheet and make a line graph so that you can se all your results visually. Numbers do tend to be meaningless unless you're a maths whizz, but a graph is easy to understand
• Set the bottom of your graph to be your ideal target weight (so you can get some context). Don't make the bottom of the graph zero, that's just silly, because you're never going to get anywhere near it, and all your weight loss will look like a useless, mostly flat line.
• Overlay some other data to give yourself even more abilty to judge your progress. My graph has a line that shows a straight line from my start weight to my "easy goal" (a rate of weight loss that I should be able to easily achieve) and another to my "stretch goal" (a rate of weight loss that I don't expect to achieve, but would be nice). This gives me a "glide path" to try to stay within. This is useful not only as a motivator, but also to help you make things easier if you are being too aggressive (i.e. if you are rocketing down below your stretch goal line, maybe you should back off a little and make your life easier while still achieving your goals).
• When you've been doing it for a couple of weeks, you'll be able to see how much you as an individual fluctuate from day to day. Look for the biggest fluctuation you can see (in my case about 2Kg) and mentally set that as your margin of error. Now only mentally consider yourself at a given weight when you have dropped below it enough to account for the margin of error (for example, when I dip below 105Kg, I pretty much ignore it. I only consider myself "at" 105 when I hit 103 at least once).

In a few days i'll provide a link to the spreadsheet and chart that I use so that you have something easy to use as a starting point. Let me know how you get on!

Ordering Your Workout Activities

When I first started going to the gym I was, like most people trying to lose weight, keen to start on some serious fat burning aerobic exercise. It didn't take much experimentation before I realised that if I did the resistance parts of my workout (weights) first, it made my arms and legs tired enough that a short way into my aerobic workouts (usually treadmill or bike), I'd start to feel worn out and not want to carry on. So I started doing it the other way around - I'd do my aerobic workout, feel great, then do my resistance at the end. Then I noticed that my muscles were feeling decidedly small for the amount of work I was doing on the weight machines. Then I did some research. Then I found out that (surprise, surprise), i'd been doing it all wrong.

Whichever type of exercise you are doing, your muscles are going to need energy to carry it out. This energy ideally comes from glucose that's hanging out in your blood stream, not doing anything useful. However, different types of exercise have different energy requirements:

• Aerobic exercise (running/rowing/biking) requires a slow trickle of energy over a long period of time

• Anaerobic exercise (resistance/weights) will usually require a huge amount of energy over a very short period of time.

Now, when you first start either type of exercise you'll have quite a lot of glucose hanging around in your blood, all ready to fuel your exercise, so lets see what happens when you do your resistance work first:

• You start to use massive amount of energy with your resistance work
• Your body starts to release glucose from fat, your blood glucose is getting lower
• You then stop and move onto your aerobic workout
• At this point, the new blood glucose is starting to trickle through, and can power your muscles

And now, what happens if you do it the other way around, as I was initially:

• You start to use a trickle of energy for your aerobic workout
• The drop in glucose is slow enough that your body can properly regulate the release of glucose from fat. You have the energy that you need, but your blood glucose is still a little on the low side
• You then stop and move onto your resistance workout
• Now your muscles need a massive amount of energy available very quickly, and... oops - there is none.

Now two things start to happen. First, you feel very tired very quickly, but secondly and most horrifically, your muscles start to do the only thing that they know how to do to carry on working when there is no blood glucose available - they start to break themselves down to be their own energy source. Yikes!

The above is probably full of factual inaccuracies that would make a medical professional scream in disgust, but the basic point is that this is why I was finding my resistance work quite hard, and also not gaining muscle in the way that I wanted.

I changed the ordering of my workout (and threw in a banana before my workout for an extra energy boost for my resistance work) and the results came quickly. The resistance work was much easier, and my muscle mass started to rise a lot quicker. Aerobic workout is still harder after my resistance work, but it's something that I can live with, knowing that i'm doing the right thing for my long term goals.

If you've made the same mistake, I hope that this helps you change too.

My Fitness Pal

Let's make this really short and easy. myfitnesspal.com is the best health and fitness site on the plant. Anywhere. Ever. Ok, we're done. Or if you'd like more...

MyFitnessPal does a fairly basic thing (track your food and exercise), but it does that thing extremely well. Here are the top eight reasons that I couldn't get through a day of my diet, let alone a week, without MyFitnessPal:

1. They're everywhere - MyFitnessPal go out of their way to make sure that they are wherever you are. They have a great website, and mobile apps for every platforms that you can imagine. This makes it incredibly easy for you to track your food and exercise wherever you are, whenever you are.
2. The database - A service like this is only as good as the database of foods and exercises that it contains. Luckily MyFitnessPal contains EVERYTHING. Sorry, did I not make that clear? EVERYTHING. A quick search will find even the most obscure of foods, conveniently logged with complete nutritional information and serving sizes. The occasions where you'll have to enter any amount of data yourself are few and far between. Surely it couldn't get easier than that?... oh yes it can...
3. The barcode scanner - The MyFitnessPal mobile apps contain barcode scanning functionality. You might have seen this before in apps that allow you to price compare in shops. It is a thousand times more useful in a food logging app. You'll be surprised how few foods you eat that don't have a convenient barcode, and it makes most new entries a matter of seconds. I said "new" entries, didn't I?...
4. Recent/Popular Foods - Once you get going with your diet, you'll probably find that you eat similar things for similar meals quite a lot. MyFitnessPal remebers everything you enter, and offers you a selection of what it think you might be about to enter. If you are as predictable as me, it is usually correct. Spookily correct.
5. Synchronisation - Everything you do in MyFitnessPal on any platform is immeditately synchronised with their servers. While this can sometimes lead to minor waiting times between adding entries, it means that you never have to worry about losing data, and whenever you use their service anywhere, it will be just the way you left it the last time you saw them.
6. Recipes - I'm big on making and perfecting recipes, and MyFitnessPal allows you to create your own recipes from the items in their database, and then save and use in your own food diary. This is great for things that you cook regularly, and even better, your significant other can log in and copy the recipe from your food diary, saving time for them as well.
7. Net Calories - This is something that is quite difficult to keep track of yourself, but MyFitnessPal makes it super easy. Basically, you have a goal of the number of calories that you want to eat each day, and entries in your food diary work toward (and beyond) that goal, but exercise that you enter (from an equally good exercise database) rolls back your calories, giving you more to eat. Yum!
8. It's Free!!! - Yes. It's free. I don't know if they have a business model. I don't know if they have plans for a business model. I don't much care. If they asked me to pay, or even offered to allow me to pay, then I would. But they don't. It's just free. Free.

If you're not convinced by now then I don't know what to tell you. Just try it. It's quick, it's free, and it is your fitness regime's best friend.

Nick's Awesome Chilli

Today I bestow upon you the most powerful weapon in my geek fat busting arsenal - my sacred chilli recipe. This thing is just plain awesome. I spent a good few years perfecting the taste, and then when I started the whole fitness thing I adapted it to be low fat and healthy too.

You have to try this recipe at least once...

Headline Statistics

• Makes 5 portions
• 340 calories per portion
• 20 mins prep. time, 90 mins cooking time
• Eat by itself, or serve with rice or pasta

Ingredients

• 2 Onions, chopped
• 1 400g can red kidney beans, drained 
• 1 400g can chopped tomatoes, drained 
• 100g tomato puree
• 500g lean beef mince (hamburger meat for Americans)
• 2 Knorr beef stock cubes (or the best stock cubes you can find) 
• 5 fresh chopped chillis
• 2 teaspoons hot chilli powder 
• 1 teaspoon fresh chopped ginger 
• 1 teaspoon fresh crushed garlic 
• 2 heaped teaspoons ground cumin 
• 1 teaspoon ground turmeric 
• 3 bell peppers, roughly chopped 
• 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 

Method

• Fry the chopped onions in the oil on a medium heat for 5 mins to soften them 
• Add cumin, turmeric, chilli powder, fresh chilli, garlic and ginger and stir up 
• Add kidney beans and stir up 
• Add beef mince, stirring it in until browned 
• Add chopped tomatoes, tomato puree, bell peppers and stock cubes (crumbled into small pieces)
• Pour in a pint of cold water and stir up (it now looks like a murky watery soup. That's ok) 
• Leave to simmer on a very low heat for at least 90 mins and until it starts to thicken

Notes

• If it is not thick enough for you after 90 mins, cook longer 
• If you want it to taste even better, add more water and cook for longer 
• If low calorie is less important, add more oil at the start
• Really try to get those Knorr stock cubes, they are so much better than anything else
• Save time wit the fresh chilli, ginger and garlic by using fresh preserved ingredients. The brand I use is "Very Lazy"