Easy Tasty Healthy: All recipes free from gluten, dairy, sugar, soya, eggs and yeast

By Barbara Cousins

‘Easy Tasty Healthy’ is nutritional therapist Barbara Cousin’s latest cookbook.

The recipes are entirely free from:

*gluten *dairy *sugar
*soya *eggs *yeast

The cookbook is also a practical guide with sound nutritional advice on how to make healthy choices for day-to-day cooking, as well as being packed full of delicious recipes. This is a way of eating that you can follow for the rest of your life and never feel deprived.

The recipes are simple to prepare, using easy-to-obtain ingredients, and need the minimum amount of time and equipment. There are throw-it-all-in-a-pan and bubble away soups, stews and casseroles, oven-cooked meals that allow you to get on with other jobs, plus favourites such as pizza, chocolate cake and ice cream. ‘Easy Tasty Healthy’ is your one-stop essential guide to affordable, healthy eating.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: May 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9780008156848

Barbara Cousins

Barbara Cousins is a qualified nutritional therapist. Her book Cooking Without, a bible for sensitive eaters and allergy sufferers worldwide, is the fruit of many years prescribing health promoting recipes for her patients.

Book preview

Easy, Tasty, Healthy is all about eating for good health – how to achieve this and make it part of your life. It isn’t a ‘diet’, as such, more a way of living that will help keep you slim, fit and full of vitality.

This book is not an extreme approach to ‘free from’ eating using specialist health foods, but a practical guide full of easy, delicious recipes and advice on how to make healthy choices for day-to-day cooking and meal planning.

Over the years, many diet books have hit the headlines only to disappear soon afterwards because they are difficult to adhere to and don’t fit in with everyday life. We’re told about the benefits of a low-fat or low-carbohydrate diet, but cutting out sustaining foods will just leave you with cravings and can lead to deficiencies in the long run. We need a balance of protein, fats and carbohydrates in order to obtain all the essential nutrients to keep us healthy. Diets are fine in the short term, but most people put weight back on once they return to their normal regime. The approach in this book enables you to eat heartily, to snack if you are hungry and to have treats when you need them. It’s a way of eating that you can follow for the rest of your life and never feel deprived.

Wholefoods form the basis of the recipes in this book – ‘real’ foods with nothing added to them, such as vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, beans, pulses, fish and meat. By eating foods in their natural state, we automatically cut out processed foods and any chemical additives such as flavourings and preservatives. This is the key to a healthy diet, one shared by the world’s longest-living people.

Although wholefoods are the way to go, there are some that our bodies have more difficulty dealing with, often leaving us feeling under par. Of the wholefoods that impinge most on our health, gluten- and dairy-based items come top of the list, with soya, eggs and yeast close behind. In this book I have created recipes that draw upon a wide range of delicious wholefoods while avoiding these common triggers.

FAST FOOD CAN BE GOOD FOR YOU

Feeding ourselves and our families isn’t easy. We all juggle with a lack of time, temptation from processed food that is readily available (but not always healthy) and sometimes the sheer boredom of having to think up yet another meal. How to produce healthy, tasty food quickly is the aim of this book.

Here is a table of ingredients that you’ll find useful for making the recipes in these pages. The list isn’t extensive, nor are the ingredients difficult to find – they’re mostly just basics, many of which you probably already have.

It’s also a good idea to try to be organised with your cooking, whether this means planning your menus for the week or just having an idea for what to cook the next day. When my children were young and I was working full time, I used to assemble ingredients for cooking the following evening to ensure I was always a day ahead of myself. I might prepare a casserole and some potatoes for baking one night, ready to pop into the oven when I got back from work the following evening. This was in the days before I had an oven timer or slow cooker. All I needed to do then was prepare a salad or some fresh vegetables to go with the casserole and potatoes and while they were cooking I could think about what to make for supper the next day. It meant that I could quickly pop the meal on to cook when I returned home, then see to the boys without feeling pressured. It still gives me a lovely relaxed feeling knowing that food is cooking while I get on with other things.

The recipes in this book have been designed to be time and labour saving. They include lots of ‘pop it in a pan’ recipes as well as whole meals you can cook in the oven. The soups involve a quick bubble and a blitz and can be made in minutes. There are pastas and pâtés made from store cupboard ingredients. In other words, you can eat well without spending forever in the kitchen or at the supermarket.

Double Up and Save Time

If I’m making a casserole, I find it just as easy to make enough for six or eight rather than just for the two of us. This means that I can freeze the extra for those nights when I know I won’t have time or I just don’t feel like cooking. There are lots of recipes that can be doubled and the extra portions popped in the freezer, so try to get into the habit of cooking in bulk.

Aim to Have Leftovers

I always like to cook with the aim of having leftovers whenever possible. I know that in an ideal world we would eat freshly prepared food at every meal, but time is short and it’s far better to eat homemade leftovers, in my view, than resort to ready-made meals or takeaways.

If I cook potatoes, for instance, I like to have some left over for the following day. There are so many wonderful ways to use them, as you will see in the ‘Love your Leftovers’ chapter. If I cook a joint of meat, I prefer to cook more than enough so that we can have a second-day roast or incorporate it in another meal.

Save Time, Don’t Sweat

My favourite time-saving suggestion is to miss out the frying/sweating stage from recipes. I don’t brown meat for casseroles, sweat vegetables for soup or sear joints before cooking in the oven. This is not only a healthier way of cooking (it stops free radicals from being produced), but it saves time and washing up. It means that generally you just throw everything into the pot and cook. I promise you won’t notice the difference, as there are enough tasty ingredients in these recipes.

More Flavour, Fewer Steps

A friend of mine who hates cooking said that she always looks for recipes with the fewest ingredients. As far as I’m concerned, fewer ingredients mean less flavour. What I look for are enough ingredients to add depth and intensity of flavour, but using the shortest method possible; it’s the making that takes the time. If you have all the ingredients to hand, it doesn’t take very long to throw a selection of them into a pot. If all you have to do is let it bubble away for a few minutes on the hob or leave it in the oven for a few hours, then you have great-tasting food with very little effort – my sort of cooking.

EAT YOUR WAY TO GOOD HEALTH

Most people, when asked, know the principles of healthy eating – consume more fruit and vegetables, less saturated fat, sugar and salt, etc. What they find difficult is putting this into practice, especially when no help is at hand. Occasionally I buy a ‘healthy eating’ magazine and look hopefully at the recipes included. But the cakes are still sugar laden and meals still lacking in vegetables. They send out very mixed messages – just like processed foods labelled ‘healthy’ or ‘low fat’ that are actually filled with hidden sugar.

In order to eat more healthily, we need to concentrate on good food. We can’t get away with filling up on poor-quality ingredients. Manufacturers tend to be less interested in consumer health than in making money – the cheaper the ingredients they use, the more profit they make. Cheap ingredients, however, mean less healthy ingredients, such as fat and sugar, with lots of chemical additives to manipulate the way the food tastes. The best way to eat healthily is to avoid processed foods and buy ingredients in their raw state to make your own meals. You then know exactly what goes into them.

Of course, there are some healthy ready-prepared foods out there. Use them by all means, but don’t be conned – read the labels on the packaging. When sugar-free, supposedly healthy snack bars first came on to the scene, I was impressed – but when my blood sugar started to dip after eating them, I suddenly figured out what was going on. The manufacturers were simply using sugar made from other ingredients such as rice or vegetables, rather than sugar cane, and so their bars were just as sweet and over-processed as many others; they just sounded healthier.

Let Food Be Your Medicine

Our bodies need good nutrition in order to work properly. Vitamins, minerals, fats, carbohydrates and protein are nutrients that we need in sufficient amounts to function optimally. Unfortunately, much of what we eat today is devoid of nutrients. What’s more, we are ingesting toxic substances from the additives in food as well as from the air we breathe, the alcohol we drink and the drugs we take – including over-the-counter remedies. Because of the lack of nutrients, our bodies are becoming less able to rid themselves of these harmful substances and so are unable to work as efficiently as they should. Ill-health becomes the norm.

Every cell in your body is like a miniature factory with a particular job to do. This may be to pass on a message or produce a substance needed for a certain reaction to take place. But if the factory is full of waste products (toxicity) and lacking in the raw materials it needs (nutrients), each cell is unable to function properly. This paves the way for health problems and often a vicious circle where more drugs are taken to help treat the symptoms.

The aim of good nutrition is to build a better cell or factory and hence body. Body cells are continually being replaced. A blood cell lasts for 60–120 days, so in 3–4 months your whole bloodstream is completely renewed. In a year, all your bones are replaced, constructed entirely from the nutrients that you eat. This means that although improved nutrition will have some immediate benefits, you will have to wait for months, or even years, for your body to reach its full potential for optimum health.

It’s not unlike a neglected house plant: if you start feeding and watering it, the leaves will perk up a bit from the improved nutrition, but you have to wait for the old leaves to die off and new ones to grow before you get a really healthy plant. In the same way, you can’t do a three-day detox and expect miracles to happen. Building good health is about changing the way you eat long term.

My first book, Cooking Without, goes into detoxification in greater depth and talks about the reasons for avoiding wheat, dairy, yeast and so on. This book moves on from there to concentrate on some of the latest information about diet and health.

SUGAR – PURE, WHITE AND DEADLY

We need sugar to give us energy, to fuel our cells and to feed our brains so that we can think, but sugar in the concentrated form found in biscuits and cakes, or in other over-processed foods, is not the right kind. Any carbohydrate-based foods such as grains, beans and pulses or vegetables are broken down into simple sugars by the digestive process, but it takes much longer to break down sugar from, say, chickpeas or porridge than from a biscuit.

White sugar was originally part of a piece of sugar cane or sugar beet and in that form we would have to chew our way through a lot of fibre to release a small amount of sugar. However, once the sugar cane or beet is processed and the sugar used in various foods, we can eat large amounts very easily. Anyone who has ever made treacle toffee or jam will know that you start with a big pan of sugar that soon boils down to a much smaller amount, so that by the time you eat your sweet or spoonful of jam, you are probably consuming the equivalent of a 3-metre piece of sugar cane. Hard to imagine, but it’s true.

In other words, nature doesn’t package foods in a way that we can overdose on sugar. Even if you are really hungry and you are offered apples to eat, you may munch your way through a couple – but after that you would be fed up of munching. The sugar in the apples would then have to be broken down from the fibre before being released into your bloodstream. Not an instant process.

Balancing Your Blood Sugar

If you look at the diagram, you will see that there is an optimum range that our blood sugar should stay within. If we eat sugar in the form of complex carbohydrates (vegetables, beans and pulses or wholegrains), then sugar will be released from these gradually and the level in the bloodstream will stay within the green zone. It will rise and fall a little as we eat and become hungry again, but provided we eat sufficient of the right kind of food at regular intervals, it will stay within an acceptable range.

But what happens if we eat sugary and over-processed foods? These include not just sugar but also white bread, cakes, biscuits, alcohol (fermented sugar), soft drinks, sweets and many breakfast cereals, as well as seemingly good foods containing hidden sugars. In fact the supermarket shelves are filled with these kind of products, food in a manufactured state that our grandparents wouldn’t recognise. Highly processed and sugary foods cause our blood sugar to rise quickly; it’s why we get a sudden lift or boost of energy from eating them. But this sudden rise is dangerous for the body, so it produces insulin to remove some of the sugar and store it as fat. Our blood-sugar levels then drop below normal (see diagram) and we are left feeling hungry, lethargic or craving sugar and stimulants such as coffee or cigarettes. Stimulants work by kicking our adrenal glands to release an emergency supply of energy, a bit like whipping a flagging horse and just as counterproductive. Eating over-processed and sugary foods means that we are on a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows, which as well as affecting our physical health can also impinge on our mood and behaviour, leading to great swings from euphoria to depression, hyperactivity to exhaustion, clear thinking to mental fog.

BALANCING YOUR BLOOD SUGAR

Forget Fat – Sugar is the New Enemy

At last, the problems caused by sugar are starting to be recognised. For many years fat has been blamed for the rise in obesity and other health problems, but little attention has been paid to sugar. Unfortunately, when John Yudkin warned of the dangers of sugar in his book Pure, White and Deadly back in 1972, he was largely ignored. If you ask most people if they eat a lot of sugar they will say they don’t, as they tend to think of grains in a bowl. But while sales of loose sugar have declined, our consumption has in fact trebled over the past 50 years. We are eating sugar but don’t realise it, because it is hidden in prepared products, from soups and sauces to pizza, crisps, ready meals, bacon and bread. Each week the average Briton consumes well over 100 teaspoons of added sugar, often without knowing it. Sometimes we are misled because the word ‘sugar’ does not appear on the label. Instead, manufacturers are cleverly using other names for what is basically sugar and often making it from healthy-sounding food such as fruit, vegetables and milk. One of the worst offenders is corn. This seemingly innocent ingredient is transformed into high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) by the food industry and because it is cheap to make it is frequently used in ready-prepared food.

Many of the low-fat foods on the market have been adding to the problem, as they are often manufactured with extra sugar to make them palatable. It’s the same with commercially produced ‘free from’ foods: remove gluten and you need something to bind ingredients in bread and cakes, so extra sugar is used. Other forms of sugar, some of which are used as supposedly healthy alternatives to sugar, such as agave syrup, maple syrup and honey, are still made up of glucose and fructose. A simple sugar is a simple sugar and its consumption needs to be limited on a daily basis for our health’s sake.

Excess Sugar a Slow Killer

In its many forms, sugar is broken down mainly into fructose or glucose or a combination of these (depending on the food) as it passes through the body. If sugar is naturally present in foods this is generally less of a problem, as the sugar needs to be released from the food before it enters the body and this takes time. It becomes more of an issue when food is over-processed or high in added sugar, as there is nothing to prevent it from entering the body in a rush.

When too much glucose enters the body, it quickly raises the sugar levels in the bloodstream, which prompts the pancreas to start pumping out insulin in response. Over time, excess sugar consumption exhausts the pancreas so that eventually it is no longer able to produce sufficient insulin. This is the beginning of type 2 diabetes, but it is also the forerunner of other major health problems, from high blood pressure and cholesterol to heart attacks, strokes and Alzheimer’s disease.

When fructose enters the body, it does not cause a sudden rise of sugar in the bloodstream like glucose because it is first processed by the liver. This may sound like a good thing – but when too much fructose is consumed, the liver can’t convert it fast enough for the body to use as energy, so instead it is transformed into fat that is then released into the bloodstream as triglycerides or stored in the liver. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease from eating too much fructose is now superseding fatty liver disease (cirrhosis) caused by excess alcohol consumption. Excess fat in the bloodstream leads to health problems such as heart attacks and strokes and, of course, obesity when deposited in the body.

Don’t Go Overboard

Many books are now being written about the ill-effects of sugar and proposing sugar-free diets. Although this is all music to my ears, there is a tendency to go overboard. Some diets suggest avoiding fruit, high-carbohydrate vegetables and cereals. They advocate a high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that isn’t balanced,

Reviews for Easy Tasty Healthy

[Farcasescu Roxana · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an amazing easy to follow/read/apply healthy meals. I cannot wait to implement the recipes as soon as possible. The lentil pate is definitely a starting point for me.