Spice Diet: Spice up slim down

By Kalpna Woolf

Spice Diet combines delicious recipes and healthy eating, using the tastes, healing powers and weight loss health properties of spices from around the world.

The book unwraps the mysteries of one of the oldest, most valued and mystically powerful food sources known to mankind and shows how spices can be incorporated into contemporary low-calorie recipes that can have a huge impact on our diets, health and wellbeing, for life.

Kalpna Woolf's healthy eating plan guarantees weight loss and improved wellbeing, whilst offering delicious recipes, featuring spices from India, South America, the Far East, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Spice Diet reveals the top 10 spices that should be in every food store cupboard; how to combine them into versatile Spice Rubs; 100 calorie-counted recipes, including Breakfasts, Lunches, Evening Meals, Snacks and Drinks; and a helpful two-week Kick-starter Plan. Spice Diet is an essential book for any cook wanting to combine adventurous and exciting food with a long-lasting healthy lifestyle.

Chapters include: Start the day: breakfast, Simple spicetastic lunches, Effortless dinners, Meals to share and impress, Spectacular sides, Tantalising sweet treats and Drinks. There are also sections How Does it Work?, Kick-starter Plan and The Spice Directory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Jan 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781911663119

Kalpna Woolf

Kalpna Woolf is a seasoned foodie and experienced family cook. In a 20-year BBC career as a Head of Production she has overseen some of the BBC’s  most well known food series, featuring everyone from Nigella Lawson to Rick Stein, Nigel Slater and Lorraine Pascale. She has launched food festivals, judged food awards, launched and run a campaign to bring Britain’s diverse communities’ foods together, written blogs and articles on food and her food know-how is steeped in the traditions of her Hindu family upbringing and a life of absorbing food cultures around the world. In 2013, she won the prestigious Asian Woman of Achievement award.

Book preview

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SPICE DIET

SPICE UP SLIM DOWN

KALPNA WOOLF

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For my Dad,

to whom I owe so much, who came to this country to give us all a better life and was so proud of his children. He loved to buy fresh fruit and vegetables for us to eat every day and taught me so much about good food, health, sharing and love.

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Contents

Introduction

The Power of Spices

How Does It Work?

Kick-starter Plan

Spice Rubs

Start the Day: Breakfasts

Simple Spicetastic Lunches

Effortless Dinners

Meals to Share and to Impress

Spicetacular Sides

Tantalising Sweet Treats

Drinks

Spice Directory

Index

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Spices are powerhouses of flavour and health with the crucial benefit of being calorie and fat free. Spice Diet is a simple and healthy way to enjoy tasty food whilst also maintaining good health. This is not an invented contemporary fad; it has a strong foundation in centuries’ old knowledge and traditions. Spice Diet reveals the secrets of one of the oldest and most valued, mystically powerful food sources known to mankind, and shows how spices can have a dramatic impact on our health, lifestyle and well-being.

Spice Diet guarantees weight loss whilst allowing you to enjoy flavourful food at every meal. Western tastes are ever more receptive to spices: from traditional (cloves, cinnamon, fennel); Indian (chilli, garam masala, turmeric, coriander) and Mexican (smoked chipotle chillies); to Chinese (Szechuan, Five spice, star anise) and Middle Eastern spices (Sumac, Za’atar, Ras el-Hanout). Yet we still know very little about their history and ability to improve our diets. This book unlocks their magic, fusing traditional spice secrets with simple, modern recipes.

I was brought up eating Indian spices and home-cooked food. However, when I moved away from home, I moved away from my ’food roots’ too and was tempted by the growing proliferation of fast food. Instant food availability and the addictive effect of high fat, high salt, sugars and colours. I soon began to feel and look tired and began to put on weight. Even when I cut down on calories and felt I was eating less, I was still hungry and not managing my weight well.

Over the years I began to learn more about food and the effects of it on our health, energy levels and our weight. I realised that I wanted to eat healthily and feel full; to enjoy my food and to have a good relationship with it. But I didn’t want to eat bland, flavourless and often insipid-looking ’diet’ foods. I wanted to eat food with lots of flavour, to enjoy dishes from around the world, and share foods with my family. I discovered that when I balanced spices with healthy food my weight reduced and then stayed down.

Spice Diet is very much the story of the food journey I have travelled: from my roots growing up in a traditional Indian family in London; to university where, whilst studying Russian, I lived in Soviet Russia; returning home to learn how to cook traditional British dishes; and travelling since to experience cuisines first hand in Iran, China, Italy and then Thailand, Morocco, Mexico, the Mediterranean, the Far East and West Africa.

I still use spices every day – I love the tastes, flavours and the good feeling I get from just cooking a meal with them. Seeing the rich colour when I add turmeric to a dish, I am instantly transported to the bustling alleys of Old Delhi where turmeric powder is piled high in large sacks. Spices are sumptuous in colour, taste and history, evoking wonderful journeys across deserts, land and sea, to countries where they are so valuable they have been used as legal tender.

Spice are relished not only for their taste, but also because they come with stories of their health powers from one generation to another. My family and many Indian people I know, use remedies made from spices still for many ailments and strength. If anyone in my family has a bad tummy, everyone rushes for the carom seeds which are then mixed with a sprinkling of salt and swallowed down with a little warm water: a remedy going as far back as my great, great, grandmother.

As well as these family anecdotes, we now see scientific research confirming the health properties of spices. Turmeric has been used as an anti-inflammatory for years in Ayurvedic medicine and now scientific research shows that an active compound in turmeric, curcumin, could help reduce inflammation.

Cooking with spices really doesn’t have to be intimidating or difficult. In Spice Diet I hope to demystify this and show how easily spices can be incorporated into our daily eating habits whilst capitalising on all those benefits to our health and well-being. That really is the magic allure of spices.

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The Power of Spices

Spices are part of the world’s food, trade and medicinal history. History recounts stories of colourful traders travelling from around the world on horseback, on ships and on foot handing over gold and silver coins for bags of wonderful spices. World markets teetered and thrived on the price of spices. Fantastic legends were weaved about the difficulty and rarity of spices so that the price could be held high (Arab traders told stories of cinnamon being carried by huge birds high into their nests. The birds would be lured down by tempting meats and, as they returned with the heavy meat, the nest would fall down with the cinnamon). Spices came from all over the world and, like plants, slowly germinated in parts of the world from which they hadn’t originated.

When we think of spice traders, we think of men journeying from the East, but trade history shows a complex network from all over the world in the sale and use of spices – from India to Egypt to England to South America, China and to Africa and back again. Records go as far back as to at least the ancient Egyptians. For centuries spices have been traded for their taste, their healing powers and their preservative properties. This made them valuable and even gave some of them mystical powers; for example, cumin was thought to be ‘strength-giving’ so was carried by the Romans on their long marches and added to staple foods like bread. Some spices were used to ward off evil. Spices that ‘warm’ when eaten, like cinnamon, chilli and cardamom, were thought of as aphrodisiacs and were prescribed to ‘warm up’ lovemaking too! Early Chinese archives mention using spices with herbs to support overall health.

Before refrigeration, certain spices were discovered to be good preservatives for curing meats so they could be kept longer. This power raised their value enormously and, of course, the aroma of certain spices helped to overpower the sometimes pungent smell of the meat.

Records going back to Before Christ (BC) show that spices have been used for health and as medicines. Certain spices were burned as a remedy for headaches and others were used to work as anaesthetics and to heal wounds more quickly. Coriander seeds have been found in Egyptian tombs and they have been cited in records as being used for headaches and muscular pain. What is interesting is that not all the spices recorded in Egyptian times were indigenous to Egypt, so they must have been carried from other parts of the world, and certainly cinnamon was one of those spices.

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While spices were used for health, they were also used to flavour food and drink, including wine. Their exotic nature and their cost meant that wealthy people would use them as a way of showing off their prosperity and culinary skills.

Always Natural

Like many people, my personal food journey has led me to question where my food comes from. Making good food choices and making the right decisions about what I eat is very important to me. Time and again studies show that natural foods are better for your health. So many foods that we consume nowadays have been manufactured and tampered with, and this is particularly true of flavours. For years, artificial E numbers and flavour enhancers have been added to our foods to improve the taste, but their impact on our health hasn’t always been positive. Even now, it is still sometimes hard to decipher what the ingredients are in many of the foods we buy.

Spices are powerful because they provide huge bursts of flavour and give great health benefits. All spices come from natural sources – seeds, barks, fruits, vegetables, etc. They have nothing added and no colours, sweeteners or preservatives. However, do read the ingredients on the packet in case salts or anything unnatural has been added to them.

Fear of Cooking with Spices

People often tell me that they are nervous about using spices because they don’t understand the taste or the quantities to use. It’s easy when you know the flavours of each spice and experimenting isn’t a bad thing. All spices have a distinct flavour and it is about getting to know what each one tastes like. It’s best to try the taste by cooking the spice rather than trying it in its natural form. Ground turmeric tastes bitter and earthy as a raw powder but delicious when cooked in rice or with vegetables or meat. Combining spices is also a good idea. Try using a single spice and then adding more. For example, a little chilli added to a dish will enhance the flavour, but as you add another spice, such as ground coriander, this will add another layer to the flavour to give a more complex taste. My spice rubs (see pp.16–19) are a good and easy way of learning how to combine spices.

How Does It Work?

Spice Diet is a healthy, flavourful way of eating based on centuries-old traditions of combining tasty spices with fresh ingredients to lose weight and maintain energy. It is a simple way of eating for the whole of your life. Most diets involve a ‘crash and burn’ timeframe but this is exactly why most diets tend not to work in the long term. For so long people have tried everything to lose weight or to maintain a good weight through short quick-fix diets, and while these diets may help to lose weight temporarily, statistics show that 95 per cent of dieters will fail to maintain weight loss. Diets tend to make you change your normal eating habits, deny yourself eating certain foods, and eat boring, bland foods you don’t enjoy, or grapple with complicated meal plans. Often, you have to eat these dishes on your own while everyone around you is enjoying their meals. Dieting is thought of as a temporary fix with an end date. It is not seen as lifestyle change, so mentally most people are counting the days to when their diet is over. However, research also shows that if you can enjoy your meals, feel positive about the foods you are eating, because of their taste and nutrition, and share them with family and friends, you are more likely to succeed. Spice Yourself Slim is packed with recipes that you can enjoy and will help you to be successful in your diet.

Each recipe uses simple, natural ingredients and combines them with one or a combination of healthy spices to create wonderful low-fat dishes. For example, try rubbing a tablespoon of sumac (a wonderful Middle Eastern berry-coloured spice) into a few pieces of chicken then stir-frying them with a little olive oil, and you will have a delicious, zesty-flavoured chicken dish. The sumac doesn’t add any calories at all. Alternatively, add cumin seeds to fresh vegetables before cooking and a sprinkling of roasted ground cumin at the end, and you will have a tantalising plate of food. You will also feel good as the cumin contains iron and other vitamins.

Spice Diet will show you which spices you need. I have used ten spices that are normally found in most kitchen storecupboards as well as some exciting new spices which I hope you will enjoy trying.

Using the Recipes

Breakfast and lunch recipes serve two people, but they will all work for four and there are tips on how to upscale the dishes. Dinner, entertainment and dessert dishes all serve four people. There are also many vegetarian dishes in the book and alternatives are given to satisfy the carnivores.

There are recipes for every day and also for light meat-free Mondays (see the meal planner on here). If you can’t do this on a Monday, try to do one day a week based on this principle. Starting the week with a quieter eating day is an excellent way of cleansing the body. I believe that it also sharpens the mind. Having one day a week without meat will not only give your digestion a rest, but as you will eat more vegetables, herbs, beans, etc. you will have a day packed with more nutrients. It is also good for the environment, as considerably more greenhouse gases are produced in meat production, which has a detrimental effect on the environment.

Breakfast

Start the day well with energising, cleansing drinks and prepare your mind and body for the day ahead. A warm drink of ginger and fennel seeds or fresh mint is a great way of gently waking up your digestion and getting your body ready to receive a lovely, filling health-boosting breakfast. The breakfasts are designed to keep