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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  Make your own health food
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Make your own health food

From breakfast cereals to hummus and peanut butterlearn how to recreate your favourite packaged foods at home, and eat healthier

Home-made tomato soupPremium
Home-made tomato soup

NEW DELHI :

It’s time to ditch processed and packaged foods. They are an easy and quick alternative—just pick them off the shelves—but there’s a long list of reasons why you shouldn’t eat them.

Mridu Mahajan Pogula, co-founder of Nirvaaha, an organic food initiative in New Delhi and Bangalore, and Neha Upadhyay, a food psychologist, macrobiotics expert and founder of Guna—The Farm Connect in the Capital, which conducts awareness workshops in organic-macrobiotic cooking/wellness, list the five most important ones: “Chemicals and additives are best avoided; fresh food is always more delicious; packaged foods are more expensive, and cutting them off can cut your grocery bill by a large margin; packaged food contains a high amount of sodium, sugar and fats to make it tasty and last longer—that’s really unhealthy; it’s really easy to use good, reliable, fresh ingredients to make the same things at home."

Let’s take the salad dressing as an example of just what’s wrong with packaged food, and how it differs from home-made food: A big appeal of salads is that the dressing should use a cold-pressed virgin oil, like extra-virgin olive oil, as its base. This provides the body with the right kind of essential fat. Add to that a little bit of lemon juice, which provides vitamin C, a few drops of honey, a little bit of salt and pepper and maybe a teaspoon of mustard, and you have a delicious home-made salad dressing in a couple of minutes.

A store-bought jar of salad dressing will be high in fat, most likely from refined vegetable oil, so you get bad fats instead of good ones. Then there’s the whole arsenal of salt, high fructose corn syrup, monosodium glutamate and other chemicals that will be added to preserve and enhance its taste, and to heighten its shine and appeal—and you have the opposite of health in a bottle.

A home-made salad dressing can also be customized according to your needs: Keep it low-sodium, low-calorie, no fat, no sugar—any which way you want, at virtually no extra cost.

Here’s how to easily and quickly make a variety of things you would usually buy off shelves. All the recipes serve three-four people.

Mridu Mahajan Pogula’s recipes

Asian-style salad dressing

This dressing can be used on a variety of greens as well as protein: Use it to dress blanched green beans or baby spinach, grilled chicken, steamed fish, blanched carrots.

Take 1 and half tsp of sesame oil, add 1 tsp red chilli flakes, 3 tsp brown sugar or jaggery dissolved in 3 tsp of lemon juice. Add a pinch of black pepper and salt, and mix well or shake till emulsified in an airtight jar.

Hummus

Home-made hummus is packed with nutrition: protein from the chickpeas; calcium, phosphorus, selenium, vitamin C and vitamin B6 from the raw garlic; calcium and iron from the sesame seeds; and good fats from the olive oil.

Soak 300g of chickpeas in cold water for 4-5 hours and then pressure-cook for two-three whistles (till they become soft enough to grind in a mixer/grinder). Discard water. Cool and grind the chickpeas with 3 garlic cloves, 1 tsp cumin powder, half tsp red chilli powder, 30g sesame seeds and salt to taste. Add 1 tsp lemon juice and 1 tsp olive oil, mix and serve.

Iced tea

When you drink a premixed iced tea, you are simply drinking sugar (or artificial sweeteners) and water; it is that devoid of goodness. There are no antioxidants in this drink. That’s because the tea leaves are exposed to low pressure, freeze-dried and powdered to turn them into instant iced tea. In fact, research published in 2001 in the Journal Of Agricultural And Food Chemistry showed that these tea preparations were even devoid of the nutritive polyphenols called catechins that tea leaves are usually loaded with.

Boil 1 litre water with 8 tsp sugar, or according to taste, in a pan, then add K tsp tea leaves, cover the pan and switch off the gas. Strain after 5 minutes and let the water cool. Now add the juice of 3 lemons to it and serve chilled. In fact, iced tea tastes better the next day or after a good 4-5 hours.

Peanut butter

Who doesn’t like a nice slathering on the toast every now and then! Peanuts are loaded with protein, folates, niacin and omega fats, and are high in fibre.

Make it at home to skip all the added vegetable oil (or worse, trans fats), sugar and salt in commercial brands.

Grind half cup roasted peanuts. Add 1 and half tsp peanut oil gradually to give it a smooth texture and grind again till it gets a smooth texture. Add a pinch of salt and sugar to give it a sweet-salty taste. Put it in a sealed container and refrigerate. It will easily last for 2 weeks.

Neha Upadhyay’s recipes

The Guna Breakfast Cereal

Perhaps the biggest sinner in the packaged foods category, breakfast cereals come in an astounding variety, and claim all kinds of health benefits. But studies have proved these claims false—breakfast cereals have large amounts of sugar, sodium and preservatives; and the processing destroys most of the fibre and micronutrients in the grains.

If they are made at home you can control everything: the kind of grains you want, mixing heart-healthy, fibre-heavy oatmeal, amaranth and wheat bran. You can add raisins for natural sweetness instead of sugar, or add omega-rich flaxseed, even nutrient-dense almonds.

Boil four cups of water with a pinch of salt. Lower the heat, gently stir in 135g oats, cover the pot about four-fifths to allow the steam to escape and cook for 10-15 minutes. Check occasionally to make sure the water hasn’t evaporated. If the oats look dry, gently stir in one by third to half cup of water. Next, add 30g almonds and 2 tsp raisins and cook for another 10 minutes. Stir in a pinch of cinnamon and serve.

Tomato soup

It comes in cans and as an instant powdered mix. Both are extremely high in salt and sugar, and have little nutritional value. Here is a recipe that gives you a creamy, tasty soup you just cannot get off the shelf, with all the goodness of the antioxidants in tomatoes intact.

Steam 1kg of tomatoes till the skin breaks (about 10 minutes). Cool, peel, chop and blend. Boil three glasses of water with a bunch of fresh coriander leaves. Add 6 pods of crushed garlic and the tomato mix and boil till the soup reduces a little. Add salt and pepper to taste.

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Published: 01 Sep 2014, 08:26 PM IST
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