Sunday Dinner

Believe it or not Sunday Dinner is the easiest meal to make a healthy and maintain the pleasure.

If you cook the meat and vegetables the healthy way you can add in a Yorkshire pud or maybe dumplings for a bit of something you like. This also applies to eating out for a pub lunch. Carveries are a doddle. Pile up with light veg and lean meat, go easy on the roasties and have one Yorkshire pud not half a plate full.

If you eat all this there won’t be room for puddings and this will save you the difficult choice when the time comes.

This meal acts as an example only.

Tonight we are having Beef and Mushroom Stew. It is being served with Curly Kale, Purple Sprouting Broccoli and mashed potato. There is a technique for making mashed potato that includes no butter or milk and this is detailed later on in this post.

Even at the ingredients stage you can see the huge shift in balance towards veg. The beef is lean diced stewing steak but I have still gone through and trimmed off all the visible fat. The only fat involved at this point is 1 calorie spray, used to brown the meat. After this beef stock and the juice from the Borlotti Beans keeps everything moist whilst the veg are softened. We all have our own stew recipes and don’t need the specifics of this one but remember there is no beer and no red wine. It tastes great without these.

When you serve it it will be served with lots of veg. Enjoy the veg, fill up on the veg. This leaves you free to savour the meat.

The key difference is the making of the mash potato. This recipe includes no butter, no cream and no milk. My son now prefers this version over the fat full version.

Mashed Potato

• Chop and boil your preference potatoes. I like Maris Piper.
• Drain once boiled and then mash without adding any other ingredients.
• Once you have an even and fluffy mash beat in one egg (the heat will cook the egg but you will not see any bits).
• Slowly add vegetable stock a little at a time and mix in until you get the consistency of mashed potato you likes.
• Season to your taste.

For the rest of the family I am making dumplings using good old suet. For now I will forgo these. When I have hit my target weight I will add these back to my diet (in moderation).