Change4Life Supermeals Challenge Day 8

Over the weekend I cooked two more recipes from the Change4Life Supermeals recipe booklet. These are recipes for quick, easy, inexpensive and healthy meals; I'm trying out all 14 of them. On Saturday lunchtime I cooked hearty vegetable soup and, on Sunday, the sunday roast.

I can heartily recommend the vegetable soup. It’s a recipe I will be using again. With a good combination of chopped fresh vegetables and a well-judged amount of pasta, it’s far superior to the usual standby of tinned soup.

The tip in the booklet for this recipe is that extra soup keeps in the fridge 3 days or can be frozen for 3 months. We had no left-overs.

I have been noting the calories per portion (from the recipe book) at the bottom of each recipe. This soup supplies 100 kcals a portion (compared to 2500 kcals recommended per day for a man or 2000 kcal for a woman). We had it for lunch, with seconds. It kept the cold at bay during an afternoon at the soccer.

All the recipes in the Change4Life Supermeals booklet have low calorie counts, so (if you’re not eating too much between meals) these recipes would be useful if you’re on a diet. I think I am losing weight (I’ll have the data at the end of the challenge – don't expect Supersize Me!); although I am also taking an alcohol break for a few weeks, so that will also be a factor.

We cooked the sunday roast in a similar manner to the recipe book. This is very like how we usually do our family Sunday roast (although we would usually have Yorkshire Puddings).

Roast chicken can be fed into other recipes for a couple of days, such as the chicken noodle dinner I cooked on Day 3 of this challenge.

hearty vegetable soup
The ingredients: 1 tsp vegetable oil, 1 chopped onion, 2 small chopped carrots, sliced leek, 2 sliced celery sticks, 400g tin tomatoes, 1 litre vegetable stock, 1 tbsp tomato puree, 50g sliced green beans, 50g frozen peas, 40g dried pasta shapes, 1 tsp dried mixed herbs, ground pepper.

The method: heat oil and fry onion, carrot, leek and celery for 4 mins. Add tomato, tomato puree, stock, beans and frozen peas. Bring to the boil and add pasta, herbs and pepper. Simmer 15 mins or until pasta is cooked.

Change4Life:
www.wales.gov.uk/change4life

Register with Change4Life online before this Friday (10 February) and you can get your own free Supermeals booklet.