Wizard Recipes

Don’t get caught in front of the vending machine again. Pack these eight healthy snacks (each less than 200 calories) to keep you feeling full and satisfied throughout the work day

Desktop Snacks

Working eight or more hours a day can make it difficult to eat healthfully unless you plan ahead. Research shows that eating every four hours helps to keep your metabolism charged and your energy level high. Before you dig in your drawer for spare change and head to the vending machine, plan ahead and stash low-calorie, nutritious snacks in a cabinet, drawer, or your briefcase. Each of these snacks has less than 200 calories and are sure to satisfy when the 3 p.m. cravings hit.

Whole Wheat Crackers and

Peanut Butter

Save your quarters by skipping the vending machine’s peanut butter crackers and packing your own nutritious snack. For a hunger-curbing option, try 10 multigrain wheat crackers (such as Multigrain Wheat Thins) and a tablespoon of peanut butter. This nutrient-rich snack rings in at just 193 calories and offers 2 grams of fiber. The combination of complex carbs and protein help to keep your blood sugar stable and keep you feeling full longer

Fruit

Grab an apple, banana, pear, grapes, or other portable fruit as you dash out the door every morning. If you grab a different fruit every day (and change with the seasons), you’ll obtain a good variety of nutrients plus fiber, and won’t get bored with the same old snack. The average serving of fruit is around 70 calories so pair with a cup of fat-free milk (about 90 calories) for a protein boost as well as extra calcium and vitamin D. This protein and fiber combination will keep you feeling full and prevent mindless eating.

Popcorn with Parmesan

Take regular bagged popcorn to the next level by topping with 2 tablespoons of shredded Parmesan cheese. The nutty flavor of the popcorn pairs well with the rich flavor of Parmesan resulting in a quick, 150-calorie snack. Simply top 3½ cups of 94%-fat-free popcorn with the cheese and your snack is served. If you don’t have an office fridge to stash your Parm, nosh on just the popcorn for only 100 calories. This salty snack counts as one of your three daily servings of whole grains and helps to increase your energy and mood.

Nuts

Make the swap and choose nuts over chips for a crunchy alternative. Nuts are rich in heart-healthy fats but are calorically dense (about 170 calories per ounce) so measure out an ounce (about 24 almonds) and stick to that amount instead of feasting on the entire bag. Stash premeasured baggies of nuts in an office drawer or in your purse to nibble on when the 3 p.m. hunger pains hit. Almonds and other nuts are a naturally high source of vitamin E, calcium, magnesium, and potassium and are rich in protein and fiber

Instant Oatmeal

When you’re in a rush at work and want something warm and comforting, heat a packet of plain instant oatmeal (just 110 calories) in the microwave for a quick and satisfying treat. Choose plain oatmeal and add your own flavorings to control the calorie and sugar content. Top with a 42 calorie mini box of raisins for a sweet flavor and added nutrients or sprinkle with cinnamon and nutmeg. Doubling as a fiber-rich breakfast or daytime snack, oatmeal helps lower cholesterol and reduces the risk of heart disease.

Mini Pitas with Hummus

Use mini pita pockets to scoop up creamy hummus. Whether you make your own hummus or choose a favorite brand at the grocery store, hummus is made from chickpeas, a great source of soluble fiber. This soluble fiber helps to lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease. Pair one serving of hummus, 2 tablespoons, with 3 mini pita rounds for a 150 calorie snack. If you want a protein boost, fill the mini pita pockets with an ounce of low-sodium deli ham or turkey. The fiber and protein combo gives the snack some staying power to keep you feeling full longer.

Snack Bars

If you’re having a sweet attack and are looking for a healthy “bar” that isn’t loaded with sugar, reach for one that is all natural. Brands like LaraBar and KIND are good sources of fiber, contain no added sugar, and are made from whole, natural ingredients like dates, almonds, cashews, and cranberries. These bars are rich in fiber, low in sodium, loaded with vitamins and minerals, and run around 200 calories per serving. Pack these convenient bars in a purse or pocket for an instantly sweet and filling snack.

Veggies with Ranch

Beat the high-fat, high-sodium snacks featured at the convenience store and pack a container of fresh veggies like carrots, celery, and grape tomatoes. Raw veggies fill you up because of their high water and fiber content. If you struggle eating veggies in the buff, try dipping them in 2 tablespoons of low-fat Ranch dressing (80 calories), hummus (70 calories), or salsa (10 calories).

‘April is the cruellest month’ wrote TS Eliot, but after a winter that seemed to last forever, the arrival of spring seems anything but mean-spirited now that brighter colours and flavours are breaking through - including wonderful wild garlic.

Cockles are small, edible bivalves. Traditionally sold with winkles and whelks, cockles have been a popular British seaside snack for many years. They were also sold by vendors outside London pubs who, in the absence of scales, used a pint glass as a measure. They’ve been sold by the pint ever since.

Live cockles in their shells are available from some fishmongers. Cooked and shelled cockles can be bought in jars, preserved in brine or vinegar. They can be used in seafood pie or tossed in a salad, eaten raw or steamed until their shells open, like mussels. Use them in soups, risotto and paella or stew them in a tomato sauce for pasta.

• Penclawdd cockle chowder
• Cockles with smoked chilli broth
• Penclawdd cockle chowder
• Cockles, laverbread and Welsh bacon

Crab

Crabs produce both white and brown meat. The sweet white meat comes from the claws, while the rich brown meat comes from the body, including the liver, which is considered a delicacy. Fans of crab say that this crustacean has sweeter tasting white meat than lobster has.

Male crabs tend to have larger claws and more white meat. However, the females can come with coral - a flavoursome red roe. You can buy a crab live and boil it yourself, or alternatively ask your fishmonger to kill it for you, or buy it ready cooked.

Crabmeat is great in pastas, salads, soups or soufflés. It goes well with cream, butter, lemon and chilli. Cooked crabmeat can be bought in cans too, which is useful for adding to pasta or making quick crabcakes, but the flavour is not as good as the fresh version.

• Dressed crab
• Crabcakes with a tomato, crab and basil dressing
• Crabcakes and mayonnaise
• Crab, saffron and leek quiche
• Individual crab soufflés

Lettuce

Lettuce was first cultivated as a medicine. Wild lettuce contains an active element with a mild sleep-inducing effect. Lettuce is now widely used in Asian and Western cookery. Cooked lettuce has long been popular in Asian kitchens - it is often stir-fried or blanched in China. It also makes a handy serving container for spicy minced meat salads in Thai or Korean cooking.

Cooked lettuce is becoming trendier in Europe - it all started with petit pois á la Française, the traditional dish of cooked peas and finely sliced lettuce. These days, chefs are adding it to risotto or grilling stuffed lettuce halves with cheese.

• Lettuce with oyster sauce
• An extraordinary way with lettuce
• Korean beef in lettuce Risotto with lettuce and spring onion
• Fish pie with petit pois á la Française

Spinach

Spinach is featured in cuisines all over the world. Full of vitamins and iron, its health-giving properties are well known, but it’s generally loathed by young children - in spite of Popeye’s attempts to promote its virtues.

Young leaves are best because older leaves can be tough. Spinach has a distinctly earthy flavour; the leaves can be enjoyed as a side vegetable or as salad, or they can be incorporated into a wide range of dishes including soups, pies, omelettes, soufflés or quiches.

• Mediterranean filo pastry pie
• Buttered spinach
• Spinach, mushroom and ricotta quiche with sautéed spinach
• Quesadillas with spinach and goats’ cheese

Spring lamb

Lamb is associated with spring in many cultures. In Christian cultures, it’s the roast to serve on Easter Sunday. Lamb is available all year round but spring lamb has small, slender bones with pink, rosy coloured flesh that is meltingly tender and more subtle than darker-fleshed summer or autumn lamb. Choose joints and cuts carefully; go for lean pieces and avoid any with yellow or crumbly fat.

• Roast leg of lamb with garlic and rosemary
• Spring lamb with spinach and feta rolls
• Spring lamb stew with ricotta dumplings
• Spiced spring lamb with black-eyed beansg

Wild garlic

In the UK, wild garlic (Allium ursinum) has many peculiar identities - ‘bear’s garlic’, ‘devil’s garlic’, ‘gypsy’s onions’ and ’stinking Jenny’ are just some of them. It’s no surprise that this seasonal ingredient is called so many names - it gives off an incredibly pungent smell in the wild. Unlike common cultivated garlic, it’s the leaves that are eaten rather than the bulbs. The taste is more delicate too, similar to the flavour of chives.

The leaves can be eaten raw or lightly cooked. Be sure to wash them well - some recipes also call for blanching the leaves for a few minutes in boiling water. Wild garlic can be stirred into risottos or omelettes, added to soups or used in sauces to accompany meat and fish.

• Honey and za’atar-glazed spring lamb with salsify and wild garlic purée
• Roast best end of lamb with garlic fritters and a wild garlic cream sauce
• Steamed monkfish with wild garlic and ginger

What would happen if we begin to consider food is less a thing and more a relationship? In nature, things have always been like this: eating meant in fact interacting whit species in the systems that we call food chains or tropic networks, which include everything up to the soils. Species co-evolved with the other species that eat them and very often, among them develops a relationship of interdependence: I’ll feed you, if you spread my genes.

Following an evolutionary process of mutual adaptation, the apple or the pumpkin turns into a nutritious and delicious food product for certain animals. Over time and through processes of trial and failure, the plant becomes tastier (and often more visible) to answer the needs and desires of the animal, and so that the animal can develop various digestive tools (eg, enzymes) needed to exploit the plant as good as possible.

Thus, at first, the cow milk was not a nutritious product for people: in fact, it even harms them that until the people who lived around cows developed in adulthood the ability to digest milk. The gene responsible for producing lactase, the enzyme that make the digestion of milk possible, was disabled by humans shortly after medical ablation, but now five thousand years, people have suffered from a mutation where the gene which remains active throughout life, the mutation that quickly spread through a population of pastors in north-central Europe. Why? Because people which suffered this mutation have access to a new extreme nutritious food source and therefore they could multiply more easily than those who had not undergone the mutation that we are talking about. This adaptation was good for those who consume milk but also for cows that have multiplied and expanded their habitat (and have improved their health status) all because of this new symbiotic relationships.

Among other things, health status is determined by the type of relationships within a food chain extreme varied relation in the human case which is an omnivorous. So, when a link from the food chain health is affected, this can be passed on to all other living creatures that make up that food chain. If the soil is sick or suffering from certain deficiencies so will be the gras growing on it and the cows grazing grass and the people who drink their milk. This is what Weston Price and Sir Howard was thinking when they were trying to establish a connection between these apparent distant spheres: soil and human health. We can not separate our own health from the entire health chain.

Psychologists proved, the most of us eat according to external signals, especially the visual ones. The bigger the portion of food, so much more we will eat; the bigger the plate, so much more we pour soup, the more we buy if the wending machine is nicely arranged and the more we will eat, if the bowl with M&M’s is closer to us.

All of this makes us easy targets for the alimentary producers and advertiser that want just to sell us more and more food. Like many others branches of our modern life, the food industry, has become a visual culture. But for the eating process, it’s better to till also our other senses, which often provide more useful and accurate information that are useful for our own body.

Is the third bite of dessert better than the first?

Could I continue to eat? But am I still hungry?

It seems that the human brain needs 20 minutes to get the information that the stomach is full; unfortunately the most of us eat in less than this 20 minutes, as result the feeling of satiety is influencing in a little way or not at all, the quantity which is consumed.

This means that by eating more slowly and being more careful for the satiety sensation, we could learn to eat less. French’s know this better than us, Brian Wansink proved it. When asked when to stop eating, the French subjects answered “when I feel full” (what a brilliant idea! Americans answered “when there’s nothing else on the plate” or “when I’m fed up”)

Maybe that’s why the long and relaxed meals allow French’s to know when they are sated. When we will learn to eat slower and will pay attention to our senses, than we could change the external signs that guide us. The idea is that it’s better to self-manipulation than traders-manipulation.

You will find a lot of tips in the recent work of Wansink, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, but I prevent you that all will hurt your quality of free will. Eat little portions, in little plates, eat and drink from small recipients (even if it means to reassign the products from gigantic packages into little containers); leave your food rests on the table- empty bottles, bones and so on-  so that you can see how much you eat. Use tall glasses instead of the wide ones; leave the healthy food at sight and hide the unhealthy ones; leave the food containers from where you served in the kitchen so that you are not tempted for a second round