Five-of-your-ten-a-day soup

After hearing last week that a recent study is suggesting we all eat 10 portions of fruit and veg every day for the good of our health I keep hearing people say they used to struggle with even 5-a-day.

Five-a-day is doable for me, but 10...definitely  a stretch. Last Thursday with a big effort and a twitter challenge I managed nine, but then for the last few days it has been down at five or six. However, today Mr Pitt made 5-a-day soup for lunch. We thought we were pretty good at making soup anyway, but recently we had a day at the Raymond Blanc Cookery School and this simple soup inspired by Maman Blanc was one of the dishes we cooked.

It is a great was to use up all the veg in your fridge. The basic recipe is to sweat some onion in a bit of rape seed oil (or a mixture of rape seed oil and butter). Chop your veg into pieces of roughly the same size and then add into the sweated onion,  adding the veg that take longest to cook first, adding just enough water to cover the veg. You don't need any stock.

Season with salt and pepper to taste and just before serving add a good handful of fresh chopped herbs. At the cookery school we added chervil, but we don't grow that, so today it was thyme from our pot on the kitchen window sill.

The veg was celery, parsnip, carrot, butternut squash, cauliflower leaves (the white part from the centre of the leaves) and onion. If you want to make sure you are getting your 5-a-day you could weigh out your veg portions, but this is now going to be my go to recipe for what is left in the fridge.

Can you do ten a day?

I was inspired by @SkinnyJeanGard  today to take up the challenge to see if I can eat 10 portions of fruit and veg per day.

I am pretty good at 5 a day and my first thought was perhaps 7 or 8 especially if I snack on dried fruit. But 10? Not so sure.

When my children were young enough to have me guide what they eat we talked a lot about 5 a day and the standard challenge was to have eaten 4 by the end of the school day. One might be eaten with breakfast in which case the lunch box would have to contain three more portions. If no fruit was eaten at breakfast then we tried to put 4 portions in with lunch. So dried fruit or mashed banana with porridge was popular. The lunch box almost always contained carrot sticks, then sometimes peppers, grapes, tomatoes, raisins, dried apricots or mango. Pasta salad is great for getting in 3 portions of veg and the same with rice salad and couscous too. I was very aware of the 5 a day thing and made a game of it with the children.  My Mum died of (hereditary) ovarian cancer six weeks before Senior Daughter was born and my aunt (mum's sister) died of the same, shortly after Junior  Daughter was born. It was then I realised it was probably not a coincidence and did some research.  I had heard of the 5 a day thing back then but when I was told that it was found to protect against cancer (that was the way I interpreted it in my vulnerable grief-filled state) I took it pretty seriously as you might imagine. So 5 a day has been a habit for a long time.

Waking up to BBC Radio 5 Live this morning and at the same time nosying for news on Twitter I heard about the 10 a day thing.

Can I really manage 10 portions a day? I decided to see.

A lot of people wonder about portion sizes. I was just editing my section from my forthcoming book Leftover Pie yesterday covering portion sizes, so it was in my head.  I heard an expert  (apologies for not catching the name) talk about 80g.  For dried fruit it is 30g (as some of that 80g is of course the water content in fresh fruit).

Here goes for my Ten-a-day challenge.

This is 30g of dried cranberries and 30g of dried papaya, which I'm going to mix into 25g oats and three table spoons of plain yoghurt for breakfast.

Two down, eight to go.

While I was weighing out breakfast I thought I'd check what 30g of dates looks like.  It is about five and a half dates.  I usually take 5 or 6 dates (or two or three apricots or some dried mango) with me if going out and about.   I don't always eat it that day, but it stops me cracking and buying processed, packaged snacks.  I think the fact I don't always eat it now, kind of tells me I'm over the packaged snacks urge anyway.  But when I started my Zero Single Use Plastic challenge in 2015 I really wanted to make it a bit easier and not feel deprived.  So that's how the habit started.

When I'm at home, I don't tend to snack as much, so I don't know whether or not I'll eat these.  I think also, because dried fruit is high in sugar - albeit natural, it is probably not great for the teeth to eat on its own.  Still you can't get everything right, hey?

Portion number three perhaps?

For lunch I made a soup testing out a recipe for "Bean Broth, Made Good" by Malou who writes a frugal food blog called Wonky Veg   (wonkyvegblog.com) which uses up the liquid from a can of butter beans.  I am going to use most of the butter beans tonight as I'm making butternut squash risotto and if I am going to get anywhere near 10 portions of fruit and veg today, I need to add in another veg (or three) to my usual combo of onion, celery, butternut squash and sage.  But there's not a lot in the fridge!

A portion of veg - cauliflower stalks.  I will
dice them up to add into the bean broth.

Bean Broth, Made Good

The soup was delicious.  As I was making it, I was getting the veg ready for the risotto this evening and using up the bits I didn't need to make my soup.  Normally I would have put in a either a half or a whole onion into the risotto, depending on how much other veg would be going in, but as I am on a "challenge" to get in my 10 a day, I didn't want to cheat, so after chopping my onion, I weighed 2 portions (160g) which was most of the onion, and then used the rest for my soup.  

I only had around 80g of celery so by the time I took some of the mainly leafy bits for my soup I didn't even have one portion.  Looking at what else was in the fridge, I found some beetroot.  I like beetroot with butternut squash and feta so I weighed that.   I have 94g so I am going to count the beetroot and the celery together as a portion each.  What do you reckon? Fair?

So my soup contained some onion and some celery leaves, but probably only half a portion's worth, and some butterbeans (but I can't count those for lunch because however many portions of pulses you have it only counts as one of your 5 - or in this case 10 - portions per day and I'm including a portion each for tonight's risotto).  So I think for my soup I can perhaps count one and a half portions.  The cauliflower stalks are one portion and the celery and onion are a half portion.

I ate two clementines (1.5 portions as 138g?) after my soup, so by lunch time I have managed 5 portions. I haven't yet eaten the dates!

This evening's risotto will contain

• butternut squash (a portion each) 
• celery (half a portion each)
• beetroot (half a portion each)
• onion (a portion each)
• butterbeans (a portion each)

Okay, so that's 4 portions in tonight's dinner - if I eat it all.  There's some leftover apple and blackberry crumble in the fridge, but I'm not sure I'm going to want that after risotto.

Adding it all up, assuming I eat all my portion of risotto, I will have eaten 2 portions at breakfast, 3 portions at lunch and 4 for dinner.  So if I am going to crack that 10th portion I need to either eat the crumble or eat the dates.  Hmm! I'll let you know.