Kitchen Garden Forum

Just watching Jamie Oliver cooking asparagus. Thought i`d get some ideas for when i have my own bed set up. Only problem is he is has used about half a pound of butter for each recipe and for his asparagus tart he used butter, about half pound of cheese and half pint jersey cream as well as buttered filo pastry.

All looks lovely but i`ve just found out I have high cholesterol and have to change my diet - out goes buttered toast, cheese and chocolate.

Cheers Jamie

Seedling

Dear Seedling, i take it that wasn't one of his healthy living recipes.

Sorry to hear about your high Cholesterol Seedling, maybe you could just cut down rather than cut out.

Assume you need to go with the HDL and not the LDL. Olive oil and rape seed oil is good. Butter and cream is bad. I'm sure we can find some alternatives between us.

There is no way I can give up chocolate. Unrealistic . Life would be so miserable.
Seedling

That's the problem with so many recipes, isn't it? We have a lovely book of potato recipes which I would love to use more, but most of the recipes use lashings of butter or cream (thereby making it all taste delicious), but as we never use either because of potential health problems (not margarine either, only olive oil in the minutest quantities), the recipes just don't work!

To my mind, there's no doubt that butter or cream do add that something extra to a meal.

A couple of years ago, I found out i am lactose intolerant, and being a veggie, that makes life extremely difficult. I can't make any of the lovely recipes which use cream or butter or both. I don't really miss cheese too often, but I am with seedling on the issue of chocolate. I have found a few dairy free ones (not the horrible soya alernatives) just good quality dark chocolate with no milk in them at all.
Green & Black
Montezuma's to name just a couple. These would be Ok in moderation I'm sure!

You've probably already seen this, but one of the simplest & nicest tasting ways of cooking asparagus we've found is just to roast it with a little olive oil, sprinkled with a little salt.

You can do this in a normal roasting dish with a single layer of spears. If the bases are much thicker than the tips, you might want to put these round the outside (or some other mechanism to help ensure even cooking). Using 180-200 C, this usually takes 15-20 mins, but feel free to try it out & decide what you prefer.

This method seems to accentuate the flavour more than traditional steaming. It's also a method that lets you "bung it in" & get on with:
- Remaining food prep, or
- A leisurly slurp of wine etc!


Colin

Sounds good Colin. Is wine good for lowering bad cholesterol? i`m willing to give it a go.
Seedling

have you come across 'butterbuds' from lakeland plastics, they are little sachets of granules which you sprinkle on moist food such as mash, gives you the flavour without the fat. Not a bad substitute if you are laying off the grease for any reason.

I saw that recipe as well and figured I'd make my mash with a bit of marg and skimmed milk as always, though the thought of all that cream is lovely. but I couldn't skimp on the cheese, must have lots of cheese.

I chased down the recipe and stuck it in the recipe section if anyone's interested.

I actually can't stand the taste of either milk or cream in savory dishes, plus I loathe cheese, so my wife hates me, as do most of her friends whenever we get invited round for a meal! Quite how anyone can actually drink meal astonishes me. I have no idea whether I am lactose intolerant or not, but without heaps of sugar I can't touch dairy products. Yuck!
Cookery books are therefore a huge disappointment. The pictures look great, but when I go into the detail, the final ingredient is usually something ideologically unsound!

Barry wrote:I actually can't stand the taste of either milk or cream in savory dishes, plus I loathe cheese, so my wife hates me, as do most of her friends whenever we get invited round for a meal! Quite how anyone can actually drink meal astonishes me. I have no idea whether I am lactose intolerant or not, but without heaps of sugar I can't touch dairy products. Yuck!
Cookery books are therefore a huge disappointment. The pictures look great, but when I go into the detail, the final ingredient is usually something ideologically unsound!

One or the other, Barry.
Your "taste" does not equal "ideologically unsound".

Dear Barry, you must have been a nightmare to feed when you were a baby, before you got onto solids.

OH, Barry did say "in savoury dishes" so, presumably, he enjoyed his rice puddings, sago 'frog spawn', sweet pops or whatever as a babe!!

hi ive just skimmed this thread, am now going to chuck in some controversial comments...
when my mother died suddenly at 50 of a heart attack ny father insisted that my brother and myself had cholesterol tests, at the time i was having eggs for breakfast, cheese sandwich for lunch, probably more cheese for supper, lots of fried stuff ie an extremely bad high fat diet.... guess what my cholesterol was the lowest of the 3 of us, well down at the bottom of the scale.
low fat is a big money spinning industry based on a very shaky brlief that cholesterol is bad for you, based on the observation that some heart patients have cholesterol deposits in their arteries, (compare with the martian in the spaceship over london seeing firemen at fires amd concluding that firemen start fires.) the body actually manufactures cholesterol from carbohydrate cos it needs it to make hormones such as oestrogen. Cholesterol may be deposited in arteries as am attempt to repair cos the artery walls are breaking down due to a lack of vitamins and protein in the body.

some vitamins (a, d, e, i think) are fat soluble if you are on a low fat diet your body cant use the vitamins in your food (or those bottles of supplements) .
what is bad for you is damaged fats found in hydrogenated fats, (margarine) processed polyunsaturated fats (cheap vegetable oils) and pasturised eggs and dried milk, cos the cholesterol has beem heat treated and oxidised.
homogenisation of milk chops up the big fat molecules so the pieces can go through the gut wall without being digested first.
There is evidence that pesticide residues attach themselves to fat so organic dairy products are a good idea.

also on cheese intolerence , the proteins are changed when cheese is cooked some people can hndle raw cheese but get problems with cooked cheese , again some people who are intolerant of "cheese" are fine on an unpasturised cheese.

we are on full fat unhomogenised milk,cream, butter,proper cheese , virgin olive oil and coconut oil.


Try googling Diana Schwarzbein or Paula Baillie Hamilton, both MDs or reading some of their books .