Food for thoughts #3

Spinach cakes

This is a super easy recipe for a quick lunch or even for breakfast. You must know how to make a good spinach omelette or frittata by now. This is a healthier version as we cooked them in the oven instead of frying them and we added a bit of salted ricotta for a richer taste. 

You will need a few cupcake tins to bake the small cakes . We used silicone baking cups cause it is the easiest solution to take the small cakes out once they are cooked. If you use some metal ones I advise you coat them with butter and dust the inside with flour to avoid them sticking to the surface. 

For the props styling I decided to play with lines and patterns. It reminded me of the intricacy of the human brain or how I like to imagine it, as a thick weave of connections.

After a short journey to my local props house, Backgrounds prop hire I found what I was looking for!

We all started this new series with the idea of creating some recipes to boost your mental health. If you have been following us you must know that my blog partner Giulia is an professional nutritionist and she will tell us a bit more about why we choose to cook this recipe. Check below:

“On our last post we talked about the important connection between gut health and mental health. The intestine and the brain communicate with impulses via nerves and chemical messengers (neurotransmitters) such as serotonin and GABA. This last neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid has the function to inhibit/block certain signals in our brain and reduce activity in our nervous system. Therefore, GABA and GABA deficiency are linked to symptoms like stress, anxiety, insomnia, ADHD… but also Parkinson’s disease and seizures.
There are not many foods that contain GABA —the only ones are fermented foods, in fact we added apple cider vinegar to our side salad— however, some vitamins such as vitamin B6 are required co-factors for GABA synthesis. Foods rich in B6 are first of all spinach (together with cabbage, broccoli, garlic, peppers, bananas…), so we decided to cook one of the most famous Italian recipes with spinach — frittata (di spinaci).
Spinach is also high in folate and mineral magnesium which both have been seen to be essential for optimal mental health. “

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Spinach cakes

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time:  40 minutes

Total Time: 50 minutes

Serves 2

INGREDIENTS

4 medium eggs (about 60g each)

100g spinach

70g leeks

60g salted sheep's ricotta

5ml olive oil

black pepper

SALAD

5 radish

300g Mixed salad leaves

1 tbs apple cider vinegar

2 tbs extra virgin olive oil

a pinch of salt

a twist of black pepper

INSTRUCTIONS

1 Preheat oven to 170 ºC

2 In a small bowl beat the eggs

3 Grate the ricotta into the egg mixture

4 Sauté the leeks and spinach in a small pan with olive oil until tender (2-3 min)

5 Pour the content into the cupcake tins

6 Cook in the oven for about 30 minutes

7 For the salad: wash the radish, discard the leaves and slice thinly.

8 Mix all the ingredients together into a salad bowl

9 Once the cakes are ready you can plate them with a bit of salad on the side.

Food for thoughts #2

Conta-bollita soup (a combination between Ribollita and Contadina soup )

Giulia and I started with the idea of a Ribollita, a thick vegetarian soup from Tuscany dated as far back as medieval times. Ribollita literally means re-boiled — noble family's servants used to reheat the left-over food with the addition of bread. The bread would soak in all the delicious flavours.

But since we thought some of you might not want to eat bread, the recipe would no longer be a genuine ribollita but more of a contadina soup. They are both very similar as they both contain lots of beans but the contadina doesn't have any bread.
So this recipe is sort of like a hybrid between two regional Italian recipes that we renamed Conta-bollita. It is a very comforting dish, perfect for cold wintery days. It would make a great addition to your diet as it is a very healthy one.

It needs a bit of advance preparation as the beans need to soak overnight or for at least 24 hours.

It takes a fair amount of time to make this soup so I recommend doing a large amount and freeze the rest if you wish.

Foods that are full of fibre and contain a wide variety of vegetables can have a fantastic impact on our gut health, and therefore on our mental health. Recent studies have brought to light the synergistic and important connection that exist between gut and brain. Our digestive system and our brain interact both physically and biochemically in a number of different ways.

The vagus nerve, for example, a long nerve which connects the intestine (and other organs) to the brain, sends signals in both directions. Therefore if you are stressed you may not digest very well, and if your stomach did not agree with certain foods, your concentration may not be as good as normal.

Gut and brain also communicate with neurotransmitter, chemical messengers produced mainly in the brain which control feelings and emotions. Our gut, though, also produces certain neurotransmitters like serotonin (which works by making us feel happy), and our gut microflora can produce a neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which helps control feelings of fear and anxiety.
This show us how connected the health of our digestive and nervous system is —no wonder that “adherence to the Mediterranean diet is associated with better mental and physical health”

In order to promote our mind well-being even further, for this recipe we added black beans to the mix of pulse are traditionally use in the recipe since black beans are one of the top foods for folate, and “Folate deficiency and low folate status have been linked in clinic studies to depression, persistent depressive symptoms, and poor antidepressant response.”

When changing the recipe we also made sure the soup was going to have a good amount of leaf vegetables which are packed with calcium, vitamin K and magnesium, essential for energy production, heart and brain health.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4367209/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4393509/
https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/68692
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2382.short
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00394-019-01943-4
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-nutrition/article/adherence-to-the-mediterranean-diet-is-associated-with-better-mental-and-physical-health/0C91627A98D6ABB078EFBA47B0573EC8
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/mediterranean-diet-and-depression/67F265CA11470ADC1C9AD2838B7340B7

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Prep Time: 25 minutes + 

10 hrs to soak the beans overnight 

Cook Time: 1h 45 minutes

Serves 6 people

INGREDIENTS

80g dried green lentils

150g dried cannellini beans

150g dried black beans

2 garlic cloves

20ml olive oil 

1 rosemary stick

1.5l water

salt

pepper

olive oil 5 ml

70g onion

2 chillies 

70g carrots 

1 celery stick

120g potatoes

250g savoy cabbage

250g kale

250g swiss cabbage

200g tinned plum tomatoes

black pepper

1-2 tsp salt

INSTRUCTIONS

1 Start by soaking the beans overnight. If you don't have time or you want to speed up the procedure you can just buy precooked canned beans.

2 To prepare our conta-bollita you must cook the beans first as they take a fair amount of time. In a large deep pan heat up the olive oil with the rosemary and garlic for about 2 minutes. Drain the beans and pour them in. Cover with 1.5l of boiling water and cook for about 1 hour. Season with salt and pepper.

3 Take out the rosemary stick. Then blend in half of the beans in a mixer and pour it back into the pot. 

4 Now prep your veggies. 

5 Peel the onion and chop it finely. 

6 Remove the strings from the celery sticks and chop them finely. 

7 Peel the carrots and cut them into small cubes of about 1/3 inch. 

8 Peel the potatoes and cut them into cubes of about 1 inch.

9 Chop the chillies finely, taking care to remove the seeds if you don't want the soup to be too spicy. 

10 In a small pot heat up the olive oil and cook the onion, celery, carrots and chilli for about 5 minutes. 

11 Wash the savoy cabbage, kale and Swiss cabbage. Then remove the middle stems from the hardest leaves, and roughly chop them into large pieces of about 2”

12 Now add in the potatoes followed by the tomato sauce and cook for about 10 minutes. 

13 Pour in all the content into the larger pot with the bean soup previously made . 

14 Add the lentils, cabbage, Swiss chard and kale leaves. Bring the soup to the boil and simmer with the lid on for about 30 minutes. 

15 Season with salt and pepper.

16 Taste and serve with bread if you wish. 

I like to eat mine like the original ribollita with a lot of bread soaking all the delicious soup.  

Enjoy!"