I love dessert. Whether I’m baking an apple pie for my children or a chocolate cake for a family get-together, the world feels like a better place with a sweet treat in it. But, when I look around for recipes that fit with the way that I like to eat, I often come up short. At one end of the spectrum, there are plenty of traditional recipes loaded with sugar, fat and white flour. They taste delicious, but they’re lacking any goodness and I can’t bring myself to serve them to my family. At the other, there are highly restrictive recipes, maybe sugar or fat free, but the results are so often disappointing. Sometimes dry, often tasteless, they’re a lot of work and I’d prefer to just eat an apple.
The recipes in this book are designed to be the best of both worlds. They’re intended to be both delicious and nourishing. They contain some sugar and fat – generally the least refined forms – as well as eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds. They have plenty of goodness, but they’re still a treat and you’re definitely supposed to enjoy them.
Above all, these recipes are intended to help you connect with your kitchen. One of my greatest concerns is how modern food processing is affecting our collective health. We’ve become so detached from our food and it’s reflected in our growing waistlines and soaring rates of diet-related disorders.
This is where your kitchen is your best friend. Whether it’s making your own spreads, seed butters, berry jams, vegetable juices, nut milks or fruit purées, by not resorting to something manufactured, you are inevitably making better food choices. No matter what you choose to cook – whether it’s zucchini bread or a crème caramel – it will be infinitely more nourishing if you make it yourself instead of taking it from a packet.
Before you get baking, I’d love you to take a moment to read this Introduction chapter. So many of us have come off the rails when it comes to food. We’re no longer sure what we’re meant to eat. My great hope for this book is that it overcomes some of that confusion and helps to keep you connected with real, nourishing food.
There is a lot of interest in food and nutrition these days. A lot of debate. A lot of opinion. Yet despite this, as a global population, we’re getting fatter and sicker. The World Health Organization tells us that worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980 and that now there are more deaths across the globe related to being overweight than underweight.1
Clearly, we’re doing something wrong. Our nutrition knowledge is greater than ever before, yet diet-related health problems are more widespread than ever before. While fingers are sometimes pointed at individual elements in our diets – fructose, saturated fats – the most enduring explanation is a systemic one, that we’re simply losing touch with our food.
Over the past few decades, we’ve seen a shift away from home cooking and a greater reliance globally on processed foods. Soft drinks and highly refined snacks are cheap and widely available. For many people, what they put in their mouth is more likely to have come from a factory than their kitchen. Recognising the destructive impact of processed foods on our health, renowned food author Michael Pollan has suggested, ‘Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.’2 His view is that, given the time and effort involved in making fries or baking a cake, you probably won’t do it all that regularly. Plus, by baking from scratch with whole ingredients, your cooking will be so much healthier than anything you’ll buy commercially.
While I do think even home-cooked treats need to be eaten with some restraint, to me this philosophy makes perfect sense. The damage we’ve done to our bodies and health hasn’t come from eating a homemade muffin now and then, it’s come from having a can of soft drink and a takeaway burger, daily.
For me, healthy eating is something I shouldn’t have to overthink. Ideally, it shouldn’t involve me obsessing over calories or precise grams of sugar or fat on an everyday basis. It should just allow me to enjoy my food and get on with my life. That’s not to say I eat whatever I want. Far from it. But what guides me is home cooking, listening to my appetite, using wholefood ingredients, keeping portion sizes sensible, prioritising plant foods and keeping highly processed foods out of my kitchen.
I eat avocado with total abandon and drown it in extra virgin olive oil, but you won’t find a packet of chips in my house. I have honey in my tea and butter on my toast, but I don’t buy sports drinks or chocolate bars. I have one or two eggs most mornings, but there are no processed breakfast cereals in my pantry. I eat nuts by the bowlful, but it wouldn’t even occur to me to buy a packet of sweet biscuits.
A group of French researchers recently proposed that national dietary guidelines might serve us better if they grouped foods, not into categories like dairy, meat and vegetables, but instead into degrees of processing.3 Under such a system we might see wholefoods, taken directly from the ground, at the bottom of a food pyramid, to be enjoyed plentifully, and highly refined foods at the top, to be eaten infrequently. Without overanalysing it, I try to structure my own day in this way, filling my plate with plants and limiting highly processed foods.
Ultimately, getting back into the kitchen is one of the most empowering things you can do. It puts the control of your health back into your hands. When you stop and consider that every single one of your cells is made up of the food you’ve eaten over the years, it just seems crazy that corporate manufacturers should be the main producers of that food.
'WHAT GUIDES ME IS HOME COOKING, LISTENING TO MY APPETITE, USING WHOLEFOOD INGREDIENTS, PRIORITISING PLANT FOODS AND KEEPING HIGHLY PROCESSED FOODS OUT OF MY KITCHEN'