Elizabeth singing How Beautiful are the Feet and Christmas food for health

Last week Elizabeth sang How Beautiful are the Feet from Handel’s Messiah at a charity Christmas concert in Aberdeen.

She did marvellously! She’s been having singing lessons for about 18 months after asking me out of the blue one day whether she could go to lessons. I didn’t even know she could sing but she has a really high range. I was impressed with her performance, especially given she’s only 15, nearly 16.

Today I made my own harissa paste and it’s really good.

It’s for a Christmas recipe I found – hazelnut and harissa nut loaf from Tim Spector’s cookbook The Food for Life Cookbook. I recently bought this as I’ve learnt a lot about the importance of gut health for overall health and wellbeing from Tim Spector who is a world expert on the gut microbiome. I recommend the Zoe podcast if you have no idea how an imbalance in microorganisms in your gut can increase blood pressure, trigger misguided immune responses causing allergies and autoimmune conditions, increase the likelihood of mood disorders like anxiety and depression, and cause skin problems, sleep disruption, inflammatory bowel disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity.

The cookbook is really good and very similar in fact to Dr Gregor’s cookbooks that I also have. This is not surprising – Dr Gregor bases his recipes on large epidemiological studies to find the best combinations for health. Tim Spector does the same but he actually does the research himself and more than that, he understands more than most the mechanism. It’s not enough just to say whole plant foods will lower your blood pressure – how do they do that? If you’re interested you can read more in a previous post I wrote about our internal bespoke pharmacy.

Tim writes in the forward in his cookbook that it wasn’t until 2012 when he got the first results back from his study that the field really took off. It changed him personally too because prior to 2011, he writes, he was eating himself sick. He was not eating enough fibre or getting enough plant diversity and he had too many ready-meals and ultra-processed foods. That is more than 10 years ago but there’s always a delay before the science becomes general knowledge and I think most people are still unaware of the gut connection.

Do people know they need to eat a lot of fibre and many different types of plants? I think not. There’s fairly good understanding that diets like the Mediterranean diet are good for us but I don’t think many people, at least not in the UK, understand what constitutes a Mediterranean diet. People mistakenly think a Mediterranean diet means salmon and red wine but actually there’s no salmon in the Mediterranean Sea. Salmon is a cold water fish found locally where I live in the north of Scotland, far from the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean diet benefits are more to do with plant diversity – beans, peas and lots of legumes like lentils and chickpeas as well as olive oil and nuts. The cookbook has a range of cuisines including Mediterranean. It’s not vegan as some dishes have yoghurt, cheese and eggs but there’s no meat and most recipes are vegan.

The harissa paste I made using a recipe modified from a version from one of Ella’s cookbooks, that I found in a café. It is as follows:

4 tsp cumin seeds
4 tsp coriander seeds
2 tsp paprika
6 cloves of garlic
4 red chillies
juice of 1 lemon
1-2 tbl tomato paste
1 dessert spoon apple cider vinegar
150ml olive oil

Fry all the ingredients together in a bit of olive oil until lightly toasted. Then blend together with a hand mixer or food processor. That’s it. Store in the fridge. You’ll need to buy the cookbook to see the hazelnut and harissa recipe. Mine was a bit soft when I tested it last week so I had to add oatmeal. I’m going to make it for Christmas along with the cauliflower wellington.

Here’s the nut loaf with a chickpea and roasted pepper salad with quinoa and dill. The coconut yoghurt is mixed with a bit of tahini.