Recipe - Spaghetti Caulinese

I’ve just got back from a week in Southern Italy and I love a portmanteau so here’s a quick and easy recipe for an alternative spaghetti bolognese… Cauliflower Bolognese, aka Caulinese, replacing mince with finely chopped cauli. This was an experiment, but the result was surprisingly great so I thought I’d share the recipe. Even meat-loving Nick thought it was pretty tasty!

Ingredients

• One head of cauliflower (chop the florets finely in a food processor, leaving out the leaves, or if you are feeling lazy but it pre-chopped from Tesco)
• One large white onion, chopped finely
• A couple of cloves of garlic, chopped finely
• A handful of chestnut mushrooms, chopped roughly
• A tin of tomatoes
• Herbs and seasoning to taste (I used basil, oregano, salt and pepper)
• Pasta of your choice (I like Dove’s Farm gluten free organic brown rice pasta)

The sauce should take about 10 -15 minutes to make so depending on the type of pasta you use, it should be easy to coordinate it to all be ready at the same time!

Method

1. First get a saucepan onto boil for the pasta.
2. Sauté the chopped onion and garlic in oil (I used extra virgin olive oil at a fairly low heat).
3. After a few minutes, add the chopped mushrooms, stirring now and again. Add salt and pepper as the mushrooms are cooking.
4. Put the pasta onto boil.
5. When the mushrooms are almost cooked, spoon in all the cauliflower mince. You may need to turn the heat up a little now; cook the cauli for about three minutes, stirring continuously so it doesn’t burn. Don't cook for too long or the cauli will loose its bite.
6. Next add the tin of tomatoes into the pan with the herbs and stir.
7. Leave the sauce simmering for about four to five minutes and then it’s ready to serve!

 PS we are still kitchen-less in our new house so this is simple enough to cook in the camping-style kitchen that we've set up in a spare bedroom!

Budget airlines and numb fingers

A couple of days ago, a series of events left me feeling stressed and anxious. By the time I arrived at the airport after a tricky afternoon and a delayed, turbulent flight, I had already noticed that the pad of my third finger on my left hand was numb. As I was waiting for my luggage, my right arm was experiencing deadness in sporadic pangs from my shoulder down to my wrist. As I drove along, appreciating the golden-lit wheat fields, the sole of my right foot suddenly twisted in extreme cramp. I panicked. I was driving on a pretty busy road and there was nowhere to pull over. I could feel the adrenaline pumping round my body as thoughts raced through my head. I told myself to carry on- to ignore the unusual sensation and recognise that my foot was still working on the accelerator, so if I could disregard the physical feeling and dampen the whirring adrenaline, my ability to drive wasn’t actually impeded.

I don’t know if this was a flare of multiple sclerosis or something else. But I have noticed a definite link with these physical twinges and feelings of stress and anxiety. Mindfulness helps with anxiety- as the plane rattled with turbulence, I found myself breathing deep into my stomach; and as my arm panged with numbness I breathed into the pain. Breathing exercises can help to reduce pain, and still anxiety so that calmness returns more quickly.

I love mindfulness, but I’ve let myself start thinking of it as something to ease the symptoms, not the cause, of stress and anxiety. When I talk to other people about their use of meditation, yoga and exercise as their preferred method of managing stress, I don’t think I’m alone in this. To truly be happy and balanced, I think you need to address the cause of anxiety. This means going one step further with mindfulness. When I lie in bed trying to sleep, mindful techniques allow me to notice that my jaw is locked tightly together. The awareness helps to relax the muscle, so I don’t wake up with a headache and ground-down teeth. But I am starting to think that the critical step is to recognise why it’s happening in the first place. What subconscious thought is going through my mind which makes me clench my jaw? Once I can identify the cause of the anxiety, hopefully I can do something about it! In that sense, I suppose I should be grateful for the physical symptoms I’m getting – because they are like a very visible warning bell to me – “you’re feeling stressed and it’s creating an unhelpful mix of emotions in your body which is disrupting your physical health”. Without the physical symptoms, perhaps I might be less likely to pay attention to the underlying cause. Either way, whether you experience the physical “warning bell” symptoms or not, feelings of stress and anxiety affect all of us. And I think it’s worth investing time diagnosing the cause and not just the symptoms, in order to reduce anxiety in the longer term. What do you think?

Here's a pic of a 'happy place' we found in the French mountains recently- certainly nothing to cause stress on that afternoon!

Healthy habits

March 2015 marks a year since my vision suddenly turned double in one eye, and this whole saga began. It also marks seven months of my new lifestyle, which has now become my new normal. Whenever I tell people for the first time about my diet (often some poor person responsible for an event’s dietary requirements) the response I hear most often is “what can you eat?!” However, I can honestly say it’s become totally normal to me now, and doesn’t feel like an effort at all. If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be living my life free from gluten, dairy, caffeine and booze – and not even finding it a chore- I would have laughed into my large glass of Sauvignon and plate of cheesy nachos!

So I’ve been reflecting on how I made such a big change. Human beings are capable of change, it’s one of the brilliant things about human nature. However, whilst making a temporary change is relatively easy, sustainable change is much harder. I know this because much of my working life has been about helping people (children when I was teaching, then adults in my work as a consultant) learn and develop by forming new habits. If you want to make a sustained change in your life, you need to pick up new habits that reinforce the change you want to make, and let go of negative habits that are obstacles to the change you want to make. We can help ourselves to do this by making it easier for ourselves to keep going with the new habits, and removing the temptation for old habits. For example, if you’re trying to form a new habit of going to the gym every morning, apparently the easiest way to do this is to sleep in your gym clothes for the first month! This makes it harder for you to turn off the alarm and skip the gym (can’t say I’ve tried this one myselfJ)

Here’s three of my new habits that have made a huge difference to my life:

Breakfast

• Old routine – I used to grab breakfast on the run to the office, and typically it consisted of a large latte and a croissant, or porridge and honey if I was trying to be healthy!
• New routine – Now I always make time to eat breakfast at home, even if I’m up at 5am for an early start in London. I have warm water with lemon (which kick starts the digestive system), followed by Barleylife supplement drink (good for creating an alkaline environment in which disease cannot thrive), followed by either a smoothie or gluten-free toast, marmite and banana. Plus a big glass of water with my various supplements. Doing this means I start the day in a structured manner and on a full stomach, setting me up for a positive day. I also feel pleased with myself that I’ve started the day on a healthy note, and saved the £5 I would otherwise have spent in Pret!

Commuting

• Old routine – I used to live in London on the Victoria line and only had a few stops to my office but it was hellish because the tubes were so crowded. I would attempt to read the Metro whilst crammed up against strangers, and would typically arrive at work feeling grumpier and less energised than when I left home.
• New routine – Now I live in the Essex countryside I have a far longer commute but I spend at least some of it meditating. I time my trains and position on the platform so I get a seat, shut my eyes and do a breathing exercise or body scan exercise. It’s a great use of commuting time, takes my attention away from the crowding and constant announcements of delays (which are well beyond my control so not worth me worrying about) and it means I arrive at work feeling refreshed and energised.

Saturday nights

• Old routine – I used to make the most of London nightlife, and drink / dance the night away. Whereas the rest of the country might spend weekends like this in their 20s, there is something about London which means it’s totally normal for people to being living this way well into their 30s. I loved the social side of it, but hated the hangovers!

• New routine – Now I spend my Saturday nights mostly at home, at the moment occupied by DIY / renovation activities! If I do go on a night out, I’ll be drinking water out of a wine glass (there is something psychologically nicer about that then a pint glass!) and nothing could ever stop me dancing! Giving up booze has been one of the toughest changes for me; not for the alcohol itself but more for the social connotations and handling the way I feel in response to the assumptions people tend to make about someone who doesn’t drink (maybe I’ll write more on that another time). On the positive side, not drinking takes away the temptation to ‘treat’ problems or bad days with booze – it’s taught me to address the problem instead. I definitely feel significantly healthier for a life without drink, and I’m grateful for a good 15 years spent partying hard! Seven months without a hangover is a wonderful feeling J

The next habit I need to try and form is exercise – I feel so much better when I’ve been for a run, but it’s one habit I’ve found hard to make stick! xxx