For us there’s nothing more gastronomic, healthier and economic for breakfast than a home-grown vitamin- and antioxidant-rich salad and an egg boiled, fried or as an omelette.
Recently we gave a talk entitled ‘Living well from your garden’ to a Costa Blanca U3A (University of the Third Age) conference. Most speakers focused on achieving better health by gentle exercise, meditation, massage, skin care, and they were followed by a medical doctor who emphasised that there are now pills to not only overcome vitamin and mineral deficiencies, but also to extend life expectancy. He himself took over 100 pills a day, half that of his US mentor, and it was suggested that if 35-year-olds started a course they could reasonably expect to live to a 100 or longer.
Most participants seemed to prefer the idea of eating vitamin-rich vegetables and fruit from their gardens and thought that they would find it very difficult to swallow over 100 pills a day, even if they were drinking three litres of water a day!
During our talk we mentioned the best vegetables to eat, and for breakfast that we included a salad (as do those Spaniards still following any remnants of a Mediterranean diet) and a freshly-laid egg.
There was an immediate audience reaction - ‘Salad for breakfast, ugh!’ and ‘aren’t eggs dangerous?’ We pointed out that the English newspapers had recently reported that the British Nutrition Foundation now admitted that it had been wrong in suggesting for many years that eggs were dangerous and that its views since 2005 were that ‘Going to work – or gardening - on an egg’ was a great idea, except for the small number of people with familial hypercholesterolaemia .
We explained that our salad was not of the lettuce leaf variety, but that it included nasturtium, parsley, rocket, marjoram, red lettuce and young spinach leaves, chopped young garlic stalks and root, sliced spring onions, sprouted radish and broccoli seeds with extra virgin olive oil as a dressing to give us a good dose of vitamins, minerals and, most importantly, natural antioxidants and antibiotics. Home-grown tomatoes, carrots and shitake mushrooms are added when in season.
Anyone can grow this breakfast in a small-raised bed or even in containers on apartment terraces as well as in the open garden. Our book ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’ demonstrates how easy it is.
Clodagh and Richard Handscombe are practical holistic and self-sufficient Irish and English gardeners living in Spain, who have written several books to share their ideas and experience.
For more information visit their website www.gardeninginspain.com.
© Clodagh and Richard Handscombe March 2009.