Salad for breakfast

bshubbard — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:27:00 GMT

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.

Protein Breakfasts for the Health Conscious

Annemarie Colbin — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 09:54:00 GMT

Let’s start by eliminating dry cereal with milk, a really wimpy breakfast that doesn’t carry you for more than a couple of hours. Here are some easy ideas:

For cold weather:

Oatmeal with one fried egg on top, with a light sprinkle of good sea salt.
Oatmeal with a handful of almonds and hazelnuts, a little salt or soy sauce.
Left-over dinner, such as cooked fish, chicken or steak, quickly sautéed in a little butter with left-over vegetables, rye crackers
For the vegetarians or the adventurous: cooked beans or chili, reheated, in a whole wheat wrap with some cucumbers and tomatoes
Obviously, eggs any style, with rye crackers, maybe some nitrite-free sausage or bacon.
Miso soup with brown rice eel-avocado sushi and pickles
Canned salmon and egg omelet with sauerkraut

For warm weather:

Smoked salmon or whitefish on wholegrain toast, with butter or cream cheese, onion slices, pickles (a real New York weekend breakfast)
One poached egg atop one slice of toasted sprouted wholegrain bread, which has been sprinkled with about a tablespoon of really good extra virgin olive oil, plus a little good sea salt and freshly ground pepper on top.
Rye crackers with almond butter
A bowful of soaked and roasted nuts, including almonds, pecans, walnuts, cashews, sunflower seeds. Add some soaked raisins for a sweet touch.
Kippers, with chopped raw tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers
Canned tuna fish with 3 tablespoons chopped celery, same of onions, 1 tablespoon good quality mayonnaise, sea salt to taste, on rye crisps

I trust you’ll find something to eat here!

Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D.

ANNEMARIE COLBIN, Ph.D., CHES, is an award-winning leader in the field of natural health She founded Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts (TM) in New York City in 1977, and is adjunct professor of nutrition at the city’s Empire State College. She is the author of four books, including The Book of Whole Meals (Autumn Press, 1979; Ballantine Books, 1983), The Natural Gourmet (Ballantine Books, 1989, 1991), and Food and Healing (Ballantine Books, 1986, 1996). Her website is: www.foodandhealing.com

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Salad for breakfast

Protein Breakfasts for the Health Conscious