In May’s edition of Elevated Food For Life our subscribers get to look forward to our Spring theme: Spring, Simple and Sorted. With longer days and (occasionally) nicer weather around, we know people want to make the most of their time – but more than likely are like us and lead extremely busy lifestyles that can suck time away.
To counter this, Jason has been in the kitchen creating some super-quick recipes, some of which build on from the existing Brilliant Bases in your Elevated arsenal, and some of which you can do quite easily from scratch. All of them take no longer than 30 minutes to make, so you can be done and dusted with healthy, nutritious and tasty food in no time at all.
James, meanwhile, has written two articles on techniques you can use to make better use of your time using time-blocking techniques. These are free to read for non subscribers: One explains how to do some simple time blocking, while the other shows how you can extend that into your menu planning to make full use of all the delicious food Jason has cooked up for you.
This month’s Brilliant Base comes in the form of a super-quick pizza dough created by Jason during Lockdown 1.0 and based on the ingredients he could get his hands on at the time. For a dough that you can start from scratch to getting a tasty pizza in less than 30 minutes it’s pretty impressive – and if you want proof of how it performs, you can check out our Pizza Challenge where we tested it against the local pizza delivery place here. Did Jason or the delivery guy win? Watch the video to find out.
We’ve got three different videos/recipes on this one. One is how to make the basic dough where James demonstrates a hand-kneed method and Jason gets his fancy dough hook out. Then we have the basic pizza recipe and a method to turn the dough into flatbreads. We’ve used these for a breakfast wrap, but feel free to try any number of different uses with it.
Most cuisines in the world have a method of self-steam cooking. In parts of Polynesia and Indonesia, they use palm or banana leaves to wrap food, then bury it in an earthen pit covered with hot coals. In Greece, kleftiko (thieves’ lamb) uses a similar method where the lamb skin acts as the ‘leaf’ and the dish is again buried in a pit with a fire on top of it.
In France, this technique was refined to cook en papillote (in paper) by wrapping your meat or vegetables in parchment paper, then in an envelope of foil, it will self-steam when cooked in the oven to retain moisture, flavour and nutritional value. The jus in the foil can then be used as a liquor in the dish. Jason has come up with two dishes here – a chicken breast for individual portions and a side of trout as a family/dinner party centrepiece.
Both have their own side dishes: the chicken comes with our Elevated take on the Irish dish champ and the salmon with courgette pappardelle – which is so good, we’ve separated it out as a dish of its own accord.
Butternut squash is nutrient packed with super high levels of Vitamin A, essential for cell growth and immune function. Here we roast some before adding it to our Brilliant Base Aromatic Nage to create a fabulously easy soup. And don’t throw the seeds away – we show you how to roast these for use as a snack or in another of our dishes for this month (see below).
We went foraging with the dogs and came back with some wild garlic to make this fabulous, vegan and nut-free pesto for stirring in pasta, using as a topping on salmon or the squash soup, or simply enjoying as a dip. It uses those squash seeds from above to ensure you’re wasting as little food as possible too. Wild garlic has tremendous benefits, including helping you regulate your blood pressure. And when it goes out of season, you can still make this dish, replacing it with young spinach and regular garlic.
We want to Elevate your kitchen skills as well as add to your recipe arsenal and improved nutrition, so each month Jason films a series of new skills tips videos. These are:
How to cook en papillote
How to prep squash
How to chiffonade greens
How to prep spring onions
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Rather than just provide you with 100’s of delicious recipes, you get a whole lot more from Elevated. We are a nutrition focussed recipe subscription. This means all of the recipes we offer are absolutely packed with health-boosting ingredients that will help you live life better.