Herbal Cooking

This hearty homemade soup will warm and nourish you on cold winter days.  During the winter months,  we crave hot food to keep us warm.  This soup provides a nutritous alternative to stodgy winter food and also lines your stomach giving you an inner warmth, as soup nourishes your emotions as well as your body.

Ingredients:
15g Low Fat Butter
1 Large Onion
2 Leeks, chopped
3 Medium Potatoes, peeled
1L vegetable stock
1 Bay Leaf
Sea Salt and Black Pepper

Making Your Soup
1. Saute the onions in the butter over a low heat for 5 minutes
2. Cube the potatoes and add with the chopped leeks.  Only use the lightest green parts of the leeks.
3. Add the stock and bay leaf and bring to the boil.  Simmer until the vegetables are tender
4. Remove the bay leaf, liquidise half the soup, then return it to the pan.  Reheat and ladle into bowls.

For a fortifying main meal, add 250g of butter beans to the soup and server with crusty wholemeal/grain bread.

Avoid catching a cold as the season changes from Summer to Autumn with this health-giving onion soup. For those who find onions too pungent, this delicious soup will still appeal for its sweet and mild flavour. Onions are a super food - they have fantastic antiseptic properties, which are great for clearing post-holiday gastrointestinal infections. Onions also boost your immunity to colds.

Ingredients:
5ml Extra Virgin Olive Oil
500g sliced Spanish Onions
5ml Soy Sauce & 1L stock
Parmesan cheese and bread

Method:
1. Heat the olive oil and add the onions. Stir for 10 minutes until the onions are transparent and soft. Turn up the heat for 5-10 minutes to caramelise them.
2. Add the stock and soy sauce and heat for a further 15 minutes then serve.

Eat your onion soup with a slice of crusty bread to provide energy-giving carbohydrates.
You can plant onions in your garden to harvest in the autumn.

Start introducing warming and nutritious foods into your diet during the cooler days of Autumn. As the wether cools, it is tempting to replace a light fruit breakfast with stodgy fry-ups, but a healthier and more satisfying alternative is a simple home-made porridge. It is warming and the Oats are a good source of complex carbohydrates, which enhance physical stamina and mental calrity. You could use the end of season fruits, such as apples and pears, to create your porridge.. Warm milk, peaches and raisins are also perfect for use in an autumn porridge.

You Will Need:
75g Porridge Oats
500ml Low Fat Milk or water
Selection of dried berries or fresh seasonal fruit.

Method:
1. Place the porridge oats into a saucepan and add the milk or water
2. Bring to the boil and simmer for 4 minutes
3. Serve with fruit compote, dried berries or chopped fresh fruit.

A home-made fruit and oat porridge is the ideal food to warm you up.

Autumn is the ideal time to reap the rewards of Summer by enjoying the rich harvest of fruits and berries. Visit a local farm on the Gower and spend a leisurely afternoon picking baskets of beautiful berries as summer ends. Berry fruits such as Blackberries, Blackcurrants and Loganberries are an excellent source of anthocyanin flavonoids, which have powerful antioxidant properties. They help strengthen the walls of the blood vessels and their high vitamin content helps to prevent heart disease.

You Will Need:
500g mixed berries
2 ripe, chopped peaches
150ml Cranberry Juice
8 Slices bread
4 tsp Sugar

Method:

1.Wash and crush the berries in a large bowl. Add the peaches.
2. Pour over the Cranberry juice and add sugar. Leave for 2 hours.
3. Remove the bread crusts and cut bread slices into triangles. Use these to line the pudding basin.
4. Pour in the fruit mix and top with a round of bread. Cover and chill in the fridge overnight.
5. Turn the pudding out onto a plate to serve.

The bread lining of your pudding will soak up the fruit juice.

Make your own, cold busting decoction, warming on winter days.  Ginger, Cinnamon and Cloves are used to make this fragrant decoction.  Its pungent spicy taste will warm you to the core.  The natural antiseptic ginger, cloves and cinnamon provide a pleasant-tasting remedy that is excellent for fighting respitory infections.   Restore your vitality during winter by making this spicy drink part of your daily routine, or replace your evening cocoa with this healthy, spicy decoction.

You will need:
5cm Fresh Ginger Root
2 Whole Cinnamon Quills
4 Cloves
10ml Honey

Method:
1. Peel the ginger root and finely grate 4cm of it into a saucepan
2. Add the cinnamon quills, broken into smaller pieces.
3. Add the whole cloves and 300ml of water.  Simmer for 15-20 minutes on a low heat.
4. Strain through a sieve, reserving all the liquid.
5. Add the honey to taste.

Ginger and Cinnamon stimulate the circulation and the digestion while Cloves have expectorant properties, making this decoction an ideal winter tonic.