Haricots savoyard

My grandmother had seven recipes in her repertoire, repeated ad nauseum. I'm kinda the opposite ...

I'm very aware that this blog has rather fallen by the wayside in the last year, so it's time for some rejuvenation. Seeing as I love cooking, and have added quite a few cookbooks to my collection over the past year, I thought it would be interesting (I hope!) to showcase the new recipes I try, and show how they turned out.

I'm not going to commit myself to anything like making every recipe from a book in a year, or posting every few days, or anything mad like that. But I will try to post more often, and from a wide variety of cookbooks.

For Christmas I received the adorable Rachel Khoo's My Little French Kitchen and The Little Paris Kitchen books. So, lots more French meals in our future! Yum.
I really loved Rachel's TV series for The Little Paris Kitchen ... and her minuscule kitchen, with the bare minimum of equipment appeals to my inner minimalist, too.

 
Tonight I made Haricots savoyard avec lentilles aux herbes ... In other words: Green bean bundles with herb lentil salad. This recipe is from My Little French Kitchen, and is from the Lyon region. 

First of all you blanch nice long fresh green beans, for about 4 minutes in boiling salted water. Slice the cheese into bean-long sticks. Then wrap bundles of beans with a few sticks of Beaufort or Gruyere cheese (my local grocer had neither, so I used St Claire cheese, which I think was a fair replacement).

Then wrap the bundle with a nice slice of smoked or Parma ham. I got very thinly sliced ham, at the deli, and it really was a bit too thin. So regular thickness would be better.

Pop these cute little bundles into a shallow casserole dish, and into a 180º oven for about 30 min, until the ham is nice and crispy. 

While these are baking, you cook the French Puy lentils in boiling water, and pop in a bay leaf. They take about 20 min to cook. 

Gently sauté an onion in butter with some fresh thyme. Then add the lentils and some grainy mustard. 

I've not had Puy lentils before; I'm not a huge fan of lentils, but these were very tasty, I must say. I gather they're called poor man's caviar. They don't break down into mush like red lentils do in Indian dhal, for example. 

The beans with melty cheese and crisp ham were wonderful, and the lentil salad complimented them well.  Definitely making this one again.

If you search on the French title of the recipe, you will find it on Google Books.

The baking dish I used is a French ceramic dish I've had for as long as I can remember, possibly even a wedding present ... 

Aren't they cute in cross-section?!

Ingredients List

• 400g green beans
• 100g Beaufort cheese (or Gruyere, Emmenthal, Fontina, Tomme, or Rebleochon)
• 8 slices smoked or Parma ham
• 200g Puy lentils
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1 heaped tablespoon butter
• leaves from 2 sprigs of fresh thyme
• 1 heaped tablespoon grainy mustard

How much sugar is REALLY in that?

Today I read this article on the Huffington Post, We live in a world where salads have more sugar than donuts.  Having lived in the States myself, I can certainly attest that American food is in general very sweet, compared to Australian. The bread tastes like cake. The desiccated coconut has added sugar. And so on.

However, the list presented in this article isn't all that helpful, as the serving sizes haven't been standardised. While there is some value in seeing how much sugar is in 'one serve', it's quite common for a smallish bottle of juice, for instance, which you'd drink in one sitting, to be classified as containing two serves. And 'one serve' of Fruit Loops is only 30g. Do you know how teensy an amount of cereal that is?

So you really have to standardise the amounts to be able to see relative amounts of sugar.

So, I decided, just as an interesting exercise, to hunt down the nutritional information for these foods myself, and figure out the amounts of sugar in standard quantities of each food. I've gone for 100 ml or 100 g of each food. Plus — hey! Maths!  :D

The article puts foods in the following order, per arbitrary serve, from least sugar to the most:

1. KrispyKreme Original Glazed Donut (10g)
2. Fruit Loops (12g)
3. Subway Sweet Onion Chicken Terikayi (16g)
4. Starbucks Grand Caffe Latte (17g)
5. Godiva Indiv. Wrapped Chocolate Truffles (17g)
6. Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Original Ice Cream (20g)
7. Yoplait Original Yoghurt (27g)
8. Vitamin Water (33g)†
9. Coca-Cola (39g)
10. Sprinkles Red Velvet Cupcake (45g)
11. California Pizza Kitchen Thai Chicken Salad (48g)
12. Odwalla Super Food drink (50g)
13. Starbucks Grande Vanilla Frappuccino (67g)

And here's my list, also ranked from least to most sugar. These are quantities of sugar per 100 ml or 100 g of the food, depending on whether it's a drinky thing or a nomming thing.

1. Au Bon Pain Thai Peanut Chicken Salad* (1.6g)
2. Vitamin water Kiwi Strawberry (3.0g)† (which is owned by Coca-Cola)
3. Starbucks Grand Caffe Latte, whole milk (3.4g)
4. Subway Sweet Onion Chicken Terikayi (5.9g)
5. Odwalla Super Food Original drink (8.2g) (also Coca-Cola)
6. Coca-Cola (9.6g)
7. Starbucks Grande Vanilla Frappuccino (9.7g)
8. Yoplait Original Yoghurt Vanilla (14.2g)
9. California Pizza Kitchen Thai Crunch Salad (15.4g)?**
10. Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Original Ice Cream (20.0g)
11. KrispyKreme Original Glazed Donut (21.2g)
12. Sprinkles Red Velvet Cupcake Mix*** (33.0g)
13. Fruit Loops (38.0g)
14. Godiva Indiv. Wrapped Chocolate Truffles (41.5g) ****

Important notes

---

† Ooops, the original article had a big mistake here ... there are 33 calories in a bottle of Vitamin Water, not 33 grams of sugar!

* Not the original salad mentioned in the HuffPo article, but a Thai chicken salad from a restaurant chain that actually gave a weight for the serving size. So possibly not a good comparison. but proof that a Thai chicken salad doesn't necessarily have a high sugar content!

** I couldn't find the exact same Thai Chicken Salad on the California Pizza Kitchen menu, but this was probably the closest match. The menu only lists 'Half' or 'Full' for size, not a weight, so I have no way of knowing how heavy the salad is. I've use the size of the Au Bon Pain salad as the size of the CPK one, but this is probably wrong. So really, without a weight of the actual CPK salad, we have to completely eliminate the salad from this table.

*** I also couldn't find a weight of a Sprinkles cupcake, but have used the serving size weight for a cupcake from the nutrition info on their Red Velvet Cupcake Mix.

**** The Signature Truffles box, shown in the original article, didn't have nutritional information on their website, so I've used the Individually Wrapped Chocolate Truffles instead.

I'm not even going to start on a discussion about different types of sugars, too ...

So, the take home message? Don't start replacing your salads with doughnuts (or donuts even), cupcakes, chocolate truffles, or Fruit Loops as 'lower sugar' alternatives. They're not.

Ice Pack Socks

I have a lot of trouble with painful feet. I mean really painful feet. Can't walk far, keep me awake at night painful feet. Probably from a congenital plantar fascia defect. The pain is constant, and deep, through the bones, and maddening!

A TENS machine does help interrupt the pain, but the simplest treatment I've found so far is ice packs. It dulls the pain nicely, and helps me get to sleep. But ice packs are ungainly things, and it's hard to keep them wrapped up (to protect your skin), and also sitting in the right place on your foot!

So I've invented these ice pack socks. Basically, I've added a pocket to the sole of a sock, and a mini ice pack (like the sort used for kiddie lunch boxes) can fit inside it. This holds the ice pack in position, and protects your skin from direct contact with the ice pack.

If you have pain on the top of your feet, just make the flap big enough to fit over the top of your foot, and sew it into the top position.

NB: these are not for walking in! You're likely to pop the ice pack, and get gel everywhere, eeeeeeew.

Here's how to make them:

Ice Pack Socks (knitted)

Choose a favourite simple knitted sock pattern. I made mine with 8 ply yarn, and the Sock of Doom pattern (Ravelry link), but you can choose whatever you like. 4 ply is fine. Remember, it's just for wearing in bed, so just needs to be comfortable, not fancy. A firm fitting sock is best.

Knit the sock (yeah, just like that!) I made mine ankle length, but you can do whatever you like best length-wise.

Once the sock is done, put it on, and see where the edges of the sole are. You're going to pick up stitches along the right side of the foot. For my sock, I picked up 34 sts ... it will depend on what weight yarn you've used. For a 4 ply sock, you will be picking up a lot more stitches than that.

Now, you're going to make a flap, which will become the pocket on the sole. You can just knit a rectangle, or you can do a few increases at the toe end of each row to make a shape that fits along to toe a bit more. It doesn't matter too much, as mini ice packs are generally rectangular.

Once you've got to the right width to fit across the sole, bind off, leaving a nice long tail. Bind off so that the tail will be at the 'heel end' of the flap.

Sew the flap onto the sole of the sock, so the left side, and the end (at the toe). If you have pain in both feet, make a second sock.

Ravelry link.

Here are my exact instructions for my pocket (8 ply sock, on 3.75 mm needles), with toe shaping, in case you want to do it exactly the same:

• Pick up 34 sts along right side of sole.
• Knit 1 row
• All wrong-side rows: K1, P to end of row
• Increase Row: Kfb (increase by 1), K to end
• Repeat Increase Row (on RS rows) until have 38 sts in total
• Knit 10 rows in stocking stitch
• Decrease Row: K2tog, K to end
• Repeat Decrease Row (on RS rows) until have 34 sts
• Bind off on RS row.
• Leave long tail.
• Sew flap to sole of foot, along left edge and toe.

Hand-Sewn Version

You'll need a pair of bought socks, and a scrap of knit fabric, from an old t-shirt, for example. You'll also need a needle and thread, some cardboard, scissors and a pen.

Trace around your foot on the cardboard, and cut it out. Place this template inside the sock, against the sole of the sock.

Cut a piece of the scrap fabric that will cover the ice pack when stretched. Cut to fit the shape of the bottom of the sock. The open edge of the pocket should be straight, no need to curve it to fit the heel shape.

Now pin your pocket flap piece around the left, toe, and right edges of the sole. Sew in place. Leave the cardboard inside the sock, as a surface to rest the fabric against (and to stop you from sewing the top of the sock to the bottom). Ta dah! Now do the other one  :)