Lorraine's Blog: The Mighty Tomato

Nice to see a bit of blue sky today over London today. Such a rarity of late. Yesterday it had been dark until about 9am and it was raining - that really persistent and drizzly rain, the kind that gets you really wet. When I woke up this morning, I started scrolling through my Instagram feed. Holed up under my big duvet, I became incandescent with envy (I know it is usually rage which gets that phrase but for me today, it is envy) as I looked at the many accounts displaying honeymoon like pictures of turquoise sea, unimaginably blue sky and sand with the fineness of self-raising flour.

I did a big online order yesterday for food which will be coming in the next few days and so wanted to use up the remainder of the vegetables in the bottom of the fridge, and some of the tins of beans and pulses in the cupboard along with bags of nuts and seeds in packets (which I seem to have accumulated) and in doing so make some food for breakfast and lunch.

I had bought bags and bags of tomatoes earlier on in the week. My vision was to pop them into the oven in the morning and slow roast them for the whole day, giving me some oven roast tomatoes to play with in salads for the rest of the week. Of course, that never happened and the tomatoes were starting to look like they were about to ‘turn’. So I chopped up the tomatoes in to slices, mixed it up with some puy lentils and one whole avocado, toasted some pumpkin seeds, tossed it all together and sprinkled the whole lot with some cayenne. Mmmmmmmm, a pimped up guacamole if you will.

A note on tomatoes: As I mentioned in my veggie vegan salad post I have recently had an extensive blood test which showed up that I am hugely lacking in anti-oxidants in my body and that I need to get more in me fast.

I thought I had been eating lots of them but not in the right way. For instance, tomatoes I will happily munch through - a whole ‘punnet’ of tomatoes, it's an easy snack. But I did not realise that in doing this I was missing out on lots of nutrients in the tomatoes.

Aidan Goggins and Glen Matten, authors of the inspiring book: The Health delusion, explained to me that one of the important nutrients in tomatoes is lycopene. It is available in smaller amounts when the tomato is raw but the absorption is far superior when the tomatoes are;

1) Mechanically processed

2) Cooked

3) Consumed with fat

What a revelation to me. I learnt that the amount of Vitamin C is diminished somewhat when the tomatoes are cooked/processed, but I had no idea that cooking something would actually increase a large component of its nutritional value.

This leads me to think about raw food, which is a world I am going to learn and explore, but in the mean time it is certainly something to think about the next time I think of having an oil free tomato salad.

I made the following salad for my breakfast. Those of you who follow my recipes on social media may know that I sometimes have breakfasts that stretch beyond eggs and cereal; I do like to keep things different. This salad serves one person. It is a hefty portion; I am sitting at the kitchen table right now, just totally stuffed still, over two hours after eating it. I would make a large bowl of this in the summer for an outdoorsy do and it would be amazing served on some toasted rye bread, which I am also going to try. Do let me know how you get on. Would love to hear your suggestions and views.

Here is the recipe for my quick and easy ramshackle salad...

Tomato, avocado, and pumpkin seed salsa with salad ginger and cayenne.

Ingredients

100g of tomatoes, halved and each half cut in to 6 slices

1 perfectly ripe avocado, de-stoned and mashed

70g of puy lentils (I used tinned)

5cm piece of ginger, minced or very finely chopped

1 pinch of cayenne

1 pinch of chill flakes

1 tbsp. of pumpkin seeds, gently pan-fried in a pan with no oil until they start to pop

The smallest drizzle of extra virgin olive oil (I used 1/3 tsp.)

Maldon salt

1 squeeze of lime juice

Serves 1

Mix the together all of the ingredients gently in a bowl. Season to taste adding more ginger, cayenne, lime juice and salt/oil if you think it needs it and serve.