Muesli

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We have started making our own muesli. It’s healthier than even the better shop bought brands (it has less sugar), and costs about a third of their price. Here’s the recipe.

  • 1kg bag of quick oats.
  • 1 cup chopped or shaved nuts. You could use a mix here, but I tend to use only shaved almonds.
  • 1/2 cup shredded coconut. A little coconut goes a long way.
  • 2 cups amaranth. Just because it’s yummy.
  • 1 1/2 cup seeds (linseed, sunflower, pumpkin, chia, etc)
  • 1 cup bran
  • 1 cup dried fruit. I use a mix of apricots, dates, cranberries and currants. Chop into small pieces.

Toast the oats, nuts and coconut. To do this, I place the ingredients in a large saucepan on a low heat. Keep the ingredients dry (no oil or anything) and keep them moving, so stir constantly. If the pan gets too hot, things will burn quickly, so keep the heat down. Once you can smell the yummy toasty aroma (about 5 min?), you can take it off the heat, but remember to get it out of the saucepan quickly or the stuff on the bottom will continue to cook and burn because the pan is still hot. I usually tip it straight into a mixing bowl with the other ingredients.

Mix everything together. Just toss all the ingredients in a big bowl and mix them together. I let them sit to cool for a bit before I put it into an air tight container.

Eat. I put a small serve of muesli in a bowl with a small amount of low fat milk, half a banana chopped up, and two spoon fulls of no fat yogurt.

This mix makes about 1.5kg of muesli and tends to last us 2 weeks.

Enjoy.

Some notes: Normal rolled oats are fine but I like the smaller quick oats. They seem to soak up the milk a bit better and taste nicer when eating. The cheapest generic brand oats are just fine. It’s just oats and you don’t have to spend a lot of money on the ingredients. I have tried an oat/barley mix which adds a nice nutty flavour. It’s actually sold as porridge mix, but makes nice muesli.

I was going to try to work out the nutritional value of the muesli, but the math was doing my head in. Perhaps I’ll do it in a later post. But this is still about as healthy as breakfast cereal gets. Plenty of soluble fibre in there. The dried fruit adds to the sugar content a bit, and I’ve since found out that the dried cranberries I was using have sugar added to them as well. You could easily to this without the dried fruit, but if you stick to a small amount of dried apples or apricots, the sugar content wouldn’t be much, so this should be a diabetic friendly breakfast too.

A new beginning

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Some time after the 9th of June this year (2011), I did a very silly thing: I deleted my blog.

It was an accident, I swear. And no, it wasn’t recoverable.

I debated recreating the blog. I might be able to get some of it back, but I’m sure I’ve lost a few things. But that’s not the point.

I think I’d resigned myself to not having a blog. In fact I kind of felt liberated by not having it. I  got out my pen and notebook and started writing the old fashioned way and found I quite enjoyed it.

But on August 11 this year, something else happened: I had a heart attack.

It came as a complete suprise and caused a complete shakeup of my life.

Previously, I was an overweight 41 year old man who paid lip service to health issues, much like most people I meet. Of course I knew I was overweight. I also knew I had high blood pressure and high cholesterol. I thought I could beat it all by fixing my diet and exercising. But it never happened. Going for a walk was always just a bit too much trouble.  And fish and chips just taste so good. And that last piece of cake wasnt going to eat itself.

And then one day, out of the blue, the heart attack came.

I didn’t realise what it was at the time. I’d never  paid attention to what the symptoms were supposed to be, but I think mine was not typical. There was almost no pain. I was walking and started to feel dizzy. I couldn’t breath properly and my vision started to dim. I thought I was going to pass out so I sat down, thinking it would pass, but it didn’t. I’d just finished a work out and managed to walk back inside where some of the guys I’d been training with were able to drive me to the hospital. It wasn’t until several hours later in emergency that they told me I had had a heart attack.

A lot of stuff has happened since then, and I’ve struggled with some of it. But I want to start writing it down here, partly for my own benefit, and partly for the benefit of anyone who reads this.