The orange groves are heavy with fruit this year – which is good news for your health

As I walk Paddy through the orange groves, still heavy with fruit, I am eternally thankful to whatever or whoever brought me to this place, because I love oranges, and they are truly healthy. Everyone knows that oranges are full of vitamin C, and that’s important for health, but to someone like me with an auto-immune system disease like Lupus, vitamin C is crucial. It boosts my immune system, and guards against infection. This is really important for me, because a simple cold can turn into a chest infection with depressing ease.

Strong Spanish antibiotics might clear the infection, but I’m left with inflammation on the lungs, and that can take weeks to settle down. I start each day with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, made from two large locally grown Valencian oranges. This way, I’m doing my best to stay naturally healthy – especially since recent research has shown that getting vitamin C from its food source is much more effective than taking supplements.

Getting to the science bit, the flavenoid herperidin, which is found in the skin and pith of oranges, can help lower blood pressure and cholesterol. Personally, I’m not a fan of orange skin and pith, but I do make a food processor marmalade that uses the whole orange, so I get the full health benefits from my oranges. I’ll post the recipe for you to try, while the oranges are still really cheap and flavourful.

If you want a quick pick up for tired skin, juice some oranges and freeze them in ice cube trays. Then just rub a cube of frozen orange juice over your skin to close the pores and tone your skin. And you can make an excellent conditioner for your hair by mixing the juice of an orange with an equal amount of water and a spoonful of honey. Apply to clean hair and leave for 5 – 10 minutes before rinsing out. This conditioner also stimulates hair growth – that’s another plus for me, because due to the Lupus, I moult almost as quickly as Paddy. Using this conditioner once a month keeps my remaining hair looking shiny and healthy.

When it comes to keeping your body and your skin healthy, you don’t have to spend a fortune. Nature has everything you need – particularly here in Spain, where fruit and vegetables are seasonal and affordable.

Luscious strawberries – Nature’s natural pharmacy

Going around Lemon Tree Road Market on Sunday , my senses were assailed by the aroma of fresh strawberries. That’s great news for me, because aside from the fact that strawberries – along with cherries – are my favourite fruit, they are also one of the best anti-inflammatory foods going. You can also use strawberries for hair and skin care.

When strawberries are fresh and in season – as they will be, if you buy them from markets in Spain – the anti-oxidant and vitamin levels  are at their peak.  What’s more, strawberries in Spain are ridiculously cheap. On Sunday, I paid just €3 a kilo, and the price is dropping every day. Within a week or two, they’ll be down to around €1.50 a kilo or less, so don’t just serve them up for dessert. Here’s how to make the most of strawberries to improve your health naturally.

Anti-inflammatory benefits

Strawberries are rich in vitamin C, which is excellent at fighting inflammation. In fact, just 8 ripe strawberries contain more vitamin C than an orange, which is acknowledged as a rich source of the vitamin. So they’re great for boosting the immune system. But there’s more, and this is the science bit. The phenols in strawberries hinder the action of the inflammation-causing natural enzyme cyclooxygenase- otherwise known as COX.

COX inhibiting drugs are often prescribed for people with Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis to cope with internal inflammation and pain. However, I can’t take any of them, because they either affect my blood pressure or my stomach. And with a history of heart disease in the family – both of my parents died young from blood pressure related conditions – it’s not advisable for me. In addition, I’m allergic to Ibuprofen, so that rules out just about all the anti-inflammatory drugs on the market.

That means I have to follow an anti-inflammatory diet. Strawberries are natural COX inhibitors, and are just as effective as drugs if you eat enough. And I can never eat enough strawberries! The result is that in strawberry season – winter in Spain – I get extra relief from the effects of the cold on my joints while enjoying my favourite fruit. What’s not to love?

Skin and hair care

One of the most annoying things about Lupus is the way it affects the skin and the hair. I could practically stuff a cushion with the hair that comes out on my comb every morning, and it gets a bit dull and lifeless too, particularly in winter. A while back, a Spanish friend who has really glossy hair told me her secret – she mashes a few ripe strawberries in a tablespoon of mayonnaise, then massages it into her hair and leaves for about 20 minutes before shampooing out. I tried it, and it really works. It doesn’t stop my hair coming out, but it does leave the rest of it looking thick, shiny and healthy.

Because of the Lupus, I also get a circulation rash on my legs sometimes, and if I forget to apply my factor 50 sunscreen – even in January – I’m liable to get a butterfly rash across my nose and cheeks. When the rashes go, they leave little scars and dead skin cells behind, so to keep my skin looking good, I make an exfoliating wash from strawberries – about 10 or 12 large ripe ones – plus a little sugar and olive oil.I  use it instead of regular shower gel once or twice a week, and it perks up my skin and leaves it looking glowing and healthy.

When my skin is itching or irritated, I find that if I just cut a ripe strawberry in half and rub it all over my face and neck, and anywhere else that’s irritated, it soothes the irritation better than anything. Leave the juice on the skin for a few minutes, then rinse off. Even if you don’t have problem skin like me, it’s a great pick me up for dull skin.

Other health benefits

Strawberries can protect against heart disease, and also help regulate blood sugar levels, thus reducing the risk of Type 2 Diabetes. They can also help you manage diabetes if you already have it. And because they are low in calories and high in nutrients, strawberries are an excellent choice if you’re watching your weight. Oh, and they taste wonderful too, so if you see somebody buying up all the strawberries on the market say ‘Hello,’ because it will probably be me!

Image credit: Pixabay.com

Alfoso 1 El Conquistador – going down very nicely over Christmas.

As my regular readers and my friends know, my two drinks of choice are cava and vodka. Never been much of a beer drinker, although I like the occasional cider. Anyway, coming in third behind the cava and vodka is brandy. I like my brandy with soda and ice, or with port and lemonade.

About 25 years ago, a Cornish farmer introduced me to the delights of port and brandy. In those days, brandy was my drink of choice, but after the mega hangover that followed a birthday night on port and brandy – and the alcohol-related death of the farmer who introduced me to it – I gave brandy a wide berth for a very long time.The day after my birthday, we visited the Royal Cornwall Show in Wadebridge, but the only thing I saw was the ceiling of the First Aid Tent, as every time I tried to stand up, I got very woozy. Luckily, it was a stinking hot day, so I blamed it on heat exhaustion, and nobody questioned it.

Now I’m older and wiser – well, older anyway – brandy is back in my life. I still enjoy a port and brandy, but these days it’s diluted with lemonade, and made to last a lot longer. It took me a while to become accustomed to the very different taste of Spanish brandy, after being used to the French stuff. That Napoleon must have been a right boozer, mustn’t he? I mean he’s been dead about 200 years, and you can still buy his brandy. But I digress.

Anyway, these days, I’m happy enough to drink Spanish brandy. In fact, I love the Torres 10 Year Old. My favourite brandy of all though, is Asbach, from Ruddesheim in Germany. At €22 a litre, it’s not cheap, but neither is it particularly expensive, compared to some of the French cognacs. I always treat myself to a litre at Christmas, along with a bottle of Torres.

However, when I was doing the last minute bits and pieces in Consum on Christmas Eve, I noticed they had another brandy on offer – Alfonso 1 El Conquistador Solera Gran Reserva, at €10.50 instead of €11.95. I also noticed that it was 40% alcohol by volume – unusual for Spanish brandy, which is usually 36%, or even 30% in some cases. So, into the trolley it went.

Of course, when I got home, I had to try it. I mean, you can’t have your Christmas pudding ruined by bad brandy, now can you? Or at least, that was my excuse. I have to say it’s just about the smoothest Spanish brandy I’ve ever had – including the Torres. Whether that was down to the higher alcohol content or the method of production, I don’t know, but I’ll certainly buy it again.

So, I’m curious now – what do other people think? Spanish brandy, French, German – or something else? Asbach is still my overall favourite, but the Alfonso 1 and Torres are not far behind. Maybe you can recommend a good Spanish brandy for me to try? I’m always happy to engage in research if it means I can promote Spanish products. That’s another excuse I’ll be sticking to!

Pork loin La Murta style – wonderful!

I do most of my shopping in Lidl, because I love the prices and I love the quality of most of their stuff. And some days, you get lucky and get 30% off their already low prices on fresh stuff that’s short dated. Last week, I picked up a 350 gram pork loin for €1.90 instead of €2.70. I was wondering what to do with it, so I looked in my favourite Spanish cook book – Debs Jenkins’ Spanish Village Cooking. If you don’t have it on your bookshelf, you really need to remedy that.

If you’ve been paying attention to my previous posts, you already know that Debs produced the book to raise funds for the La Murta Fiesta Committee, using over 150 simple traditional recipes submitted by the villagers. I’ve already tried Market Garden Chicken – of which more later – so I was confident I would find a great recipe for my pork loin, and I wasn’t disappointed.  This recipe, on Page 121 of the book, is so simple anyone can do it, whether you are a good cook or a Kitchen Virgin.

• 600g pork loin
• 1/2 glass olive oil
• 1/2 glass vinegar
• 1/2 glass sugar

Obviously, I adjusted the quantities to suit my pork loin, so I pretty much halved the ingredients. It doesn’t really matter what size glass you use, as long as you use the same one for all the ingredients to keep the proportions right.

The preparation is so easy, you’ll probably think – like I did – that you missed something important. Just cut the loin into medallions, then season to your taste with the salt and pepper. Heat the oil in a large frying pan and brown the pork. Then remove the meat, add the sugar and vinegar, and heat through until the sauce changes colour. Then return the meat to the sauce and cook for a bit longer, turning occasionally to coat them in the sauce. Simples!

Because cooking is an art and not a science, I made a couple of changes. I used apple cider vinegar, since pork and apples go well together, and I cut down on the sugar a little, and replaced some of the cider vinegar with fino sherry. I was concerned it may turn out a little too sweet for our taste, as Tony and I are pretty much strangers to sugar.

The resulting dish was melt-in-the-mouth pork loin in a sweet and sour sauce that complemented it perfectly. I’ll definitely cook this again, but I’ll cut down a little more on the sugar, and up the sherry, because it was still slightly sweeter than we like, although the empty plates told their own story! I may even try it with honey instead of sugar – I think that would work too.

Debs recommends serving it with chips, but as we had it on Sunday, I served it with new potatoes boiled in their skins, cauliflower and broad beans. And the whole meal took less than 30 minutes from start to finish. What’s not to love?

Fresh tomato paste is so versatile – I always keep a bowl in the fridge

The first time we went to Alquibla in Algorfa – which has since become our favourite ‘abuelo’ restaurant – we were served with bread, ali oli and tomato paste while we waited for the salad. It seemed much more interesting than boring old butter, and of course, it was healthier. At that time, my Spanish wasn’t up to dragging the recipe out of the waiter, but on my next shopping trip, I spotted tomato paste in the cold cabinet at Consum.

It was okay, but nowhere near as good as the restaurant version, and at just over a Euro for a small tub, it was hardly economical. A swift surf on the Internet turned up a recipe, and it’s surprisingly easy to make. Just grate some tomatoes – yes, you heard that right. Simply rub the pointy end of the tomato over the grater teeth, and the skin will peel away gracefully to form a protective shield for your fingertips. Or if it’s one of those huge tomatoes that’s almost the size of Murcia, you might want to cut it in half.

Grating also helps you to get every bit of flesh from the tomato, but be sure to use a grater with an integrated bowl, or things could get very messy. Oh, and make sure the lid is firmly in place too, because tomato paste is good for many things, but cleaning marble floors isn’t one of them.

Once you have enough grated tomato, drizzle in some olive oil, and add freshly ground black pepper to taste. If the mixture seems a little slack – maybe because the tomatoes are very ripe – stir in a little tomato frito to bind it together.You can also add some crushed or grated garlic if you want, but I find it masks the clean, fresh taste of the tomatoes a little. I make up a load, and keep it in the fridge. If it’s covered, it will keep for several days.

Tomato paste makes a great breakfast spread on toast for tostada con tomate, and it’s a good way to use up yesterday’s barra de pan. If you want a meal in a hurry, saute some onions, peppers, mushrooms, garlic and taquitos of serrano ham. Then add some tomato paste, heat through and serve over pasta. Delicious! I also add it to soups and stews as a thickening agent, or use it as a spread instead of butter.

I must tell you about my favourite sandwich. I spread one slice of wholemeal bread with tomato paste, and another with ali oli. Then I add tuna and sweetcorn for a tasty sandwich which is low on fat and calories. With the ali oli and tomato paste, you don’t need to add extra mayonnaise to the tuna, and you’re saving more calories by not using butter. This is a Very Good Thing – after all, the calories for the cava have to come from somewhere, don’t they?

Photo credit: Dreamstime.com

My version of Rick Stein’s beef in white wine, Oviedo style

I had some estofado de vacuno I needed to use up yesterday, and for once, Tony didn’t fancy a beef curry. Well, we are going out for a curry at Spice City with friends on Thursday, so perhaps he didn’t want to overdo the spicy stuff.  So, I hit the Spanish cook books in search of inspiration, and came across this brilliant recipe in Rick Stein’s Spain.

What attracted my attention was that, unusually, the beef was cooked in white wine, as opposed to red wine. I couldn’t imagine how that would work, but I’ve cooked a lot of Rick’s recipes and never had a failure, so I decided to give it a go.

The recipe in the book feeds 6, and there are 10 crushed cloves of garlic in it. Now, I love garlic, but Tony isn’t too keen, and even reducing the quantities, it would still have meant using 3 – 4 garlic cloves, so I decided to cut it down to 2, and use extra bay leaves. I also cut down a bit on the olive oil, but used a little extra white wine, as Tony doesn’t do big quantities of olive oil either. The recipe called for 7 tablespoons for 6 people – I just used 2. Here’s  how I cooked it:

First, I coated my 500 grams of meat in seasoned flour, then browned it in a little olive oil. Then I set the meat aside, added the rest of the olive  oil and slowly cooked 200 grams of onions, the garlic and bay leaves for half an hour, adding a little salt and a little extra white wine to make up for the reduced quantity of olive oil. I reckoned that would stop the onions and garlic drying out, and I was right.

Once the onions and garlic were nicely softened, I returned the beef to the pan with 150 mls of white wine and a little salt and freshly ground black pepper. Then I brought it to the boil, before lowering the heat and simmering slowly for two hours. There’s not a lot of liquid in this, so you need to stir it fairly regularly.

You can use any white wine, but I settled for a Pata Negra Verdejo, which happens to be on offer at Consum for just €2 at the moment, instead of the usual €3.50. It’s a nice crisp white, and I thought it was ideal to achieve the results Rick spoke of. Plus, I tidied up the rest of the bottle while the meal was cooking!

After two hours, I added the carrots, then cooked it for another 30 minutes. Rick suggests serving it with patatas fritas, which is how the Spanish serve it, but I did boiled new potatoes in their skins. I reckon it would also go well with brown rice.

So, what was it like? Certainly different to any other beef casserole I’ve eaten. Usually I cook beef with red wine, and/or tomatoes. Often, I’ll add some smoked paprika to the mix too. That makes for a rich flavour, and the first couple of mouthfuls of this seemed a little strange.

However, once my palate adjusted to this different way with beef, I have to say I really enjoyed it. As Rick says, the white wine gives it a crisp, clean taste, and it’s not particularly herby, since only bay leaves are used for flavouring. I’d certainly cook this again, and  it’s light enough for summer eating when you’ve had enough of the salads and barbecues.

Incidentally, if you don’t yet have a copy of Rick Stein’s Spain, it’s on offer at Amazon for just £5. Click on the link above to buy.

Sangria – great if it’s made right

It’s a cliche, I know, but when most people think of Spain, they think of sun, sea and sangria. Sangria comes in many shapes and sizes, from pleasantly light and refreshing, for a hot afternoon, to ‘Should come with a health warning’ for an evening of serious partying. The mixture also varies from undrinkable (usually the ready-made variety) to ‘gimme more, then some more.’ You’re not likely encounter undrinkable in a Spanish bar; every Spaniard I’ve ever met can rustle up spectacular sangria. It must be something in their DNA.

One of the best sangrias I’ve ever tasted – apart from my own – cost only €5 for a 1 litre jug on a cantina in a Sunday market. The secret is to soak the fruit in the alcohol for at least an hour before completing the mix. Everywhere where I’ve thought the sangria was worth a return visit, there are always jugs of fruit and wine waiting to be mixed and enjoyed. Any bar using tinned fruit instead of fresh should be avoided. That’s the cheat’s way, and you can’t cheat with sangria. The first sip gives it away.

Okay, I’m saying it myself as shouldn’t, but my sangria is legendary. Some people call it rocket fuel, but it’s not really that strong – people just love it so much they overdo it. So, here’s how to make Sandra’s Special Sangria – enjoy!

The first thing people want to know is what fruits to use in sangria. Anything that takes your fancy, is in season, and is ripe enough for the juices to flow is the answer. Avoid bananas, as they begin to break up in the alcohol almost immediately, so they will make your drink cloudy. Here on the Costa Blanca, oranges are cheap, juicy and plentiful, so they’re always in the jug. Plums, pears, persimmons, apples and melons are great at the time of writing (December). In spring, strawberries, apricots and cherries are a good addition. If you want to counter the sweetness a little, add some lemon or lime. And if you’re short on fresh fruit, you can always add dried cranberries and apricots – just leave the fruit soaking for a little longer.

I usually make two 1 litre jugs – one is never enough, and if there is any left over –unlikely, but it may happen – it will store in the fridge for a couple of days in a covered jug. Remember to remove the fruit before storing, though. Chop the fruit into small pieces about ½ inch square. Leave the skin on everything, except melons, mangoes or kiwi fruit. Prepare enough fruit to give 2 – 3 inches depth in the jug.

Now add the alcohol. My favourite blend is brandy, moscatel wine and red wine. How much? That’s up to you. For a refreshing but not overly strong sangria, I use 4 single measures of brandy, a small glass of moscatel and 2 – 3 medium sized glasses of wine to 1 litre. Don’t waste your money on decent red wine. An ordinary ‘vino de mesa’ is fine for Sangria. Same goes for the moscatel. Remember, making good Sangria is an art, not a science. The correct quantities are those that work for you.

Allow the fruit and alcohol to stand at room temperature for an hour or more. To finish your sangria, add plenty of ice, then top up with gaseosa, Sprite or 7-Up, but not the diet variety, as it doesn’t give a fruity enough flavour. Don’t use any kind of fizzy limon, as it is cloudy and will spoil the colour of your sangria. For special occasions, or for a higher alcohol content, use half gaseosa/lemonade and half cava. Stir well and serve, ensuring everyone gets some ice and fruit in their glass.

For children or drivers, you can prepare non-alcoholic Sangria using red grape juice, apple juice and lemonade. Left over fruit from your sangria will store in the fridge for two or three days. It makes a tasty topping for ice cream, cheesecake or yogurt, but be careful, as the fruit will contain alcohol. This sangria is perfect for any occasion – why not try it yourself over Christmas or New Year?

Photo credit: © Akross | Dreamstime.com – Sangria Photo