Friday Fare – Honey Lavender Oatmeal with Blueberries

March 2, 2014

Ahh, what could be more sweet than honey and lavender? I’ll tell you what … honey and lavender combined with hearty oatmeal and fresh blueberries!

After making the Green Post’s delicious Apple Butternut and Lavender pancakes a few weeks ago, I have been thinking of ways to use the lavender that I bought. It has such a beautiful smell and taste, and I knew there had to be a way to incorporate it in a novel way into a recipe. Et voila: my honey lavender oatmeal with blueberries was born!

I don’t have oatmeal as often as I did when I was in England (I was SO cold in England, I needed all the warmth I could get) but I love it because it is a filling, delicious and healthy breakfast meal. Oatmeal is a funny one though because you have to be careful about what type of oats you buy. I recommend you buy traditional rolled oats, or steel cut oats. I would advise you to stay away from instant oatmeal, because apart from the fact that most are flavored (and thus have loads of sugar), instant oatmeal has been highly processed to make it quicker to cook so it is also broken down more quickly by your body resulting in a higher glycaemic index. It isn’t the end of the world if you buy PLAIN instant oatmeal, but if you can, try and buy traditional rolled oats or steel cut oats as they have a lower glycaemic index 🙂

Alright, let’s get down to business!

Honey Lavender Oatmeal

Alice Williams

Melt in your mouth oatmeal with sweet honey and notes of lavender

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Ingredients

1/4-1/2 cup oatmeal
1 cup whole milk
1 cup blueberries
1 tbsp raw honey
1 tsp dried lavender
1 tsp vanilla extract

Instructions

1. Pour the milk and lavender into a pot. Heat the milk and the lavender on a low heat for 5 minutes to allow the lavender to infuse into the milk. Do NOT boil the milk. After 5 minutes is up, pour the milk back into the pot using a sieve to catch the lavender buds.
2. Now add your oatmeal; as you can see I am using steel cut oats so the time I have to cook these for is longer than traditional rolled oats. Heat the lavender infused milk and oatmeal on a medium-high heat for 15-20 minutes.
3. Once the oatmeal is cooked, transfer it to a bowl and then drizzle 1 tablespoon of honey onto it. I use Eco pollen's raw honey as it is one of the best honey's I have ever tasted.
4. Wait about 5 minutes, or until your oatmeal has cooled slightly, and then add your blueberries.

Notes

Feel free to sub the milk for your preferred milk such as almond milk, coconut milk, soy milk and etc.

A super-easy and delicious way to enjoy breakfast 🙂

There are so many ways you can get creative with this. Make overnight oats, and add chia seeds, and coconut flakes!

NOTE

I am discontinuing the posting of the nutritional information because the numbers can vary so much depending on what brands you use.

Let me know what you think of this recipe, and whether you like the lavender infusion by leaving me a comment below!

Honestly yours,
Alice

Health

Green Tea – Part 1

February 18, 2014

Green Tea – Part 1

Green tea – it’s become a major player in the health and fitness world, and for good reason. There are many benefits to drinking green tea, although unfortunately, most of green tea’s benefits have been highly skewed by the fitness industry in their quest to market green tea as the ‘miracle fat loss drug.’ Green tea extract fat burners, dieter’s green tea, the list goes on.

Source: www.myessentia.com

Now that’s not to say that green tea can’t help you with losing weight, and adding to your health and quality of life; quite the opposite in fact. Green tea DOES have many health benefits, and I wanted to give you guys the cold hard facts about green tea. Without further ado, here is my green tea – part 1 post.

So to start my research off, I decided to look at a few academic studies that have been done on green tea and its weight loss, and other health benefit links. Let me just say that reading scientific articles are n o t fun. Sure, they have really interesting content but sheesh, the language … the language! Everything is epicatechin this, supernatant that … which is exactly why most people just accept the health benefits of green tea with little to no research into it. And I definitely don’t blame you guys!!! However, someone has to do it AND give you all an honest and real summary of green tea’s health benefits soooo here goes nothing 🙂

There have been scholarly articles written about green tea since the 1970s (as far as i could tell), and a whole bunch in the last decade. What is so special about green tea, and various other tea’s is this ingredient: C A T E C H I N S

EGCG’s belong to a group of compounds called catechins, Catechins are a type of flavanol, which is essentially a naturally occurring antioxidant (which can, but not neccessarily, help prevent cancer). Catechins include several different compounds, and in green tea these are:

E P I G A L L O C A T E C H I N
E P I C A T E C H I N G A L L A T E,
E P I G A L L O C A T E C H I N G A L L A T E (EGCG)

Phew, what a mouthful!!!

Okay guys, you still with me? Okay, awesome!! Let’s continue.

The EGCG is the thing we wanna focus on, because out of the three compounds given above, EGCG is the big daddy, and the compound that is you find the biggest amount of in green tea.

Sorry for the chemistry lesson guys! After reading several different articles (not all of which are posted below), here is a round up of the health benefits of green tea:

Can help in fat and weight loss due to its ability to increase energy levels, and fat oxidation (obviously if you are eating a terrible diet and not exercising, it won’t help much)
Can help regulate blood glucose levels (important because crazy all over the place blood sugar levels can make you crazy hungry .. I’ll talk more about blood sugar levels in another post)
Studies have shown promising results in using green tea in the fight against various types of cancers (does NOT mean that drinking green tea will 100% prevent cancer)
Can help keep your breath clean (lol)
Can be helpful in making you feel less bloated (this is just from personal experience, and this probably just happens because you are running to the bathroom so much!)

Alright guys, I am going to end part I there. I think that’s enough information for one day. Stay tuned for part II where I will talk about how much green tea you should drink, and my own personal experiences with green tea. It will be a much lighter blog post and not as intense as this one I promise 🙂

I hope you all enjoyed this post, and please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for a new post!

Honestly Yours,
Alice

Key sources:
Green Tea and Theamine: Health Benefits – Raymond Cooper
Going Green: The Role of the green tea component EGCG in Chemoprevention – Laura Schramm
Emerging Evidence for Tea Benefits – Carrie Ruxton
Nutrition and Health Info Sheet – Karrie Heneman and Sheri Zidenberg-Cherr
Nutrient Data Laboratory US Department of Agriculture. USDA Database for the Flavonoid Content of
Selected Foods. US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, 2007 (chart)

Friday Fare

Friday Fare – Almond and Oat Cinammon Spiced Muffins

February 14, 2014

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!! Whether you have a special someone to spend it with, or are single and proud, I hope you are having a fabulous day.

Since I made a very decadent raspberries dipped in dark chocolate and cacao for last weeks Friday Fare, I thought I would make something a little lighter, but delicious nonetheless. I bring you Almond and Oat Cinammon Spiced Muffins!

I really like muffins, particularly in the mornings but most commercial ones are full of junk and other yucky stuff I quite frankly refuse to put into my body. These muffins are light, healthy, and very versatile meaning you can add berries into the mix, dark chocolate chips, pretty much anything into them. If I had some coconut whipped cream I most definitely would have dolloped some on top of the muffins I made. They are still a sweet treat regardless of their lovely and wholesome ingredients however, so please treat these as a dessert and do not go nuts. I am planning on featuring a lower calorie sweet treat soon that you can definitely eat quite a few of, so stay tuned 😉

You need the following ingredients to make 8 muffins:

Almond & Oat Cinnamon Spiced Muffins

Alice Williams

Muffins that won't pack on the pounds!

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Ingredients

1 cup almond flour
1 cup oat flour
2 eggs
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 cup honey
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp high quality salt
1/4 cup coconut oil

Instructions

1. Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees farenheit 🙂
2. Mix all of your WET ingredients in a large bowl (eggs, vanilla extract, unsweetened applesauce, melted coconut oil, and raw honey).
3. Mix all of your DRY ingredients into the wet ingredients (high quality salt, baking powder, oat flour, almond flour, and almond flour).
4. Once you have mixed all of the ingredients together well, get a muffin or cupcake pan and either put muffin cups into the cupcake pan holes or grease the holes with some olive oil or coconut oil. Put the batter evenly into 8 of the muffin holes.
5. Bake the muffins for 20 minutes (or 25 minutes if you like them more firm).

To make the oat flour, all I did was buy rolled oats and then quickly pulse them in a food processor (a blender works too).