Blog Archives - Page 22 of 24 - One Girl and her Thermie

Store cupboard staples

It appears that we must all prepare for the arrival of the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown in the UK. It hasn’t happened officially but with our European partners locking down one by one, it’s inevitable. Panic buying has already started, toilet paper seems to be the top purchase item on the public’s shopping list but as a foodie, I’m all about the food. I have a large pantry and a deep freezer, so I personally bulk buy anyway (yes, I’ve had Costco Membership for years), but given the current climate, I wanted to share some of my hints & tips for being able to stay home and still eating well. Here is my store cupboard staples list.

Kitchen and pantry essentials

Please find below a list of the most used, versatile, and budget-friendly pantry staples. Keep these pantry essentials on hand for quick and easy meals!

Tinned foods:

Tomatoes – Tinned tomatoes in the juice are a versatile ingredient. They can take centre stage as a simple sauce for pasta as well as being an ingredient in dishes like Bolognese or chilli.
Fruits – Tinned fruit keeps for ages and will count towards your five a day. During the winter it can be a good way of getting more exotic fruits in your diet like peaches, apricots, and pineapple. Just make sure the fruit is tinned in fruit juice rather than syrup.
Tinned fish – Tinned tuna is a useful ingredient to have to hand, whether you use it for a simple tuna sandwich filling, to top a salad or jacket potato or for more substantial meals like a tuna bake or in a tomato-based pasta sauce. Don’t just stick to tuna: oily fish like salmon, sardines, and pilchards are also a good choice. The important thing is to choose fish that have been tinned in water, tomato sauce or unsaturated fats like sunflower or olive oil rather than in brine to keep the salt down.

Dry foods:

Beans & Pulses are a good ingredient to bulk out meat dishes as well as being a vegetarian source of protein. Dried pulses keep well too but when they are tinned in the water they are ready to eat making them a quick and easy choice.
Nuts and seeds: Always a great stand-by to keep in your kitchen. Use as instant nutrition when you have no time to cook, but wonderful added to your food, both savoury and sweet, cooked or raw.
Herbs and spices: Adding flavour is important when it comes to cooking with less salt. Dried herbs and spices are an inexpensive way of doing that and have the advantage of keeping for a while if they are kept well sealed and out of direct sunlight.
Pasta: Higher in fibre than white pasta, whole wheat pasta is a filling choice and will keep for a long time in your cupboard ready for a quick evening meal. Use it as a starchy accompaniment for main meals as well as having it cold in pasta salads.
Flour: flour can be useful for making bread, pancakes, and scones, as well as to thicken a white sauce or casserole. I bake a lot, so I have everything from plain flour to self-raising, bread flour which contains a higher percentage of gluten and also specialty flours such as wholemeal and pizza flours, to rye flour for my sourdough baking. I also have ‘chappati atta’ for all my Indian bread.
Dried fruits such as sultanas, apricots, figs and dates are all useful for adding sweetness to breakfasts, stewed fruit and adding to stews and casseroles. While dried fruit won’t have the vitamin C that fresh fruit does, dried fruit still contributes to your five a day and can also be a source of nutrients like fibre and iron.

Fresh fruit and vegetables

Onions A basic ingredient that contributes towards your five a day, onions are a versatile ingredient whether you are making a cooked dish or a salad. They keep well stored in a cool, dark place without needing to be refrigerated. You can also buy fresh and freeze to increase the shelf life of onions.
Potatoes: Whether they are baking potatoes, sweet potatoes or new potatoes, these root vegetables keep well when stored in a cool, dark place. Eat them with their skins on to benefit from some extra fibre. Again, these again are frozen if making french fries/ chips, or wedges; grated for hash browns to increase the shelf-life. Obviously can also be bought as frozen versions

Fridge

Eggs, whether that be for breakfast, lunch and dinner eggs, are quick to cook source of protein and keep well. Use them when they are at their freshest for poaching and for a Spanish omelette, boiled or scrambled if they are nearing their use-by date.
UHT Milk, whether it’s for hot drinks, on cereal, or to make a white sauce, milk is in most of our fridges. Using low-fat milk like semi-skimmed, 1% or skimmed milk will help to reduce the amount of saturated fat in your diet. It might seem like a small change but because milk is such an everyday food the benefits can add up.

Freezer goods

Frozen vegetables can sometimes have more nutrients in them than fresh and will count towards your five a day. Having a bag of peas in the freezer means you will never be short of a vegetable to serve with your main meals and you can also use defrosted frozen peas as an addition to salads as well as to make a filling soup.
Ice-cream. Yes, you can hardly call ice-cream a staple food group but who hasn’t felt better grabbing a spoon and eating right out of ice-cream tub. There’s a reason why it is called a comfort food and in this climate, I think we all deserve a hug from a tub.

In the coming days, I will be uploading more recipes to this blog and also posting on my new social media ch

One Girl in the Mix

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Vorwerk UK and Vorwerk International have recently changed their social media policy, which means for socials such as Facebook and Instagram, I am no longer able to use the name Thermomix or any abbreviation of Thermomix, such as Thermie within my business name.

This has had a huge impact on the workforce on the ground, who like me have been running their Independent Thermomix. Some of my best friends in the business have been Thermomix Advisors for years with names like ThermieChef to LivingwithmyThermie or Thermbalina. All these will have to be changed in the next few months.

After much deliberation that I have finally worked up the name, “One Girl in the Mix” for both my Facebook and Instagram accounts. It was a resounding yes from all of you that I needed to keep the One Girl in my name, so it was either One Girl and her Journey (detailing my journey with Thermomix…and if you say it fast enough, it sounds like Thermie) or One Girl in the Mix, which is what my Instagram followers voted for. I never thought I’ve ever say that sentence. I have followers; I have a tribe. Yay!

I’ve managed to get a quick redesign of the logo, so you can now see a little icon that now bridges the two brand names. Yes, it is a picture of me in a Thermoix. Smiling back at you.

This domain will remain unchanged, as will my contact details and other accounts – does anyone even know that I have a YouTube channel? Probably a good thing. But given what’s happening in the world right now (read Coronavirus) I do have plans to revive my YouTube and go live (argh…) to get us through things.

Despite really liking my new social name, it is a huge blow to my business as the name ‘One Girl and her Thermie‘ has been around for longer than most of the staff who make these decisions have worked at Vorwerk UK. It will mean I have to build up the hashtags (#onegirlinthemix) and the audience to get the rankings for the business, which leads many of you to this page.

I’ve been demonstrating Thermomix for more than 10 years now, so in those times have seen the business change from a family run company and Thermomix as a distributor owned by John & Janie Turner to having 3 different Sales Directors under Vorwerk UK as a fully-owned subsidiary of Vorwerk International. With these transitions, we’ve also had countless Marketing hats. But I am a fan of change, given my marketing expertise (I am Chartered Institute of Marketing qualified), I welcome to see what the new marketing guy has up his sleeve. He certainly has the experience having worked for Tupperware before so hopefully has a grasp of dealing with distributors and business partners with a sales force of over 40,000. Let’s hope with having worked with a much larger remote workforce, he’ll have the energy and the patience to grow our Thermomix in the UK, raising consumer brand awareness through recruitment.

I go back to my marketing training. Bruce Tuckman, an educational psychologist, identified a five-stage development process that most teams follow to become high performing. He called the stages: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Team progress through the stages is shown in the following diagram.

Let’s hope the storming stage which this hiccup in the social media strategy has had will be on the upward curve soon, so we can get back to the performing stage.

So whichever social you follow, please do leave a comment. Or when you are cooking and posting yourself, hashtag me so I can see what you’ve been making. All of this will help the algorithms do their thing.

Stay well and keep cooking up a storm, Ankita

How to make your Thermomix pay for itself

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So you’ve taken the plunge and bought a Thermomix. That’s fabulous. Our unique selling point of a Thermomix is the cost-saving from day one, so here’s a helpful guide of what you should be making in your Thermomix TM6. Here are my 5 top recipes that I encourage everyone who buys a Thermomix to make regularly to ensure you start to make your Thermomix pay for itself.

1. Stock paste

The vegetable stock paste is something that I always have in my fridge and one of the recipes I always suggest to my customers that they make first with their Thermomix. I put homemade vegetable stock into everything I do from curries, stews, risottos and of course soups. One heaped teaspoon of Thermomix stock paste is equivalent to one stock cube without any of the nasties. When you know what goes into your food, including something as simple as stock paste, you start to eat cleaner and healthier. Making your own vegetable stock paste is neither difficult or expensive. All you need are some vegetables, good quality salt, and an excellent blender. 400g of vegetables makes one mason jar full of stock paste which lasts for about four months in the fridge. The sea salt acts as a natural preservative so no other additives are needed.

Yes, you can follow the recipe to the fullest, but my favourite and craziest idea is to wing it. I either empty the vegetable tray in my fridge on a Sunday evening and cook all the leftover vegetables before they go bad. I’m always a bit excited to see what colour my stock paste is as I never follow the TM recipe and depending on what vegetables I use, it’s a different colour. I don’t why but red cabbage always features heavily in my stock paste – it’s one of the vegetable I buy and only use half of it.

Here’s the Vegetable Stock Paste Cookidoo Recipe, I roughly follow.

2. Nut, seed and rice milk

Have you ever looked at the ingredients in any of the supermarket nut milks? Take example almond milk. Chances are you find a whole lot of ‘extra’ crammed in there that really don’t need to be there. Do we really need locust bean gum, gellan gum, lecithins? I don’t even know what half of them are. And when you see the almond milk percentage, it’s low’ super low. As low as 2.3%. Making your own homemade nut milk will mean you keep your milk preservative and additive-free.

The process of nut milk is simple; soak some nuts, wait and blend. If you are adding it to make a bechamel you can strain it, but if you are drinking it as part of a smoothie or shake, I don’t mind the ‘bit’s and leave it as it is. Store-bought nut milk has a sweet taste, so if you like that, you can sweeten it with a little honey or a couple of dates.

The best part of it is that homemade nut milk is easy and so much cheaper than store-bought and you know exactly what’s in it. I’ve milked almonds, cashews, pecans, hazelnut, and cashews. The sky is the limit.

Check out my recipes here: Almond Milk, Soya Milk, and Rice Milk

3. Almond meal

Many people who lean towards a Thermomix are those who are gluten free and making a change in their diets due to health reasons. However, it’s not just for medical reasons, alternative flours and meals are becoming really popular for baking these days. One of the most popular flour substitutes is almond meal, which is simply ground up whole almonds. It often costs much more than an equal weight in almonds; currently £1.25/100g. A store-bought almond meal will become rancid very quickly once the oil in the nuts is oxidized during the processing. Milling nuts, seeds or grains (rice, quinoa, oats, etc) fresh whenever you need a meal or flour will not only save you money but also give you a much healthier product! Mill for 30 seconds, speed 10, or until flour is achieved (will vary for different nuts, seeds, and grains).

4. Icing sugar

In the UK, one of our regular demonstration recipes is a frozen fruit sorbet or berry foam. These recipes not only show the magical blending capability of the Thermomix but it’s the ability to make icing sugar.

Did you know that icing sugar and caster sugar are simply milled versions of granulated white sugar? Yet, they are always more expensive! Everyone has granulated sugar in their pantry or store cupboards and all you need to do is mill 2 seconds, speed 10 when needing caster sugar and 1-3 minutes, speed 10 when needing icing sugar and hey presto, you have all 3 versions. It’s not just the cost-saving that is great here but the space-saving too especially needed in London where we have tiny houses and flats with little or no storage space.

5. Yoghurt

Homemade yogurt tastes great and it is better for you too. The key to this is to use the most delicious milk you can find. You can eschew the powdered milk if you want, but you will need to leave the yogurt to ferment twice as long and sometimes the texture can be a little unusual. There are plenty of Cookidoo recipes for yoghurt especially now that the Thermomix TM6 has a ferment mode too. But my favourite yoghurt recipe is one that I’ve been doing successfully for years and still works out perfectly every single time.

6 Reasons why you should plan your meals

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While meal planning can be considered a chore to add to your “to-do list”, this is one chore that should be at the top of that list!

Here are 6 reasons why you should start planning your meals a week in advance and how Thermomix’s Recipe Platform Cookidoo can help you do just that:

1. Improve your nutrition

By planning in advance, you can aim to have nutritionally well-balanced meals throughout the week.

For example, you can make sure each of your dinners have the requisite vegetables, protein, and grains. Planning your meals ultimately allows you to take control of your own personal nutrition needs.

Whether you have to stick to a lower sodium diet or want only to eat whole grains and vegetables, you can plan for it!