soup with toast of whipped ricotta, lemon zest, and chili. This is a delicious little soup that I know you're going to love. Full of color, full of texture, full of nutrition. And this is a brand new recipe from my new cookbook, Eat Yourself Healthy. And it can happen in about 25-30 minutes. It's a really nice thing to do. So, this is a celebration of veggies, and actually veggies in many different forms. I'm going to be using artichokes, which are jarred. I'm going to be using fresh leeks, which is fantastic. You can swap these out for onions if you wish. And then some frozen veggies from the freezer, broad beans and peas. This is a real celebration of veggies, but I think it's really important that we don't get so kind of worthy about seasons and it has to be from a farmer's market. I love all that, by the way, even if you grow your own. But also, like being busy, corner shops, supermarkets, and kind of working with things so you can enjoy spring all year round, or more importantly, you can enjoy the nutrition of spring all year round. So, let's start it off. Pan on, nice big pan. We'll kick off with these artichokes. These are actually already cut into quarters. If yours aren't, cut them into quarters. We'll place that into a pan. I'll pour in a couple of tablespoons of the oil that it comes in. And let's just put the artichokes into the pan like that. Add some vinegar to it and some mustard. Put the lid on, shake it up, and you make a lovely French dressing, and that'll be good for a week in the fridge. So, I'll put that over here. What I want to do is start off the frying by just putting these artichokes in one little layer. Let's go to the world of fresh. So, we love leeks. Sweet, creamy, and delicious. What I tend to do is just take the outer leaf off like that. And just run my knife down like that. Pull this off. And once I've done that, get the tip of my knife and run it down the length of the leek. We'll compost this. So, I'll trim the green part off here, and I'll use this for making a stew or something nice like that. Wash away any of those gritty bits. And then what I want to do is just run my knife down the length again. What's nice about giving them a wash as well is you create a little bit of moisture. It's going to really soften up nicely. And then in we go with all these veggies. So, look, mix everything up. Give it a light seasoning with salt and pepper. And we'll let the excess water from washing the leeks create a nice little bit of steam. And what we want to do is cook this on a medium heat for 15 minutes, just to really help those leeks become sweet, delicious, and beautifully buttery. So, let that cook, and then I'll show you what to do next. After 15 minutes, you can see the leeks have really cooked down. It smells amazing. You've created good flavor and texture here. If you want to kind of get real good food into your life and you're busy, like using jarred food, tinned food, fresh food, and even frozen food, this is important. And there's a few things that we should probably know about the freezer. The freezer's amazing. It's like your best friend. So, when you pick veggies, the nutrition is depleting all the time, but when you snap freeze it, it's really, really helpful and useful. This is broad beans. Really common. You get them in most of the supermarkets. Really, really delicious. They will stir that in. A classic, frozen peas. People just love it. And again, embracing the freezer and frozen veggies, it's super cool. They're sitting there in the freezer waiting to be used. So, what I've tried to do in this book and in this recipe is show you how easy it is to get more veggies into your life, which are super nutritious and often incredibly affordable. So, here I've got 60 g bunch of mint. Just grab it at the top. Rip that off like that. And do the same on the other half, right? So, we can keep these stalks for putting in stews or cooking potatoes. So, do not waste that. We'll put that to one side. And then with this, we just roughly chop it. And boldly and bravely, we're going in with the mint. So, mint, broad beans, peas, leeks, they love each other. It's a good combo. So, stir in the mint, cook it down, and we're almost treating it like spinach. Now, I'm going to add a liter of boiled water. You could add a chicken stock cube or a veggie stock cube if you wanted to, but actually, I think we've achieved enough flavor by slow cooking those leeks already. Bring that now to the boil. We don't have to cook the life out of it cuz we want to keep the color, the texture, and the nutrition, right? But I want to give you a really nice little trick and it feels really indulgent. So, I can take just a couple of little ladles of this beautiful soup and whiz it up. We can simply pour it back in. Salt and pepper, and let that tick over while we make some beautiful toasts. And I've got a lovely loaf of bread here. So, four nice centimeter slices of good bread. The better the bread, the better the flavor. So, this is going to go under the grill. So, we'll let that grill. It won't take long at all. In that time we're going to grill it, what I want to do is show you a way of using a really delicious cheese that's very, very healthy. This is ricotta. Kind of neutral, light, delicious, and super healthy, high-protein cheese. You can get it in the supermarkets. And what I love to do is just put a pot of the ricotta in like that. Season it with a little salt. I'll take a little lemon zest. And then some Parmesan. 20 g in weight of Parmesan, a little bit of lemon zest in and on it. Like that. We'll season it a little bit with salt and pepper. And then we just take a little spatula and smash it, whip it, mix it. You can go coarse or you can go smooth and shiny like that. So, soup done. That lovely ricotta done. Lovely hot toast. Look at that. Put a nice little dollop of that ricotta on each toast. Any extra you have, you can put in the fridge. That'll last for 2-3 days easily. Just use the back of the spoon just to push that ricotta around to the edge. If you've got any extra ricotta, you can put that in a little bowl in the fridge. It's good for like 2-3 days, and you can use it as a dip. To make this even more delicious, I just want to take a little bit of lemon zest and a little bit of extra Parmesan. Look at that. And a little Parmesan goes such a long way. Just a few extra mint leaves just on top. I love it. And very important, flaked dried chilies. That little bit of heat with the peas and broad beans works so well with the lemon, the creamy ricotta, the peas, the broad beans. It's a beautiful thing. So, let's just plate some of this up. I'm just going to take a nice big bowl of this creamy and chunky soup. Look at that. So, look, I'm going to serve up two lovely bowls of this soup. Any leftovers you can keep in the fridge for like 3 or 4 days. And if you just serve that with a nice little toast on the side like that, I think that is just a beautiful way to enjoy veggies. You can slurp it. You can get involved. It's comforting. You can dip in your beautiful toast. So, for me, just that simple act of making a delicious homemade soup with accessible ingredients is a cool thing. So, look at that. Count to three. Let it absorb. And then get amongst it.
This is my lemon tahini chicken. It's a brilliant, quick, and healthy midweek meal. It is a recipe from my brand new cookbook, Eat Yourself Healthy, and I'm going to cook it in my cheap as hell stainless steel pan. So, get your pan, and let's put it on a medium-high heat. So, once you've preheated it, we're going to do the water bead test. That's a really good signal that you're at a good searing temperature. What does that mean? It just means taking a little water. When you think it's nice and hot, we'll put that in the middle, and it should just bounce and sizzle on the top of the stainless steel. Just like that. It's kind of beautiful. So, now we're at that good searing temperature. I'm going to start off by this nice kind of dry frying, kind of charring, steaming way of cooking sprouting broccoli. You could do this with asparagus and little sugar snap peas. It's really, really beautiful. What I want to do is just take the tip of a knife and run it down the stalk like that. And this method of cooking greens, you know, it could be French beans, asparagus, you know, is a really, really nice way to char it. You get a little bit of color from the natural sugars in the veggies, but also it kind of internally sort of steams. And we're not going to use any oil. We're just going to use searing heat. And I like to just trim up whatever veg you've got. And in this case, with the broccoli, you can put your knife down the stalk, so it just kind of makes the heat penetration a little bit easier. I'm going to place the veggies in the pan like this. And you can hear it kind of And you're going to get this kind of charring. You're going to get this kind of nice natural color from the sugars in the broccoli. And you can smell it. It smells toasty and smoky. But also, internally, it's going to be steaming. So, while that's doing its magic, let's talk about the chicken. Very, very common and popular form of protein. You can swap this out for fish if you wish or things like, you know, tofu, stuff like that. What I want to do with this chicken breast is even up the cooking time. Can you see how one side is thinner than the other? So, that's about a centimeter thick here, that's about an inch thick here. So, I'm going to even it up by slashing the chicken. And this is a clever thing to do. What we're going to do is use a knife and just score that fat side about centimeter deep. So, you're going to use your knife to score into the chicken and that's going to even up the cooking time of the fat end to the thin end. But also, what's beautiful about this is if you want to rub this with salt and pepper and herbs or spice, this is a beautiful thing, right? We can get that seasoning and spice or whatever you want to put on it into those cuts. We can put a little olive oil on the chicken as well. Now, wash my hands. Turn the broccoli over like that. You can see it's caught and charred on the outside and it's going to be fresh and steamed on the inside. What I'll do once it's had a nice little bit of cooking time is place the broccoli onto a little plate like this and then we can simply dress it with a little salt, pepper, a little kiss of olive oil and then a little drizzle of lemon juice. And that just tossed will be really, really delicious. It's a really clever way to cook your greens. Full of life, character and flavor. Right, back to the pan. We're going to add some oil to the pan. Move that around. We're going to go in with our chicken, scored side down. You can hear that sizzle. And I'm going to wash up this knife and board. The nice thing about scoring it is you don't just speed up the cooking and even up the cooking, but you're also giving it a surface area that will cling to flavors. Once it's had a couple of minutes, turn it over and just look at that chicken. It's going to be beautiful. Okay. While that's cooking, in a liquidizer, I'm going to add a jar of these beautiful roasted red peppers. Now, they've been roasted, they've been peeled and the flavor is amazing. This is a really good hack to big flavor. I'm going to liquidize this with some herbs. So, I'm going to use basil today. Just take a nice little handful. So, what I like to do is pick, say, the stalk of basil. The little delicate leaves, I like just to put into some water here and that's for sprinkling over the top. Just looks really pretty. They're a really delicate expression of basil. And then the bigger leaves and the stalk, they can go in here. We'll waste nothing and we'll liquidize that with a couple of garlic cloves and we just whiz it up. So, that is going to give you the most amazing sauce to flavor beautiful beans and really healthy grains. So, the chicken's had about 5 or 6 minutes. And got these lovely cooked chicken breasts. Look at that sizzly golden top. So, you can see in the bottom of the pan, there's all these golden kind of dark bits of stickiness, right? Don't wash that off. That is flavor. So, we'll go in with that beautiful pepper sauce, right? And it smells amazing. So, we go back on the heat and then we're going to bring to life some really lovely healthy things, right? We all need to be eating more beans and more grains, okay? So, the beans can be cannellini beans, borlotti beans, mixed beans, butter beans, could even be chickpeas. And all I do is just take away some of this liquid and once you've drained it, just put those beans into that amazing pepper sauce. That pepper sauce will get the flavor off the bottom of the pan and almost clean the pan for you. In with the beans and then I've got a pack of really beautiful super grains. You can get these in the supermarkets. These are my ones, but they're just a really nice healthy mix of unusual and delicious grains. There's all kinds of different types. They're super nutritious and delicious. So, in we go with those and then we'll just break those up. This sauce cooking into the beans and grains is utterly delicious. It's going to fill you up with a good stuff. It's going to feel really comforting and delicious and indulgent, but it's actually just really, really good for you. So, mix up those beans and grains and just let that simmer away. So, let me show you how to make the tahini lemon sauce. It's delicious. Just take 2 Tbsp of tahini and this is ground and minced sesame seeds. And you can get blonde tahini or light tahini or the toasted and dark tahini, very, very good. So, that goes in there. I'm going to add just a little bit of lemon juice and a little pinch of salt and just a little swig of water. When you add the lemon juice to the tahini it starts to thicken up in a really unusual way. So, we let it down with a little water, but this is such a delicious flavor. Fresh with the lemon, really rich with the tahini, two ingredients and a pinch of salt and you get this incredible simple sauce that works so well with the chicken and the beans. Look at the beans. Can you see? We're just simmering it now and that sauce has been absorbed by the grains and the beans. They're going to be incredible. And can you see how it's cleaned the bottom of the pan, right? So, all those sticky bits have come off and that's going to give color and flavor. Right, time to plate up. Often when you think about healthy food, you always think it's about, like, what you can't have and about being sort of stingy and doing without, but this is a really generous portion. It's really comforting. It's big flavors. So, I'm going to take the broccoli that's just been kind of marinating there nicely. Look at that. Beautiful colors. And using the sear of that pan, you've created extra flavor and, you know, textures as well. Beautiful. And you can see the chicken where it's rested. We've got the lovely juices that have come out and it should be juicy and shiny. Look at that. I'm just going to slice it up. And we want that to be moist and tender. Put that over like that. Pearly white chicken on the inside and gnarly golden chicken on the outside. That is attitude, that is flavor and it's beautifully cooked with the sear from that amazing pan. These little resting juices, we can just pour over the top. Don't waste anything. And then that amazing and utterly simple sauce of the tahini over the top. Oh, just a little sauce goes a long way. And then just a few olives torn over the top. A little hit of kind of black olive fragrance. It's delicious. It's nutritious. It's fun. It's exciting. It's generous. This is what we want from healthy food. Those little basil leaves that we saved. But guys, look at that. Come on. For me, that is a fun, delicious, cool, contemporary midweek meal bigging up healthy ingredients that have been put together in a really exciting way. These are things you can get from a regular supermarket and you've got veggies in there galore. You know, you've got lovely protein there with the chicken. You know, those beautiful beans and the grains with that sweet pepper sauce. Let's have a little try. Come on. Let's try the chicken first with the tahini. Mmm. The chicken is so juicy. And with that tahini lemon sauce, it is utterly utterly delicious. That roasted pepper sauce is so utterly simple, but the flavor is massive. So, there you go. That is a delicious little midweek meal that you can put together with a lot of passion and fun. Happy days.
