Easy Tasty Clean - Janice Cumberlidge

Easy Tasty Clean is a new e book from Janice Cumberlidge, focusing on easy, tasty, healthy recipes which can assist in weightloss. Janice  the author really practises what she preaches and has dropped over 2 dress sizes by following this diet and lifestyle plan. She is also based in Lancashire too !

Janice has kindly asked me to review her book and allowed me to publish one of her recipes, but more of that later. The e book is available from www.easytastyclean.com  and covers the nutritional background to each of  the recipes and features a section on healthy clean ingredients and on healthy cooking techniques. Every recipe is illustrated and the book also features photography by the author and a foreword by her "guru" Nancy Reinhardt.

The book has a great layout and I particularly liked the sections on the more unusual ingredients such as chia seeds, quinoa amongst others and how to prepare them, the word layout on some pages was a bit strange and didn't seem to be justified correctly but that might be my PC. All the recipes look tasty and the recipes cover breakfasts, balanced main meals, savoury snacks and soups, sweet snacks and desserts , and smoothies. 

The recipe I chose to test from the book is

Stuffed Walnut Topped Mushrooms

Serves: 2. Prep: 10 mins. Cook: 25 mins.   

Ingredients:

• 4 Portobello mushrooms (large, flat) 
• 300g / 3oz tub low fat, low sodium cottage cheese 
• 1 clove of garlic, minced 
• 1/2 small red bell pepper, finely chopped 
• 1 banana shallot or 2 small regular shallots, finely chopped 
• Ground black pepper, to taste 
• 10 walnut halves, finely chopped 

Directions

• Preheat oven to 190C / 375F / Gas 5. 
• Cut off the stalks of the mushrooms then lay them upside down on an oven tray. 
• In a small bowl, mix together the cottage cheese, garlic, shallot and red pepper. 
• Spoon the mixture onto the upturned mushrooms, pressing it down slightly and making sure it is pressed into all edges. 
• Add freshly ground pepper to the surface of the cottage cheese mixture then top with the finely chopped walnuts. 
• Bake in the centre of the oven for 25 minutes, turning half way through the cooking time. Once the walnuts start to brown the stuffed mushrooms are done. 

*You may find that quite a bit of water is released from both the mushrooms and the cottage    cheese, this is quite normal and the water can be discarded. 

Serve immediately with some steamed vegetables on the side.   

Nutritional information:

Two stuffed mushrooms gives: 219 calories, 21g protein, 13g carbohydrates, 10g fat (2g of which is saturated fat).   

*Tip:

Pre-bake the mushrooms in the oven for 15 minutes and they will release much of their excess water ready for you to use in the recipe as directed.

Here is Janice's picture 

and here is mine

I tweaked the recipe slightly as unfortunately Mr Lancashire Food doesn't do nuts, so I substituted a sprinkling of oats to add crunch ( this will affect the protein content of the recipe) and also I added a pinch of dried thyme to the cottage cheese mixture to give a little extra flavour as sometimes cottage cheese can be a little bland especially as I was omitting the nuts. This was a nice snack dish and I served it with steamed homegrown green beans. I am keen also to try some of the other healthy dishes too but as quite a few feature ingredients I don't have in the store cupboard so I  will need to visit the health food shop first.

The book would be great to purchase if you were looking to make a serious change of diet and follow Janice's healthy living plan to eat easy, tasty and clean. Check out her website or facebook page for more information.