Steaming… a challenge

Seeing a comment on my blog and commenting back made me think that I started out on this voyage to slenderness posting delicious recipes which were helping me eat nice food, stay healthy AND lose weight.

I had intended to be one of those super duper food photographers (didn’t work) and after that failure I decided to at least be a mediocre food photographer and share recipes for big lovely healthy satisfying meals (didn’t keep it up). So I’m going to start again and more than that I’m setting myself a blog challenge to prepare my main meal each day for 5 days using nothing but my steamer. I have one just like this which costs about £20-25 in the UK depending where you get it and the brand.

I find using the steamer to be beneficial in a couple of ways…

1. It’s not a very messy way to cook and keeps washing up to a minimum
2. It takes up little space if you are preparing a meal in a titchy kitchen or for one
3. Food tastes AMAZING when it’s been steamed, organic carrots in a steamer? There is nothing finer.
4. It’s fast
5. It’s probably environmentally friendly, I don’t know but it definitely saves on time with gas and electricity grilling, baking, frying, roasting or whatever it saves you from doing
6. It’s got to be healthier than a microwave (I’m microwave averse by the way, don’t have one and won’t have one)

Worries – I heard about the heating up plastic and it giving off carcinogens in the oven thing and wonder if that extends to plastic steamers, maybe it’s time to invest in one of the wooden ones instead. I’ll do some research one day but for now I’ll crack on with it and hope that if there is a danger the huge amount of anti-oxidants I consume each day will whoop the asses of any free radicals that enter my body.

I’m not going to be too adventurous as I’m pretty much a tasty chicken or fish and veg girl these days but I do get inventive with my marinades and sauces and so there might be something that catches someone’s fancy that I put out there.

I love reading people’s recipes because I do find that changing to a really healthy lifestyle has meant that most of my go to recipes are now retired or kept back for special occasions as they are just not in keeping with my new way of doing things. I like to experiment and I really don’t want my eating habits to become too boring and samey because I love food and I’ll find that hard to maintain long term.

If I experiment a bit and add a few bits and bobs into the healthy recipe bank now and then as I go along I know this will gradually build to a sustainable new set of go to meal options. If sharing those helps someone who is on a similar quest then that’s all good and all part of the fabulous blogging community spirit that I love.

So tomorrow it begins, my 5 day steaming challenge. If anyone wants to join me for the whole challenge or for a day or two of it and share a steamer recipe too that would be super fabulous and will help me to grow my steamer meals recipe bank for which I would be most grateful.

By the way for any new bloggers who can’t think of anything to write, setting yourself a challenge is a really good way of prompting yourself into writing, giving you a focus for your blog and it in turn helps you to achieve your goals. Top tip is don’t make it impossible to achieve and don’t make it go on for too long unless you are sure you will have tons of material to go at, I’ve started so many 30 day challenges and even though I’m still doing at least one of them I’ve given up blogging about it as there was little left to say about it after the first 5 days.