The concept is simple enough - you have your 'free' foods: as many fruit and veg as you like, fish and meat too as well as potatoes and rice. You then have two lists - a and b. A is the dairy products that are limited and b is cereals and breads - you're allowed one carefully weighed item from each of these lists a day. Then there's your third list - a list of food that have a 'syn' value. The aim is to eat or drink between 5-15 of these syns each day and with wine weighing in at about 9 syns for a large glass, I'm a little concerned - especially as I was starting to become quite accustomed to a bottle of wine a night most weekdays. But no pain, no gain (well, the opposite of gain hopefully).
Looking at these lists, I was actually quite inspired. Considering I cook everything from fresh anyway, it didn't seem too much of a problem but then I thought more about it - no olive oil, very limited cheese and bread, even some stock ate into my syn allowance. Time to get inventive.
The first week was all about finding different ways to cook things - I've discovered Fry Light which is really rather genius and I've been using lots of spices rather than stock.
Running around being a photographer and editing Edible deems me a busy lady. I wanted to find something I could have for lunch that I can cook the evening before that I can eat on the go. I also had a load of eggs that came in my vegetable box and some veg I wasn't sure what to do with. Enter the humble frittata.
A frittata is so easy to make and you can chuck anything in them. I fried onions until browned and added sliced sweet potato and cabbage, I then added about a cm of boiled water and covered to let the vegetables soften (this is termed steam frying). Next I beat four eggs and added half to a smallish and deepish ceramic roaster. I then added the rest of the veg and covered with the rest of the egg, roughly mixing it all in and seasoning. Because the frittata will be lasting me two days, I doubled my allowance of feta (42g is my daily amount) and crumbled it on top, finishing off with some thinly sliced tomato. You can add anything to the mix - olives, Prosciutto, chorizo etc (just don't let me smell it if using chorizo, it's my favourite and is banned from my life - the horror).
After 25 mins in the oven on a medium heat, et voila, here it is straight from the oven. Frittatas are best eaten at room temperature so allow to cool before eating. And just so you know, I had it for lunch today - as my two year old niece would say 'mmmmmmm... delic-li-lus!'
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