Hello,  

Recipe of the Week

You will need to plan ahead to roast the garlic before making this recipe. Roast garlic brings a deliciously mellow garlic flavour to the soup. To save heating up your oven especially, you may like to cook it at the same time as preparing a roast dinner or similar. Once cooked it will last for up to six days wrapped in foil in a refrigerator. I suggest you use cans of whole tomatoes rather than ready chopped ones as they are more luxurious and flavoursome. This soup also works as a delicious pasta sauce. Suitable for freezing.
 
Preparing the garlic:

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C, 400°F, Gas Mark 6.
2. Remove the outer skin from the garlic bulb and slice the top off. Place on a square of foil and wrap the foil around to form a parcel. Place in the oven for 45 minutes until soft. Set aside to cool.

Preparing the soup:

1. Pour the cans of tomatoes into a soup maker or saucepan.
2. Squeeze out the garlic puree from the roasted bulb and add to the tomato mixture along with the chopped spring onions, the stock pot, and the freshly ground black pepper.
3. Bring to the boil then cook for 5 minutes.
4. Liquidise until smooth then add the fresh basil leaves and liquidise again.
5. If you wish, you can push the mixture through a sieve to remove the seeds but if you liquidise it well, you may not need to do this.
6. Season with additional freshly ground black pepper to taste.

Fun, Facts & Fitness from Mary Morris MSc.

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I always set a challenge to my members at the start of a New Year to set them off on the right path for the months ahead.  They may want to lose some weight, or to stop eating biscuits, or to get more active... and I always tell them that they simply need to set their own goal. I always include myself in this (or my members would start a revolt!) and this year I set myself the target of achieving 10,000 steps per day... every day! 

I had no idea it would be so difficult, as on days such as this (sitting at the computer writing to you) it was impossible to achieve.  So, I decided to be kinder to myself and I would change it to 70,000 steps per week which of course is the equivalent really, and I find that this is totally achievable.  I enjoy a long walk at least once a week which seriously ups the steps for that day allowing me to feel better about my more sedentary days.

So where did this requirement of 10,000 steps come from you may ask? It would be good to tell you it has a scientific and solid research origin but sadly that is not the case. It started with a pedometer developed by a marketing company for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics called the Manpo-kei.  'Man' meaning 10,000, 'po' meaning steps and 'kei' meaning ‘meter’.  It was hugely successful and the number of 10,000 has simply resonated with people across the world. It has gradually become an excellent goal to encourage us to walk more. Today the scientific community is definitely onboard and you can find lots of facts and figures that have been created around it, all aimed at getting us to walk more.

Here are a few of them:

• Walking 10,000 steps per day burns on average 3.500 calories per week.  That equates to 500 active calories per day and 1lb of fat.  Great if you want to lose weight as long as you don't eat an extra 500 calories!
   
• One research study found that women who regularly walked 10,000 steps per day reduced their blood pressure significantly after 24 weeks.
   
• Another study on overweight participants over a 12-week period found that walking 10,000 steps per day had significantly lowered anxiety, depression and anger AND they lost a significant amount of weight.

Now we do need a reality check here because, as I alluded to earlier, the pressure of reaching that goal every day could be extremely arduous and you might say that then walking loses some of its pleasure.  It just becomes hard work!  So, I was delighted to come across a study where 16,000 women in their 70s were tracked over a 4-year period monitoring the value of steps between 5,000 and 10,000 per day.  The good news is that at 7,500 steps per day we will realise the same health benefits and longevity as 10,000.  Thanks to the scientific community, we are now getting some really valuable information, properly measured and evaluated, that we can trust.  So, let's set our step goal ‘realistically’ allowing us to thoroughly enjoy our walks knowing, too, that our good health is being preserved.

If you like garlic have you tried our Roasted Garlic and Green Pea Soup?