I’m by no means an great cook – I’ll settle for average – and certainly don’t have aspirations towards uber-cookism. If I want to eat, I have to do it myself in the kitchen – errors and whoopsies can be quietly sidled off to the dogs…I get my biggest buzz cooking for someone else…it’s too easy to settle when you’re your own critic…

Even before setting off on my green journey, I made my own bread and I have a range of bread staples that I can churn out on demand:

• white bread for when we’re in a  hurry (shorter cooking time);
• herb bread which has evolved from ‘just follow the recipe‘ through a more relaxed ‘just toss in a  teaspoon of any three herbs or spices‘ to settling on a teaspoon each of cumin seeds and mixed herbs.
• Fruit bread which was apple bread in the book until the day I found myself out of apples so just tossed in a fresh mashed banana – came out great and went awesomely as toast with manuka honey.
• Multi-grain brown bread with six tablespoons of mixed grains – fibre for the diet.
• Cheese bread – self-explanatory.

…and a range of oven breads…kumara, pumpkin, blue cheese…mainly as accompaniments for soups…

I’m very much into root veges like potato, kumara, parsnip, turnip, etc and will try to get as many of these into a single serving as possible. I’m less good on greens and will rely in revitalising frozen veges if I can get away from it – all that might be due to change now that the vege garden has taken off.

Late in 2015, a very clever young lady encouraged me to have a serious think about my eating habits and that was the start of my green journey…a healthy way of eating and thinking about food. To my intense amazement, changing the habits of a lifetime was not that hard, nor was sticking to those habits once the novelty wore off…along the way I’ve shed 20kg I didn’t really need and managed to keep that off as well…

The main changes I made are:

Reducing dairy, mainly by opting for non-dairy milks which I now make myself.

Avoiding whites (sugar, bread, salt, flour etc)….any thing that is overprocessed.

Avoiding anything in a wrapper that says it is healthy.

I feel a lot better, I sleep a lot better, I feel a lot better…all I can say is try it…