Healthy Cooking Recipes

Let's finally shatter the myth that healthy food is boring and lacking flavor. In fact you can enjoy life and do your health some good by eating tasty healthy food all the time. Much of the tastiest cuisine comes from the longest living and healthiest people on the planet -- and here's one example: a tasty Italian dish of mussels and pasta.

Bon appetite!

Mussels with Pasta and a garlic and parsley sauce

Serves 2

450g or 1Ib mussels
175g or 6 oz spaghetti or other pasta
25ml or 1 fl oz extra virgin olive oil
Two garlic cloves
Three short sprigs of flat leaf parsley.
One tablespoon of dry white wine

Wash the mussels in plenty of fresh, cold water and remove any barnacles with a short bladed knife. Pull out the beards (short hairy stems like seaweed).

Discard any that are open and do not close when given a sharp tap.

Bring a large pan of water to the boil and cook the spaghetti for five minutes or until still firm.

Meanwhile, slice up the garlic cloves, put in a small pan and add the olive oil. Place on the stove to gently sweat (but not brown) the garlic.

Meanwhile, roughly chop the parsley and, when the garlic and oil mix is ready, add the parsley to this.

Drain the cooked spaghetti and return to the pan. Add the mussels and the wine and put a tight lid on the pan to steam the mussels. Shake the pan and occasionally stir the pasta/mussel mix.

After about five minutes the mussels should all have opened. Discard any which have failed to open and add the garlic and parsley sauce, then replace the lid and cook for two more minutes. If the pasta is still too "al dente" for your taste, you can replace the lid and cook gently for another couple of minutes.

Stir and serve.

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Mussels With Pasta and a Garlic and Parsley Sauce -- The Health Benefits

This dish is a variation on the Italian classic of clams and pasta, using mussels instead of clams.

Many people think pasta is fattening, taking Luciano Pavarotti as evidence! However, glamourous movie star, Sophia Loren, eats pasta every day and no one could accuse her of being fat.

The truth is, pasta is not fattening -- provided you use it in the right way: don't overcook it and don't add fattening sauces. The pasta we are using here is made from whole durum wheat, so -- provided you don't overcook it-- it is still firm (what the Italians call "Al dente") and is 40 on the glycaemic index. If you are not familiar with this, it is the measure from 1-100 of foods which give you a glucose "rush" .

Below 50 is fine, and most foods in the no,no range of 50-100 are over-refined foods which, consequently - give you a sudden rise in blood sugar levels. The body then produces insulin to level out the blood sugar. That's fine, once in a while, but if you constantly eat foods almost exclusively in the 50-100 level, not only will you get fatter but your poor pancreas has to constantly turn out more and more insulin in a vain attempt to keep your blood sugar levels normal. Eventually, your pancreas might start to malfunction which can lead to Type 2 diabetes. This is an increasing feature of modern life, due to the prevalence of over refined, "junk" foods.

If you overcook your whole wheat pasta, so it's no longer al dente, it actually shoots up a whole ten notches to 50 on the glycaemic index. Even if you have ordinary, pasta made from refined flour (not whole wheat), but cook it gently to al dente, it stays at 45.

However, if you do what most people do and take ordinary refined pasta and cook it until it is soggy, you will get a GI reading of 55. Incidentally, overcooking pasta is what makes it stick together, which is why you need add oil to the water. But by cooking the type of pasta used in this recipe and only cooking until firm means you won't get it sticking together, so you don't need to add oil to the cooking water.

Mussels are packed with zinc and iron, as well as Omega 3 oil. Like other shellfish, they are rich in phosphorus, the mineral which -- as well as aiding bone construction -- is also reputed to improve your cerebral functions, which is why many people call fish "brain food".

Also, the garlic has a long pedigree as a super food: it lowers blood pressure and cholesterol, it is antiseptic and anti-coagulant and promotes the production of white blood cells -- vital for your immune system.

Flat leaf parsley, as well as being a really tasty herb, also has great health giving properties: it also boosts the immune system as well as being packed with vitamins A B & C as well as calcium, sodium, magnesium.

So -- provided you cook your pasta al dente -- this dish is a wonderful combination of great taste and health giving properties, which we should seek for every meal!