Making a fresh start

Above: Tony Tobin serving up some delicious food

If you’d like to lose a few pounds for summer, or simply want to start eating a bit more healthily, then it’s easy... Forget the latest fad diet, bin the ready meals and start cooking with fresh, seasonal produce, says resident celeb chef TONY TOBIN

Dieting books and weight-loss programmes in the UK and North America are the frontline in a ‘get thin’ industry worth billions of pounds each year. That’s enough to provide good nutrition to whole countries in Africa, which is a cruel irony in itself, but from a chef’s point of view I want to look at this phenomenon in a different way. I will start by letting you into a secret…

Unfortunately, it’s a secret that pretty much everyone knows already, but here goes. This industry has little to do with health and lots to do with profits. And it makes those profits by fuelling an already unhealthy public paranoia about ‘how we should look and cook’ and then offering a supposed solution through various weight-loss formulae, which must themselves have some unique ingredient or theory that no diet to date has been daft enough to include. The reason for having the unique formula or theory is not that they work, just that they need to appear unique to sell their associated books or courses.

Walk into any book shop and you will find a whole shelf or section depressingly devoted to books with pretty much the same title: The X Diet. If you type the word ‘diet’ into Amazon, it returns 22,468 books with that word in the title! In The X Diet books, the X will be one of three things: a counter-intuitive food type (like cabbage soup), a scientific sounding acronym (like GL) or the name of some guru or celebrity (Atkins, Jordan) who has adopted their own diet, lost a few pounds and now wants the world to do the same so long as they start by shelling out £12.99.

Excuse the cynicism; it’s not just because I’m a chef and, as they say, turkeys wouldn’t vote for Christmas. No, my gripe with the diet industry is that any dietician or nutrition expert worth their salt (Oops! Sorry, I probably shouldn’t have included such an inappropriately unhealthy phrase) can tell you the three steps to dietary health in just under a minute. Eat regular moderate sized meals with lots of fresh fruit, veg and lean meat/fish, drink lots of water, do some exercise and don’t obsess. Simple.

When I am wearing my chef’s bib and tucker – which is most of the time – people will occasionally wrinkle their foreheads at me before launching into a vigorous discussion that restaurant food ‘surely can’t be good for you’ because it’s too rich or too sweet. Rubbish. Granted, if you visit an ‘eat all you can for £5.99’ restaurant where wheat and MSG are the cheap staples of the low cost gorge-fest, then it certainly won’t be good for you but to me, that’s not a restaurant. A restaurant works with fresh ingredients that are prepared on the premises within hours or minutes of serving.

Binning the ready meals...

What’s more, a good chef will usually buy from a local supplier who they can trust and there will be an unbroken chain from the field or farm to the plate. Restaurant veg is fresh and usually steamed rather than boiled to a pulp because customers would send pulp back. The villain when it comes to modern food is not the restaurateur, it’s the Ready Meal. Never has such a friendly sounding description hidden such a cloak and dagger approach to food. Yes, they’re easy but no, they’re not fresh. Yes, they’re cheap but that’s because most of them contain cheap ingredients with enough salt, sugar and fat to fool the stone age parts of our brains into thinking we’re getting both a full stomach and the raw ingredients of life.

Now, you’re probably thinking, ‘Calm down, Tony’, but I have to say that I was set on this path by a lovely email from a Surrey Life reader who wrote in with admirable honesty saying: “I’ve made a conscious effort to eat a little more healthily since the New Year, but I have to admit, it is starting to drag. What would you recommend to liven up a lunchtime salad? Or perhaps you’ve just got some great recipes for healthy but filling meals.” Thanks Mr Goodbrand for the question and for giving me a perfect opportunity to climb aboard the Tobin soapbox.

Healthy food doesn’t have to be a drag; it doesn’t have to leave you hungry. It doesn’t have to be salad-centric. Healthy eating starts by making yourself more conscious of what you’re eating and filling your shopping basket with fresh ingredients rather than ready meals. The less packaging that fills your bin bags, the better your diet’s likely to be. Don’t stress about red meat or potatoes or Atkins or cabbage soup, just pick up fresh produce when you shop, cook it, eat it and wait 20 minutes before you go for seconds or pudding.

Here, I have included a lovely recipe for Mr Goodbrand, perfect for those mid-week dinners, and I hope there are more of you who will try it. But, most of all, I’d urge you all to begin to think like a chef rather than a convenience seeker. Convenience equals shortcuts equals processed equals rubbish. Good chefs buy great ingredients fresh and do as little as possible to them. The only difference is that we also try to make things look great too – but a few crispy leaks and a teaspoon of jus isn’t going to harm anyone.

So, to end the sermon, if you want healthy food that looks great and you don’t fancy the washing up, visit a good restaurant (and I can recommend two!). If you want to eat well at home, save yourself the pain and expense of Yet Another Diet Book… just visit your greengrocer, butcher and fishmonger. If the meals you put on your table involve puncturing plastic films and pushing start on the microwave, it’s going to take more than an X to make you healthy.

Tony's recipe

Aduki Grilled Seabass Serves 2

A real favourite of mine, this recipe (pictured left) uses one of the original superfoods, aduki beans. They are bursting with both flavour and protein. This means they’re not only good for you but will provide long lasting energy and help you feel full up without needing to eat lots of bread. The seabass is one of the lightest and tastiest fish around and the lime juice ensures it has a good vitamin C kick.

Ingredients:

• 2 sea bass fillets (about 150-200g each)
• A little vegetable oil
• 100g of boiled Aduki beans
• 50g of boiled black-eye beans 
• 1 large shallot chopped very finely
• 1 large red chilli, deseeded and chopped very finely
• 3 medium-sized firm tomatoes  
• 1 lime
• 2 cloves of garlic crushed
• A pinch of thyme
• A little olive oil
• A sprinkling of chopped coriander

Method:

• Chop the shallot and chilli very finely and gently fry them, along with the garlic and thyme, for 3-4 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside. 
• If you are boiling the aduki and black-eye beans yourself, drain them and allow them to cool completely. If you’re using pre-prepared beans, put them into a large bowl, add in the shallot mix and the  coriander and stir together. Leave to stand.
• Put the tomatoes into a bowl of boiling water for a minute or two then slip off the skins. Quarter them and remove everything but the outer flesh. Chop roughly and add to the mixture. Stir, squeeze the lime over the whole mix and put it in the fridge.
• 10 minutes before you’re ready to serve, brush a little olive oil on the skin side of the seabass and grill it for 5-6 minutes skin side up. Turn it over and seal the other side.  
• Remove the salsa from the fridge, add a tablespoon of virgin olive oil and stir. Make two small mounds on cold plates and top with the fillets of seabass, skin side up. Decorate with a little more coriander.

Tony Tobin has been a regular on the BBC’s Ready Steady Cook for over a decade and runs two acclaimed restaurants in Surrey: The Dining Room in Reigate and POST in Banstead.

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