Five a Day

Do you get your five a day? Yes, fruit and vegetables I mean of course. We never really thought about it too much. We prefer cooking meals from scratch so don’t have packets to inform us how many portions we are eating with each meal. So when we had a quick tot up of our daily portions we had a pleasant surprise.Now of course we don’t manage it every day. No one really does I expect. We have lazy days just like anybody else, but on the average day we easily achieve the five recommended portions and often easily exceed this number.

We usually start the day with either a bowl of wholegrain cereal topped off with fresh fruit often a banana and semi skimmed milk or multigrain toast with spread or reduced fat cheese washed down with a helping of fruit juice. So this equates to either one or two portions a day depending on what we decide to have.

Between breakfast and lunch we have a couple of apples as snacks and then lunch comprises a sandwich on granary bread. My sandwich is usually ham, beef or turkey with a generous helping of lettuce, tomato and cucumber. A medium sized apple equates to one portion of fruit so we have another couple of portions here. We decided to disregard the salad on the sandwich and ignore it for the sake of this exercise. So already we are up to either three or four portions before our evening meal.

Tonight we are having a vegetable tart for our evening meal. A puff pastry based loaded with roasted tomatoes, leeks, onions, mushrooms and peppers. This easily equates to a couple of our daily portions. Other favourite evening meals are spag bol which holds a surprising amount of vegetables including tinned tomatoes and onions, chilli which is just a variation on spag bol with beans and peppers added into the mix and some chilli powder of course. We also have a lot of traditional roast dinners which include plenty of fresh vegetables, we usually try to eat what is in season but now with the supermarkets flying in produce by the hundreds of tonnes you can eat what you like when you like.

So as you can see, it isn’t really as difficult as it sounds to eat the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. It is of course advised to have five different portions a day, for example drinking five portions of fruit juice is not a good idea. We enjoy cooking using fresh ingredients so achieving five a day seems relatively easy for us.