Am putting this recipe down to beating a cold inside 24 hours. It’s THAT good (and tastes delicious).
Yesterday I woke up feeling GRIM.
Sneezing, eyes streaming, full blown cold suddenly appearing out of nowhere. Not impressed.
I’m not very good at being ill, so as I sat on a sofa next to a mounting pile of tissues, I decided to do everything I could nutritionally to blitz it.
By the end of the day I was feeling a lot better and today, less than 24 hours after it started, the cold has pretty much gone, so before giving you the recipe I thought I’d share what I ate. If you’re just interested in the recipe, keep on scrollin’ down 🙂
Cold-busting food for the day, from the beginning:
My boyfriend had bought a packet of half price Bioglan Superfoods Supergreen powder a few weeks ago, so I started with a couple of teaspoons of that mixed with water (tropical flavour – actually very nice). Not sure of the proven benefits of things like they but in this instance, anything was worth a try.
Also knocked back an echinacea tablet (these do seem to help prevent / reduce colds) and about 8 vitamin D tablets (recommended amount is 1 or 2 at a time but these are fat-soluble, meaning any excess is simply stored in the body, so decided to take in the maximum amount I could and let my body store the rest). These were the only supplements we had in the house that might have helped; if we had multivitamins I would have taken one of those too, but I prefer to just eat enough fruit and veggies to get the freshest and most high vitamins and minerals straight from food.
Didn’t have much of an appetite at first but wanted to get the nutrients in, so breakfast was a nutribullet smoothie of spinach, frozen berries, unsweetened almond milk and half a scoop of vanilla protein powder.
By lunchtime, the idea of some chocolate protein pancakes was seeming more appealing.
The ingredients in this are pretty healthy – 1 egg, 1 banana, 1 scoop chocolate protein powder, 1tbsp cacao powder, some yogurt and some frozen berries, so I figured this would be good for me and I should most definitely have some (purely for health reasons of course).
After this, I also snacked on some raspberries and blueberries to pile in as many antioxidants as possible, and then decided to make a soup.
We’ve all heard that chicken soup is great for a cold. I’d also read about the benefits of garlic, ginger and peppers, so basically thought – ‘why not chuck as much good stuff in as possible’. This lead to the recipe below, which was really rather tasty and did seem to help a lot.
It’s fairly low calorie too, so there was still a little bit of room left for a dinner of a small piece of steak with stir fried veg – courgette, pepper, tomato, garlic, celery and spinach. TONS of veg, along with gallons of water, and I’m sure these both really helped. Honestly most of my steps came from trips to the bathroom to ‘spend a penny’ but was well worth it to feel better so quickly.
So there we go –
Tons of veggies. Tons of water. Some protein. Some berries. And this awesome chicken soup.
Chicken Soup Recipe (finally!)
Ingredients (serves 2)
- 1 sweet potato
- 1 red pepper
- 1 red onion
- 1 carrot
- 3 cloves garlic
- 2 cm fresh ginger
- 1 stick celery
- 500ml chicken stock
- 2 chicken breasts
- 2 tsp smoked paprika
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1 tsp mild chilli powder
- 1 tbsp tomato puree
- 1 tbsp sweet chilli sauce
- salt and pepper to taste
- 1 spring onion to garnish (optional)
Instructions
Peel the potato, onion, carrot and ginger, then chop up all the veg into small pieces and add to a large pan with tablespoon of coconut oil.
Fry on a medium heat for around 5 minutes.
Add the chicken stock. The water should just cover the vegetables, so add a little extra if needed, and then let it simmer for 10-15 minutes until the sweet potato and carrots are soft.
Pour everything into a blender and blitz until smooth. Add the paprika, cumin, puree, sweet chilli sauce, chilli powder, salt and pepper, and blitz again, then taste to see if it needs a little extra of the paprika or chilli sauce.
Pour the soup back into the pan, chop up the chicken in to small chunks and add that in.
Allow the soup to bubble away gently for 10 minutes or until chicken is cooked (you may want to cover the pan with a lid if it starts spitting soup into the air like mine did).
Pour into two bowls, garnish with the chopped spring onion, and feel better with every mouthful 🙂
