14 fave freezer hacks you can pin on your fridge now!

So you take some meat out of the freezer and defrost it. You end up using only half of it. What do you do with the rest? Can you put it back in the freezer? Or does it have to be tossed?

Sarah Wilson Freezing
Image from Simplicious

If you’re impatient and choose the quicker (but not so safe) method of defrosting in the microwave or under warm water, you’ll need to prepare your food immediately and can only refreeze it after it’s been cooked.

Avoid at all costs: defrosting food on the kitchen bench at room temperature or under hot water. Bacteria multiplies much more rapidly in a warm environment, making these methods simply unsafe.

A stack of freezer hacks:

1. Defrost slowly.

It’s totally fine to refreeze thawed foods (including raw meat, some fish and seafood), provided you’ve defrost it slowly in the first place.

2. Defrost in the fridge.

Always. Not on the bench or sink. Over one or two days.

Read more

Meet the new Julie and Julia…

I’m pegging myself as something of a Julia Childs here. Forgive me for the lack of humility. I’ll explain. Quickly. And then we can move onto pretty pictures.

A while back Jo invited readers to cook their way through my latest book, Simplicious. All 306 recipes. Which is quite the endeavour. A stack of keen cookers took up the challenge, veritable Julies in this equation (get the reference now?).

Sweet Potato Nachos: I made a giant family tray using pulled pork from the freezer. My 5-year-old loved his ‘sweet potato boats’, and of course, the corn cobs were saved to make corn cob stock.
Erin’s take on my Sweet Potato Nachos. She says: I made a giant family tray using pulled pork from the freezer. My 5-year-old loved his ‘sweet potato boats’ and, of course, the corn cobs were saved to make corn cob stock.

I’ve been sharing results on Instagram. But I reckon Erin’s efforts are so bloody impressive they deserve a full interweb page.

Over to you, Erin.

Why I’m cooking my way through the book:

I love cookbooks. I own nearly 80 cookbooks.  But I have a bad habit of cooking only a handful of recipes from each book, returning to the same, familiar and appealing recipes.

I always fancied the idea of doing a Julie and Julia style challenge – to deliberately cook every single recipe from one cookbook – but I’d never found ‘the’ book to do it. When I started flicking through Simplicious, I immediately felt that it met all the criteria for such a challenge. Based on IQS principles, it aligns with my way of eating; it’s

Read more

Time for me to get really real with you about the sugar tax

I’m going to start this post by saying hats off to Big Soda…they sure do a fine job of spreading misinformation.

xxx

Last week the I Quit Sugar team and I launched a huge campaign for an Australian sugar tax on sugar soft drinks.

Click to sign now if you like.

Jamie Oliver did similar in the UK and, with 155,000 signatures, was able to influence UK Parliament to commit to a 20 per cent tax on sugary soft drinks in 2018. The folk behind his campaign – change.org – approached me to do the same here.

Wonderfully, on the weekend, Jamie Oliver got on board and endorsed my petition.
Wonderfully, on the weekend, Jamie Oliver got on board and endorsed my petition by sharing my link. You can do the same, adding your own empassioned message. Simply click here.

We now have 15,000 signatures. And counting.

Click to sign now to add to the tally.

Anyway, I’ve become a little frustrated about the push-back from some to the campaign. I love debate and constructive questioning of anything I do. I’m grateful for it. It keeps me on my toes and committed to getting closer to truth. But I tend to get frustrated when push-back is wedded to the black and white and lazy blanket

Read more

9 fun ways to make last night’s dinner with an egg on it

Folk out there are still scared of leftovers. They needn’t be. They’re safe, and legal (to take home in doggie bags from restaurants), and entirely sensible, sustainable and simplicious. If there’s one trick you need to perfect, should you be new to this leftovers caper, is to know how to repurpose dinner into another meal the next day.

https://www.instagram.com/raeishungry/
Rae’s clever take on this dish, details below.

I call it “Doggie Bag Dinner the Next Day”. The French call it oeufs en restes. Whatever you want to call it, the idea entails putting a leftover meal in a pan – it can be a whole meal (chopped up), a soup, a pasta or a stew – adding a dash of broth and sticking an egg in the middle.

Fennel, silverbeet, turmeric, leek, garlic, miso, blended, with an egg smoodged through it. Plus coriander. Because I'm snotty.
Last night’s fennel, silverbeet and leek, plus turmeric garlic, miso, blended…with an egg smoodged through it. Plus coriander.

The 2:4 Doggie-Bag Rule. 
Don’t be scared of food poisoning: simply get the meal to the fridge within 2 hours, and keep it there for no more than 4 days before eating. Oh, and reheat it in the microwave for at least 2 minutes until it’s steaming

Read more

When other people do Simplicious better than me!

One of my great mates, Bill, told me he’s sick of the sound of my name. His partner Mark has changed the way they live and it’s kind of annoying Bill. Bones being collected from his plate and the smell of bone broth…it’s driving him mental. Worse, whenever he arks up, Mark’s response is, “Sarah Wilson says…”.

The embarrassing thing is, Mark is actually doing a better job of the whole Simplicious caper than me at the moment. He out-Simplicious’d me. He’s not alone…awkwardly enough.

I've been out-Simplicious'd!
I’ve been out-Simplicious’d!

I Quit Sugar’s recipe developer Meg has a housemate Lucy who goes beyond.

Says Meg: “We always keep a “banana box” in the freezer for smoothies and whatever. One day we were cutting up the bananas to freeze and Luce was just like OMG I can’t throw out the peels. And I was like… throw out the peels you crazy person. So then she Pinterested the hell out of it and found you could make “banana water” so she simmered the peels in a pot of water… then froze the water into ice cubes to use in smoothies and things.”

Yeah, totally out-Simplicious’d.

xxx
Bananas about to be simmered up for Lucy’s “banana water”

Then “Emily”, a reader who once posted a “celery boner” on Instagram (which I reposted) emailed me to share this: “The other day my friend texted me, ‘Every time I throw away food, I feel like Sarah Wilson is looking

Read more

10 things to do to heal your gut

I’m gut-health obsessed. I talk about gut health a lot, here and elsewhere. I believe most contemporary ills stem from gut issues and I’ve got my fair share of personal experience. Today, I’m sharing some of the tips and tricks I’ve accumulated in my years of research on the topic.

Things to heal your gut Sarah Wilson
Image via montanaroue.com

1. Don’t worry about dirt on veggies.

A little dirt provides your gut with some soil-based organisms, which, through a process of gene swapping with the microbiome, have been found to strengthen the immune system. European scientists worked out this is why kids living on organic farms are far less likely to develop asthma or allergies. They call it the “farm effect”. I reckon I have this…I used to live in dirt, eat dirt and certainly didn’t have a germ-a-phobe mum.

2. Quit sugar.

Sugar is your microbiome’s worst enemy. It promotes the growth of bad bacteria in the gut and hampers the growth of the good stuff. But good news: the effects of sugar are not irreversible (unlike the effects of seed oils, for instance). When you quit the white stuff and Just Eat Real Food, your gut flora will repair itself.

3. Avoid Aspartame. 

It’s converted to formaldehyde (yep, the stuff used an embalming fluid) in your body. Your liver can’t clear this toxin normally, so it remains lodged, activates inflammation in your gut and can lead to autoimmune issues and cancer growth.

4. Just Eat Real Food.

Because processed foods contain all the things you should avoid if you’re aiming for a

Read more

My bareboating (and hiking) guide to the Whitsundays

My recent sailing trip up at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was quite possibly the best trip of my life. Brace yourself for a fair bit of hyperbole. Apologies in advance!

xxxx
Bareboating in the Whitsundays…I slept. And read. And hiked. And ate.

Please note: I was supported in doing the bareboating by Tourism and Events Queensland, however, as always, the trip was conducted on my own terms and the recommendations are my own. The operators and providers I went with were my own choosing. You’ll find my position on sponsored posts and advertising here.

So the basic gist is this.

Bareboating entails hiring a boat that you sail yourself. You live on the boat in extremely comfortable digs. You are the captain, skipper and crew. You choose where you go and where you anchor for the night.

There are 74 islands in the Whitsundays to visit and more than 50 anchorages. It’s all very choose-your-own-adventure. Which totally floats my boat. I’m not so good at being handheld through a holiday. Contiki tours and

Read more

My Indian Kimchi recipe: The best probiotic food

Kimchi is hands down THE best probiotic food out there. I add it to my meals on a regular basis and figured it’d be a good idea to share why it’s so bloody good for you…as well as a recipe from my latest book I Quit Sugar: SIMPLICIOUS. Yeah, for free.

My Indian Kimchi
My Indian Kimchi, recipe from I Quit Sugar: Simplicious

Probiotics vs prebiotics

Before I start ranting about the health benefits of kimchi I’ll distinguish between the two ‘biotics. Folk can get them confused.

* Probiotics are live “good” bacteria that aid the digestive system by controlling the growth of “bad” bacteria. That lactobacillus acidophilus in yoghurt…that’s a probiotic.

* Prebiotics on the other hand are non-digestible food fibres that enable probiotics to stick to the bowel wall and helps stimulate their growth. Fibres found in foods that typically make us fart are prebiotics (they travel to the large intestine intact where the “good” bacteria tries to break it down, facilitating “good” bacteria growth and…gas).

The two go hand in hand.

So why are probiotics so important?

Bacteria are crucial to human health. In fact, the vast community of bacteria (also called the microbiome)

Read more