Scandinavian, plant-based, and seriously clever with their veggies: this year, we want to eat a little bit more like the Green Kitchen Stories bloggers. Here, they talk following the seasons, getting kids to eat their greens and how eating well doesn’t have to be a bore.
Motivation for eating healthily abounds in this month. But if lycra-clad ‘#fitspo’ icons and a solemn looking plate, adorned only with a few limp green leaves and some anaemic-looking chicken don’t do it for you, we’ve found a couple who are serving up a delicious alternative.
David Frenkiel and Luise Vindahl – and their adorable little’uns – are the first family of healthy foodie bloggers. Authors of two cookbooks (the latest is Green Kitchen Travels,) David hails from Sweden, Luise from Denmark, and they are sure to be all over your feeds in 2015. Which is no bad thing, they’re not exactly tough on the eye. Nor is their food: bright, nutrient dense, and crafted from the season’s best produce, their recipes nod to two of the buzziest nutritional trends – plant-based eating and Nordic Diet.
High on root veggies, leafy greens, pulses, and nuts, meat and seafood: the diet was originally devised by René Redzepi and Claus Meyer at Copenhagen’s famous Noma restaurant (that place with all the flowers and fairytale food they always used to go to on Masterchef). Its benefits are now science-backed too: with a new study from the University of Eastern Finland suggesting it can help beat inflammation. As for the benefits of a diet based mostly around stuff that grows out of the ground? They’re plentiful.
So forget flimsy fad diets and work a few of these tips from Luise and David into your eating habits instead.
Eat the seasons
‘We follow the seasons and take inspiration from what’s growing around us, but for someone in Australia, the seasonal foods will be completely different! Replace items in a recipe with what’s at its best around you – they’ll be much cheaper, too.’
Start with veg
‘On our travels in Asia, we saw people starting dishes with vegetables and this was really inspiring. The way we eat in the West is to base a dish around meat, or people will say, “I want pasta”. But we focus on the vegetables and build out. I’m a vegetarian and Luise eats veggie about 80 per cent of the time – so she’ll add some chicken or some fish.’
Go back to basics
‘We want to make healthy eating friendlier and easier for everyone to “get”. It’s not about scaring people with special foods, or restricting ourselves to one type of diet. Different things work for different people, so start simple and focus on all the good things about what you are eating, not what you can’t eat.’
Develop a healthy relationship with unhealthy food
‘There is no need to put numbers on your food – or focus on how bad sugar is. Every Friday it’s our daughter Elsa’s turn to choose dessert and if she wants to go out for ice cream, we’ll go out for ice cream, and we embrace that.’
Start little ones off good…
‘…and you’ll have a much easier job later on! If the rice has always been brown, that will be normal for them. And it’s the same with sweet things – if yoghurt is flavoured with sugar and sweeteners, that is how they will expect it to taste. When Luise was pregnant with our first daughter, Elsa, we decided together what we would feed her and stuck to it.’
Trust your instinct
‘You can eat whatever you want but as soon as you’re feeding your child, everyone suddenly has an opinion. We recently had a fight with our child’s pre-school – they had a nutritionist look at her menu for a week. It turned out she was the healthiest in the class.’
Give the supermarket a miss
‘We learned so much from going to markets on our travels. I’d ask to go in their kitchen and take lessons. In Morocco, we learnt completely new ways to make salads. They weren’t salads as we know, but rich, fragrant chutneys. You learn so much from normal people who cook every day meals at home.’
Photos by Instagram / @gkstories
Nourish your Instagram feed by following David, Luise and their food @gkstories. While you’re at it, you can check out our more humble efforts @healthymagdaily