Switching to Soup

In the wintertime, I like to switch to soup instead of salads for lunches. It has long been a diet secret that soup helps you lose weight. Being prepared and having healthy food easily accessible is one of the best ways to avoid food temptations and I think that having healthy soup in the crockpot is a great way to do this. You can go grab a bowl anytime you get hungry (if you’re a SAHM like me).

My Vegetable Diet Soup: Tomato sauce, water, celery, cabbage, onion, green beans, mushrooms, carrots, spinach (any vegetables you want except starchy ones like potatoes and corn), garlic, salt-to-taste, and I like to add chiles, beans are also a good choice, but I would make sure that vegetables are the biggest part of the soup and not the beans.

Coming down the vegetarian pub?

Two London pubs – out of 7,000, the first in the capital – have just announced that they're ditching meat from their menus. The idea of a vegetarian pub remains alien to most Brits; one of my favourite boozers tricked me, the Harden brothers and many others when it announced on 1 April this year that it was going veggie for a month. But there are in fact around 16 vegetarian pubs across the UK, several of which are apparently in Glasgow, which has always been a haven for bien-pensant lettuce-eaters.

One of the new places is the Smithfield Tavern, in the middle of the largest meat market in London. (I've been there at five in the morning: the punters don't look like they eat much tofu.) The other is the Coach & Horses in Soho. In some circles, this is one of the city's more famous boozers, attended by hacks in macs, wasted artists and, until 2006, presided over by Norman "You're Barred" Balon. Private Eye, whose offices are up the road, still hold their lunches there. Jeffrey Bernard was among the Coach's more famous and tragic regulars. He never ate anything there and took all his calories from booze, so if nobody eats the new food at least there's a precedent for it.