Fit Fare

As I mentioned in the last installment of The Athlete Gourmet, you shouldn’t deny yourself the occasional sweet treat. However, if made properly, cookies and muffins may not even have to fall into the reward category. They could be the perfect pre-run energy or mid-morning snack. The key is using the right kinds of ingredients to make your cookies.

I recently discovered a great way to learn about these better ingredients:  Heidi Swanson’s cookbook Super Natural Cooking- Five Ways to Incorporate Whole and Natural Ingredients into Your Cooking. Swanson details the wide array of superior alternatives to white flour and sugars and offers great recipes that use these more healthful ingredients.

My favourite discovery from the cookbook is mesquite flour. The flour is made from mesquite pods and tastes naturally sweet, almost like an odd combination of sweetened cocoa and coconut. It is quite delicious, and even better, very good for you. It has a low glycemic index and provides a slow constant source of energy.

Swanson uses the flour to make chocolate chip cookies which were so delicious that I was unable to snap a photo of them, they disappeared so quickly!

In addition to explaining the various types of whole grains that can be used to enrich the nutritional content of your foods, Swanson also uses a wide variety of wheat flours. Not having much experience baking with alternatives to white flour myself, I did not realize that there were any whole wheat possibilities beyond simply “whole wheat flour.” Turns out there are quite a few alternatives and the two that she recommends are whole wheat pastry flour and white whole wheat flour.

Almost immediately after receiving this book, I headed to Rainbow Grocery, our local Natural and Organic grocery, and began exploring the bulk flour aisle. I bought a variety of flours and went home to begin experimenting with them. The Espresso Flecked Banana Muffins looked delicious (thanks to Swanson’s gorgeous photography) and I happened to have some overripe bananas on hand.

The white whole wheat flour in this recipe is much lighter than regular whole wheat flour and makes for a delicious and not too dense muffin. It was the perfect breakfast, especially before heading out for a run.

I highly recommend checking out this book, not only for the delicious ways of incorporating whole grains in your diet but also for Swanson’s other equally tasty and wholesome lessons: natural sweeteners, superfoods and adding colourful foods to your diet.

They are all lessons that, while not specifically targetted at athletes, can definitely improve the quality of anyone’s meals.