Plus

Health is svelte

Devanshi Mody picks out Colombo’s best low-calorie specialities

“Decadent” the Oxford Dictionary defines as “decline” and also “self-indulgent”. The latter makes your health decline, but not your line. Someone in a café once said nonchalantly, “Sri Lankans love eating sugar, butter, cheese, mayo and cream and then they get heart attacks and then they die.” Jolting. But Ernest Hemmingway said, “Without discipline everyone will die anyway.” Despair not, discipline can be delectable.

Milk & Honey (777681703):

They dare to be different. Dare one say Colombo’s only radically different café. From being audaciously vegetarian in carnivorous Colombo, indeed Colombo’s sole elite as opposed to ethnic vegetarian café, M&H has just re-invented itself as a conscientious health-food haven. And it requires intrepidity, lots of it, to be self-proclaimedly healthy in Colombo. Predictably then, although adored-by-embassy-clique, unique M&H remains woefully less in locals.

Young owner Pri is pioneering, although Pri no doubt would find inflated the epithet “pioneer” applied to her. Unlike most who won’t stop talking about themselves and their earth-shattering concepts, Pri won’t start.

Kohila Kottu at Mount Lavinia Hotel

So let’s start on Chef Justin’s Just-ins: Just-slim-for-summer selection. Taper with wholemeal wraps that nimble-fingered new recruit Dilusha, a cashier until now, wraps limberly. Through reels and reels of tightly spun lush lettuce resembling a plush emerald carpet emerges not Cleopatra but more delicious (unless you have a taste for Egyptian queens) beetroot falafel: slimly cloaked in tzatsiki and pearled with bean sprouts this is an exquisite contrast of sweet, soft beetroot, refreshing mint and studs of crunchy sprouts.

Nouveatés include avocado-rocket-raita-homemade-pesto and tremendously trim tofu-mushroom wraps. The deceptively slender wraps fill. I’m constantly told Colombo wants ‘big’. But remember that best-selling book “French Women Don’t Get Fat” emphatically links leanness to portion control.

Copious yet healthy are imaginative new salads (spicy pumpkin, hummus, avocado, tofu & toast with German brown bread made exclusively for M&H). Try too Colombo’s only wholemeal pastas that feed without feeding greed. At Rs. 490 the pastas, including summery, ungreasy zucchini, capers, oregano, tomato, remain unrivalled on the quality-quantity-cost equation.

M&H’s only concession to enormity are those resist-me-if-you-can homemade delicacies. And yes, those ample cake slices abundantly popular at a meagre Rs. 250. Haply, fruit-faceted cakes like subtle, supple, superb apple-cinnamon, ginger-jaggery and date-chocolate are as of now monkish in their uncreamed bare heads and ascetically sugar-controlled.

Astonishing crumble-at-sight cardamom shortbread is spectacularly not sweet. Be egg, butter, flour insufferable, get vegan orange-carrot or orange-nut. Lemon-yoghurt and apple-rhubarb muffins are phenomenally fragile. Lemon-yoghurt layers-cake-like icing; though naughtier, frugally sugared.

More austere still are just-inaugurated flawlessly firm but fluffy, sugar-slayed dark chocolate digestive and that marvel of a muesli cookie onwhich I (reluctantly, very reluctantly) must concede 10/10. Pri murmurs, “Well, you’ve gone on about slashing sugar and butter and perfecting textures…” Nice that one’s strictures strike and suggestions are sometimes implemented.

Sugar-free innovations include toffee brownie, ever so tender and made with jaggery, which is more sophisticated in being less refined than sugar. And then those low-fat muesli bars just barred all that’s bothersome.

True to its name M&H increasingly replaces sugar with mineral-enriched kitul 25% less calorie than sugar. Besides the old peanut-raisin version is the new unbettered, unbuttered, honeyed extravaganza of sesame-spangled muesli, almonds and cashew slivered in apricot. One feels so helpless before that expanse of resist-me-if-you-can homemade delicacies, but even date & oat slices have further dieted into slyly sugarless date & oat cookies.

Summer truffles aren’t mushrooms but delicate balls of sugar-free cocoa (cinnamon-chocolate, nut-chocolate) or fruit (apricot-lime, fig-orange). Terrific. Pri sighs she has only introduced four varieties yet of Colombo’s healthiest fruit-&-nut alternative to chocolate.

As for coffees, for once, I needn’t specify, “No sugar-cream-ice-cream.” M&H alone in Colombo adds none. Discover lithe limed iced milk-free coffee, optionally kitul-dashed, that attains without anything unwholesome luxurious lather.

Those in the know aver there are no two words about it, perhaps three: Colombo’s niftiest café! The only fat I’ve gained from eating here are fat chunks of words on how to eat all that’s neat without meat or sweet.

Healthy Kottu (Mount Lavinia Hotel):

I’ve missed the svelte-ring sunset. But the evening will blaze, as I’m to lose my cool. Chef Publis whom I’m meeting first time informs he has documented 260 vernacular veggies. I’ve come expecting some battered into healthy kottus. Indeed, a promo pamphlet that first enticed enumerated exciting unpronounceable exotica. And yet I’m now told to contend with jejune carrots and beans. Haven’t they jakfruit? No. Lotus flower, lotus stem, gourd, even yams? No-no-no-no.

I express the deepest dismay.

Chef promptly excavates his kitchen. Luckless. Exacerbating matters, my favourite manager Shamal, whom I was assured would be there, isn’t. Young Damith attempts to chill me with fat-slicing zingy ginger-lime slush. It isn’t the regular churn of ice so potently ginger-limed it punches you like a boxer. But Damith rushes right back with reinvigorated slush, “Is this Shamal-style?” Indeed. And Damith charms too.

I’m anticipating disaster with Chef Publis, but Kurakkan kottu comes with the much-deplored carrots. And propels me to such joy. Discipline slackens. Damith recommends restraint- a feast is following. Next variation: okra-rice. Delicious, I ravage, but it’s unfathomable why oil-gleaming okra and white rice are especially healthy, less still why subsequent rather random noodles with oleaginous aubergine are.

Milk and Honey’s tempting carrot drizzle loaf

Chef then bears coconut kottu beaming, “This I’ve invented today just for you!” I’m assuaged. But I shouldn’t have thought the Mongolian-wok-like motley of rice and salinated sambol healthy. I’d anticipated grain-free or at least wholegrain kottu with carefully-researched nutritious herbs, but the kottu terminates with beans-semolina weltering in oil.

By what stretch of imagination this is healthy eludes. Never mind, one manager discloses, “Chef Publis generally only instructs. But just for you today he jumped in and prepared the kottu himself.” The kottu changed hands half-way, we say simultaneously.

Our verdict: immensely tasty, but not particularly dainty.

Urban Kitchen:

Its best part is its emptiest part- the juice bar! Get Sanjeeva to knock out grenadine and knock up zingy Tarzan Juicy Cooler (fresh orange, pineapple, lime, curd) that’ll have you swinging. A meal in itself. Be reinforcements required, try fresh mango/ginger/strawberry lassi, customised sugarless. Sanjeeva commendably streamlines other fruit-curd concoctions deploying frappé-making techniques acquired at DéliFrance.

Expect that exhilarating sharpness of icicles interspersed with precisely proportioned fruit. New trend is if your favourite barista isn’t at your favourite café, you U-turn. Quite rightly, for it’s not the recipe but its execution. If Sanjeeva’s away, I’d abstain. Unless you can persuade young supervisor Graham, also ex-DéliFrance, to whizz low-calorie fruit fantasies.

Top to the page  |  E-mail  |  views[1]
SocialTwist Tell-a-Friend
 
Other Plus Articles
Medicine can be fun
Practical ways to open the doors wider for our disabled
Letters to the Editor
Appreciations
Chugging along on a happy train ride
A place to relax and revitalise away from the city din
Anoma’s artistic message
Memories are made of colour and brush strokes
An emotional evening to remember
Diluka off to Austria for World Dance Comp
Health is svelte
CCSE readies for arts and handicraft exhibition
Weaving her childhood days to bring joy to today’s children
Events in brief
Royalty is as royalty does
A reluctant politician who united communities
‘Unity Camp’: A child’s right to reconciliation
Mary Chapman’s mission to give vision in its 100th year

 

 
Reproduction of articles permitted when used without any alterations to contents and a link to the source page.
© Copyright 1996 - 2012 | Wijeya Newspapers Ltd.Colombo. Sri Lanka. All Rights Reserved | Site best viewed in IE ver 8.0 @ 1024 x 768 resolution