Getting your Ten Vegetables and Fruits At Home and Overseas

Tea time fruit and yogurt. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Problem
How do you achieve five vegetables a day, seven or ten, at home or travelling?

Answer
At home this is easy:
Ten pieces of fruit and vegetables, not difficult if you are vegetarian and cutting out sugar. Even if you aren't:

Breakfast:
Three pieces of fruit mixed into yogurt or muesli including apple and sultanas and one more fruit in season. If no fruit is in season, add tinned prunes. Plus freshly made orange juice, that's four for breakfast.

Some people prefer to make up a mixed fruit or mixed votable juice. You can make it up in bulk and eat or drink a little every day.

You could also have a banana milkshake for breakfast or your eleven o'clock break. Or mix yogurt and milk with mango to make a mango lassi.

Elevenses
Add an apple for elevenses, five. You are half way there, and two meals and a snack to go.

Lunch
For lunch: two or three vegetables such as tomatoes and carrots and lettuce for lunch; that's three, plus apple tart or pear tart, or fruit fool or puree, that easily another four so you have reached nine.

Tea
If you had either an apple or fruit juice for tea that's ten.

Dinner
However, if you have not had four of those items, have vegetable soup, meat or quiche or pizza and two vegetables with dinner, such as broccoli and peas. For dessert, follow by strawberries and cream.

Fruit and vegetables are not so expensive if you have a garden and grow apple trees. We should all go back to growing apples in gardens, allotments for those in flats, tomatoes in window boxes, mushrooms in dark cupboards.

Stories
I started serving fruit salad for dessert when my late father was suffering from late onset diabetes.

Later, another close family member had cancer treatment and we read health articles all day every day for weeks. We looked at the cancer websites, the World Health websites, the NHS guidelines. We went back to their sources: respectable sites with academic studies of large numbers of people, over years, and shorter studies, with control groups. I read about comparisons of migrating populations such as Japanese women going from Japan to the USA and getting different diseases showing that it was not inherited but to do with lifestyle or diet.

Prunes
At first we were not keen on prunes but needed them for some reason. (Was it that chemo made you constipated?) Within a few weeks, we had found that they provided interesting contrast in colour and a touch of sweetness.

(We also cheated on the 'fresh' idea by adding ginger in syrup or maple syrup.

In Singapore we have not managed to find tinned prunes. We have added a carton of apple juice to dried prunes but it comes out at three times the price.

Travelling
The simplest way to stick to your edit is to carry a Tupperware or similar box containing two pieces of fruit for a snack or to add to lunch. I find an apple and a banana are the most convenient. I sometimes cut the apple in half and remove the core and slice it into segments like an orange. Other good fruits for travelling are seedless grapes, and red and green grapes. You can have them all at once, or sneak the odd one or two into your mouth as a pick me up.

Speaking of citrus fruit, oranges are heavy and messy, but tangerines have easy peel skin, weigh less, and make less mess.

Hotel and Restaurant Breakfasts
Opt for half a grapefruit. Add prunes. Orange juice.

Hotel or Restaurant Lunch
Lunch time, again look for a fruit starter such as melon, melon and ham, avocado pear, tricolore (Italian for three colours) which is the three colours of the Italian flag, white cheese, red tomatoes, green avocado. Try meal and two vegetables, a vegetarian option. Two of you can share one meat and vegetable dish and one vegetarian dish. Pizza? Try a pizza with tomatoes and / or pineapple (often called Hawaiian).

Ask for a fruit dessert. If none, pop out to the local supermarket.

Cakes and biscuits
If you must have tarts and cakes, the French apple tart (tarte Tatin) with an apricot marmalade glaze; pancakes with jam and fresh fruit, apple tart, apple crumble, durian cake, "Jaffa" cake with orange spread. You can simply take any three fruits or vegetables and look at recipe websites for ideas from around the world. Other favourites are carrot cake and blueberry muffins.

Cakes, Biscuits and Tarts List
Apple Crumble
Apple and Blackberry crumble
Apple pie
blueberry muffin
Carrot Cake
Fruit fool
Fruit Pavlova
Mincemeat pies / tart
Plum pudding (Christmas pudding)
Stuffed Dates
Summer Pudding
Tarte Tatin

Fruit
Fresh pineapple is cheap in the UK. In the UK in summer you can often find summer pudding in supermarkets or on restaurant menus. Summer pudding contains two or more red fruits, such as red currants.

Another British favourite is apple crumble, or apple and blackberry crumble. For a change, you might like apricot crumble.

Here's a list of fruit you might find in your nearest shop, either fresh or tinned, or frozen.

FRUIT
apples
apricots
bananas
blackberries
black currants
blueberry
cherries
dates
durian
figs
gooseberry
grapefruit
grapes
greengages
guava
kiwi fruit
lemon
lime
mango
melon
orange
passion fruit
peach
pears
plums
prunes
pumpkin
quince
raspberries
red currants
satsumas
star fruit
tangerine
watermelon

Also add herbs such as mint.

Drinks:
Banana Milkshake, mint tea, black currant cordial, lemon tea, mixed juice (two to four fruits such as apple, orange, pineapple, star fruit watermelon) watermelon.

VEGETABLES / Herbs for flavouring
artichoke
avocado
beans
bean sprouts
cabbage
carrot
cauliflower
chives
courgettes
green beans
lettuce
Mange tout
mint
mustard and cress
olives
onions
parsley
peas
peppers (green, red, yellow)
pickled cucumber (gherkin)
snow peas
spinach
spring onions
squash
string beans
tomato
watercress

Fancy fruits
You might also try fancy fruits, exotic fruits, when travelling. Mangoes. Durians. Guava. Passion fruit.

Decoration
Use mint, individual small fruits such as sliced strawberries, mint, edible flowers such as rose petals.

Tips
Look at the reduced price sections of supermarkets in the UK and Singapore for bargains, sometimes all day, sometimes evenings.
Look for the cheapest fruits. For example, in Singapore bananas are very cheap.

The Chinese in Singapore eat green vegetables such as Pak Choy. Fruit and vegetables are likely to be cheaper and more unusual varieties will be available in Little India or the wet markets on the edge of the island near the HDB (state housing). Fair price supermarket is cheaper than HillV2 and Jasons.

Tinned prunes can be bought cheaply in supermarkets in London and carried to Singapore.
More information from:
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit

Angela Lansbury, travel writer.