Snacks and breakfast, tofu

Diet begins with breakfast. The first meal of the day should give a proper calorie intake and a balanced quantity of proteins, vitamines, and minerals. A healthy breakfast is a good start for the day and to integrate those elements that in the next meals will be used to combine and balance the nutritious elements. 

This is a good principle for any diet and especially for the vegetarian diet. The most difficult thing, but then everything the main thing is getting used to eat healthy, is to combine food and meals. 

Especially at the beginning, you tend to eat a lot of cheese or to avoid them completely, to step into the wonderful veggie shops and try all the types of seitan, soy and legumes based food, or you behave as nothing happened and fill with eggs.

Clearly, when starting a vegetarian diet, also the ovo-lacto vegetarian, you start to look at the nutritious in foods and try to understand the best way to get the best diet.

I personally always avoided diets with non-chalance, convinced that in the very end the perfect diet is the one that in that particular moment we feel like eating, I always trusted my body and my instict, and I tried to swing around the idea of controlling all the ingredients, the nutritives and RDAs etc.

Flipping over the pages I read that it is advisable to combine the elements. Actually my ancestors were well aware of that, seen that they followed and invented the so called Mediterranean diet during  the centuries. To avoid lacks of proteins, heme and nonheme iron, B12 viitamin and most B group vitamines, calcium, magnesium, potassium and a lot of other things that I'm not going to list. If for the B12 there's not much to do if not looking for fortified foods or some supplement There is also a way to get a good intake of omega-3 and omega-6 without eating fish, the secret being in fitting food and meal in a proper  way, beginning with breakfast and snacks. 

A freshly pressed orange juice, or a lemonade in the morning would be the ideal also to help absorbing proteins and iron with vegetable origin; yogurt is a good habit for those who like it, and cereals would be desirable. 

Eating fruit and dark leaf vegetables is important as well as avoiding as much as possible industrial food. Reading the label, also to see if there is some element derived from dead animals. The home made ciambellone dipped in milk is a good breakfast, especially if sided with a freshly pressed 0miles orange juice, even if  we do not always remember to bake the ciambellone the evening before breakfast. A nourishing, sweet, light and quick recipe is a treat of tofu, tasteless very nutritious food that should be eaten at least once a day, and honey.

Fresh tofu

Acacia honey

Cinnamon

Slice the tofu, lay it on a slice of warm bread, cover with walnuts and abundant acacia honey, sprinkle with cinnamon and serve with fresh ginger flakes, candied rinds of lemon and orange and cinnamon sticks.

©2010.2011