The Secret Ingredient: Delicious,easy recipes which might just save your life

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350g/12oz mixed salad leaves, washed, dried and torn (curly endive, baby spinach, rocket/arugula, radicchio, chicory, watercress, treviso, oak leaf, dandelion, nasturtium)

freshly ground black pepper

to serve (optional):

wholemeal (whole-grain) croutons

toasted pine nuts

shavings of Parmesan

for the dressing:

2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

juice of 1 lemon

1 tsp wholegrain mustard

½ tsp muscovado sugar

1 Rub a wooden salad bowl with the raw garlic. Combine the herbs and the salad leaves and mix thoroughly. Season with black pepper.

2 For the dressing, put the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, mustard and sugar into a cup or small bowl and whisk together with a fork quite vigorously.

3 Dress the leaves, but don’t drown them. Serve immediately - once dressed, try not to let the salad sit around for too long, or the leaves will go soggy. If you like, scatter over some wholemeal (whole-grain) croutons, toasted pine nuts or flakes (slivers) of Parmesan.

prawn, avocado and pecan herb salad

everyday

You know, salads don’t have to be boring. This dish is full of flavour! You can serve it as a main meal or smaller portions for a healthy starter. If you don’t like prawns, you can substitute with chicken; anything goes, really. Be adventurous with your salads and make this a regular, everyday dish.

Prawns give great texture and flavour to this recipe, but they do contain cholesterol, so I have allowed only four prawns per serving. If you want to make it more substantial, you can add extra protein: such as tuna, chicken or turkey.

1Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. Add the chopped salad onions, crushed garlic, soy sauce, black pepper and raw prawns. Sauté until the prawns have turned pink all the way through.

2Arrange the salad leaves, watercress, avocado and tomatoes in a big dish, then pour over the prawns and other cooked ingredients. Squeeze over the lemon juice, sprinkle with torn basil and pecan nuts and serve.

serves 2

drizzle of olive oil

2 salad onions or spring onions (scallions), peeled and finely chopped

1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed

1 tbsp soy sauce

freshly ground black pepper

8 uncooked king prawns (jumbo shrimp)

mixed salad leaves

watercress

1 ripe avocado

2 tomatoes, sliced

juice of 1 lemon

handful of fresh basil, torn

handful of shelled pecan nuts

the ‘staying alive as long as possible’ plan

I enjoy giving talks to different heart rehab groups and medical conferences around the country. I love hearing people’s amazing stories and I love to learn different tips to make life a little easier after surviving a trauma. Something that people in my heart groups seem to really struggle with when recovering from any incident is learning how to rest properly. For some reason, we seem to feel guilty when we need to rest and see it as some sort of failure.

I have always been a busy Bee! So having rest forced upon me after my heart attacks was difficult to accept. For a long time I tried to fight it, until one day I had one of those ‘light bulb’ moments when everything suddenly made perfect sense and I no longer viewed resting in a negative way.

I realized that the problem with my heart was playing with my head. I was frightened that I was going to die because my heart would simply stop working. So whenever I got tired and needed to rest, I started to panic, thinking I was going to die any second. Looking back, I can see how ridiculous this mindset was, but it made perfect sense to me at the time.