12 posts tagged “food”
a very close friend in sydney got married on saturday. i couldn't go because it basically ended up being a choice between getting to her wedding and djeli being able to spend christmas with his boys, and seeing as his eldest is turning 16, it's going to be the last christmas he'll be able to spend with them while they're still (officially) children, so it was really no choice at all. that, and i'd like to make my very aged great-aunt happy (and my other rels) by turning up for christmas for the first time in 4 years. the other hard decision was that if we'd gone to the wedding i'd have been able to be there for my da's 75th birthday. so i feel i'm missing out and letting people down this year. i just hope christmas can make up for that.
and today i'm home with a sort of fluey thing which has collided with the tension headache i've had for the past 2 weeks now, which my masseuse started doing something about on sunday (45 minutes of her pressing hard on a knot, saying "does that hurt?", me going "aargh!" and her saying "ok, tell me when it stops hurting". fun) and which will obviously continue through at least one more session, so there's been a lot of pain and general feeling-sorry-for-myself.
on the plus side, there's been the joy of on-demand tv. i totally forgot to watch the first episode of merlin on whatever night it was on (saturday?) so i got to catch up with that (bbc iplayer. looking pretty good, i think - good escapist stuff anyway and has giles from buffy in it and gwen from torchwood in the first episode too so that has to be a recommendation), then treated myself to two episodes of the river cottage road trip and ... erm ... 7 episodes of the second series of jamie at home (all on 4od), all of which i missed when they were on the telly proper. which i probably shouldn't have done because it set me off pining, not for the fjords, but for the time when i could cook whatever i fancied and actually entertain my friends properly - in ways involving exciting combinations of flavours, varying textures, puddings and no brown rice.
i've begun to realise, in short, how very far away my old life is - between the wedding and the sorry state of (my) food today (although, i made an exciting discovery in the form of sumac at a food festival we accidentally tripped over on saturday), it feels like a fantasy that i used to be able to just cook quiches and casseroles and sausages and bacon and white rice and meringues and make my own marshmallows without thinking twice about it or feeling guilty. and i feel quite distanced from most of my sydney friends, mostly because a lot of them don't really do email and can never be bothered to read any of my blogs or check my photos or anything while i, on the flip side, loathe and detest telephones only slightly more than i loathe and detest facebook, which seems to be the only social networking site most of them frequent (why?? why??? surely you have better things to do!). and true, i do have this blog linked in to my facebook account, but i'm pretty sure nobody's actually reading it from there. i would love to be proved wrong...
i should say that while this distancing does make me sad (especially where food is concerned - jamie oliver cooking rhubarb and custard souffles in front of me was kind of the last straw there) there are good things about it too. i've managed to cast off the shackles of the assorted expectations i was labouring under and reach a not-even-but-improved balance between dayjob and real work - lately i've even managed a few days where i've been able to fit in a little composition before going to work which has felt just brilliant; i'm a lot more adventurous with food now, especially vegetables - i've learnt to cook with and eat fresh chillis, capsicum, radishes (home-grown!), spinach, and salmon. we've set up our own vege garden too, which has been pretty successful (too successful in places - next year we will apply the lessons learnt in the areas of staggered planting times and thinning out) and resulted in our own spinach, radishes, zucchini, peas and peas, with cucumbers, spring onions, carrots and tomatoes still to be sampled. oh and djeli's brussels sprouts which we are hoping liberal spraying with malt vinegar will save from the horrible bugs they have on them without resorting to chemicals.
i find it interesting that since i have been on this diet (which, while it does get me down on a regular basis, i have to say has created pretty spectacular results - i've lost 14 kilos since february, been sick much less often, have significantly more energy than when i started and have started writing again after about a 3-year patch of composer's block) we have bought 9, yes 9, new cookbooks, most of which i can't eat very much out of at all. which is frustrating but also in a wierd masochistic way makes me feel some semblance of culinary normality. i haven't baked anything in 8 months, which is something unheard of for me, yet still i collect every issue of the waitrose food magazine that comes out (one day those giant toblerone cookies will be made), check every month's new recipe cards and the recipe books just keep piling up. the latest acquisition (from saturday) is the london cook book, which is a delightful mish-mash of recipes - from a classic english fry-up to chinese dishes, iranian food, a recipe for making fresh ricotta - all sorts of things. marvellously random. and now that i've discovered that it doesn't seem to exist on the web, i'm even more glad we lashed out on the day rather than thinking about it and then finding that it couldn't be found.
we had a beautiful day on saturday - it was very nearly perfect. stunning autumn weather and the design festival was on so once we'd gone to euston and djeli had bought his train tickets for the week (the car is poorly and languishing in the auto hospital so he's reduced to trains to get to telford and then taxis to and from work because there's no public transport where he's living) we donned our explorers' caps and set off for the wilds of peckham rye to go to a tiny but quirky student design exhibition, then headed back to blackfriars and across the river to the oxo wharf to potter about the design shops - some very very cool stuff there - well worth exploring. djeli found a wooden sculpture thing listed in the festival guide as being at the southbank centre, so we strolled up along the river, past the second-hand book stalls (we were very strong and didn't even peek) and in hunting for the sculpture, we came across this food fair, which felt rather cruel with chocolate ice cream and venison sausages and assorted other culinary delights i wasn't allowed, but there was also the man selling sumac who had a little dish for people to taste (which was great, because i'd heard of sumac but was a little nervous about what it would taste like - the answer is "very good"), someone giving away slivers of sheep's cheese, a snacks company promoting their new wheat-free breakfast cereal (very yum. the little bit of honey was a tad naughty, but it was very tasty and otherwise pretty much right on diet) and then there was a sort of lecture-with-samples on orchards and the joys of britain's many hundreds of apple varieties. i don't think i've eaten so much fresh apple in years! and after that we bought the cook book and decided we really ought to head home.
oh dear. i seem to have rambled completely off course with this post. i guess that's what happens when i try to write these things at - eep! - midnight. grovelling apologies to anyone who's actually read this far. i will try to do better...
and it's not my fault, i promise. this year is turning out to be a year of firsts - in february i experienced my first faint, and now i get to experience my first concussion - woo! um. so how did i gain this premiere concussion, you ask? well, i was so engrossed in my book (o'reilly's rather helpful adding ajax, since you're so very interested) that i kind of didn't notice we were at earl's court station until the doors were about to close, so i bolted for the door, hesitated a second to make sure the doors weren't about to close *on* me; they weren't, so i hopped out onto the platform where i was promptly cannoned into by a fellow commuter who seemed to come out of nowhere at immense speed (but apparently, i was told later, was bolting from the train that had just come in on the other side of the platform). his (presumably very heavy and hard, judging by the bruise it left above my knee) bag whacked into my left leg, unbalancing me and sending me spinning off down the platform. i realised i was going to topple over and there was basically nothing much i could do about it; then i realised i was about to topple over towards the train, which is never going to be a healthy thing to do, but i managed to spin myself a bit more before heading for the pavement. i don't *think* i actually hit my head on anything, but there is a small blank space between the point where the other guy ran into me and realising i was about to fall over, so it's possible i did hit something, but anyway. (in defence of the guy who ran into me, i do dimly recall hearing an "oh sorry!" as i went spinning off, but as the doors were on the verge of closing, he wouldn't have been able to get out by the time i went down, even if he wanted to). fellow travellers flocked to my side and then vanished again just as quickly when i said i was ok and it was obvious i could stand. i was, however, feeling terribly confused and disorientated and more than a litlte queasy. but i got over to the other platform and managed to get on the ealing broadway train alright, meandered vaguely down the hill and home safely where i spent the evening on the couch not really doing anything other than ordering three (yes, three) cookbooks on amazon.
fast forward to thursday morning and i arise, limping, with an enormous bruise above my left knee and the poor wrenched muscles in my left leg and arm all protesting against any sort of movement. i managed to get breakfast and lunch all ready and staggered into work. needless to say i was not quite as effective as i would usually be, so come early lunchtime, i took myself and my confusion off to the nhs walk-in centre down the road from the office (noting, with a little concern, on crossing the road that i couldn't really tell which cars were moving towards me and which were stationary) where the nurse told me that i seemed to be concussed and i should go home. so home i have been ever since. improving now, thank heavens, but still a little confused in the head and unbalanced when moving around.
i know i haven't really been writing much lately. the first six weeks of the new nutritionist-imposed regime turned out to be very hard work indeed, and the last few weeks (covering Easter and my cakeless birthday) even more so. so i was disinclined to talk about it much cos it just made things worse. i am now in phase two, though, and doing pretty well (although, after a pretty much blemish-free record over the first six weeks, i have now blotted my copybook with a few small easter eggs during this concussion incident). phase two is much the same as phase one, except that i am now allowed some protein at lunchtimes which makes a *huge* difference in dealing with my dodgy blood-sugar levels. i am being encouraged to try to cook more pulses though, which i'm trying very hard with (hence one of the books i ordered - cooking without which apparently has some good recipes for pulses in it) but nothing changes the fact that a dinner without meat just doesn't make me feel fed. full, yes; fed, no. i am such a carnivore. so far i haven't really seen any change at all in my energy levels, which is disappointing and i suspect may mean that wheat isn't the answer - so yay! toast! but then raises the question again of what *is* causing it? however, i have scored big-time with the weight-loss, which was a goal of the whole enterprise but actually a less important one because i figured if i could deal with the energy levels then i wouldn't always be snacking to keep awake which would be bound to help with the porkines. but i have made real progress - from 79.1kg when i started about 7 weeks ago, i am now down to 74.1, just 0.1kg off my second weight goal. i have gone from a well-filled size 18 down to a 16-needing-a-belt and can now do up (and in some cases actually wear in public) all of my size 14 trousers from a couple of years ago. all of which i find quite amazing, and certainly very encouraging. especially in the light of my attempt at the csiro diet which it seems is just not right for someone of my metabolic and blood sugar peculiarities and under which i struggled to lose even 2 kilos over about 3 months (and then promptly stacked on 4 kilos or so as soon as i started work). so i'm very pleased with this progress.
some interesting things we've discovered:
- soy disagrees with me. it makes me feel slightly queasy and makes my skin break out
- i really really really need protein at lunchtime and preferably at breakfast too
- it is possible to have too much salmon
- watercress is horrific, but baby spinach rocks
i've actually found a lunch i can eat without feeling too sorry for myself - brown rice with avocado. woohoo! and yesterday's homemade-hummous experiment went well, so now i have a big tub of hummous, ready to be mixed up with some soy yoghurt for afternoon tea. thank heavens. something with some flavour at last. now i need to find something to do with mackeral. or sardines. no clue what. we don't have these fish in australia so i have no recipes and not even the vaguest idea of what they might taste like. any ideas that don't involve wheat, dairy, salt or sugar, or any kind of alcohol or vinegar? hmm?
for those who do not already know it, i am a christmas junkie. totally. i love just about every part of it except the part that insists on putting fruit into baked goods (blech). and this year i have decided to share my particular love with everyone. i am settng my own NaBloPoWhatever challenge and will be posting a carol or christmas song every day until we leave for denmark. as today begins the onslaught of adventy stuff (in our family, the christmas season always starts on 1 december - the tree goes up, carols go on, mad helpless grins abound) i thought i'd start with a bit of a bang with one of my all-time favourites, 'this little babe' from benjamin britten's a ceremony of carols. this version is sung by the choir of st john's college cambridge.
today has kind of been overwhelming in its christmassiness, actually. and in the excess of suddenly-arrived activity. i went back to the doctor yesterday and it seems i am in limbo with inconclusive test results resulting in a verdict of "try to stretch yourself more and come back if the symptoms recur". hmm. anyway, today i definitely stretched. first thing on getting up, the first carols of the season went on the stereo and i had a bit of a tidying frenzy in the living room, which has looked like a bomb site for weeks, in preparation for the raising of the tree (insomuch as any tree that is 2 feet high can be "raised"). then we gathered ourselves and our christmas lists up, walked up the hill and boarded the tube for the west end. today was vip ("very important pedestrians") day when they block off oxford st, bond st and regent st to all traffic and shoppers can revel in being able to walk down the centre of a couple of the busiest streets in london without getting squished. jostled, yes, because the place becomes an absolute zoo with christmas shoppers, but not actually flattened. this in itself is joyous. so we revelled a bit more by heading in to the selfridge's christmas department (instant snow!!!) and then on to john lewis' christmas department (plush snowmen with cute carrot noses!! wobbly tin santas!!!) and doing a little random christmas shopping on the way. djeli's shopping is now just about done. mine languishes still, but at least i have weekdays and don't need to be harrassed to go out and do it. anyway, it got dark and started to rain, so we headed for oxford st tube... along with everyone else... so we got scared and decided to walk to tottenham court rd and it seems that during the interim everyone decided to not catch the tube after all and we practically had a carriage to ourselves all the way to ealing broadway.
we got back to ealing just in time for the beginning of the pitshanger "light up the lane" festivities. every year they hold a street party up at the village shops when they switch on the christmas lights. we missed it last year, so we really wanted to see this year's offering. and soooo much fun. they really do the whole community celebration so well here. if it was done in australia it would have been supremely half-arsed and no one would have turned up except for a couple of grannies and maybe a hippie or two, depending on the area. but here, most of the restaurants had put out stalls selling easily-munchable-on-the-run fare, the bakery was madly baking fresh pizzas (they're about to start selling these properly and omg yes, that's an excellent thing - soooo yum) and had prepared a big batch of chocolate cakes with stars on them made out of that funny plasticky but somehow yummy icing you get on fruit cakes, and heaps of bell- and star-shaped butter biscuits and other seasonal delights. the grog shop and pub were selling cups of mulled wine (djeli had mulled wine with cherry brandy which really had quite a kick to it) and pimms winter with apple juice (lovely and warming - i had this one). there was even a puppet show outside the library, and all sorts of stuff going on, and fireworks going off at both ends of the lane when they flicked the switch for the lights. and so many people! it's so lovely to see people heading out to stuff like this with their kids and just standing round in the street chatting away to their neighbours and (often, round here) relations with a glass of mulled wine in one hand and a mince pie in the other. it's the way the world should be.
For a full sit-down dinner with several guests, would you rather be the one cooking or do you prefer to just show up and eat?
i'd rather be cooking - but with a slight adjustment to being me and actually being organised about the cooking, doing as much as possible in advance and planning the menu right, rather than doing what i usually do and running about in a screaming panic and never getting to talk to the guests and generally serving the meal at least an hour after everyone expects it. hmm.
why'd he have to go and write such thoroughly addictive books? i sailed through northern lights then absolutely had to go and get the subtle knife on thursday so i didn't have to stop, and now i've just about finished that so i have to go back to the library today to get the amber spyglass. grr. i'll be through that too in a few days, i guess, but that's the end of the trilogy so there won't be any more. damn. and then i can't let myself start another book until i head to paris next wednesday. but i have a good book lined up for that - the last book of philip reeve's 'hungry cities chronicles', a darkling plain. hopefully that will last me a full week. it's quite thick...
i guess i should report on the other book i've been working my way through which is julia cameron's walking in this world. i found the first couple of chapters very overwritten and quite fluffy (although still with a couple of useful points, but her editor really should have slashed and burned, especially with the extended metaphors) but the third and fourth chapters are much more controlled, and i'm finding it useful. yes, she reiterates quite a bit from the artist's way, but in a way that's also kind of what i needed - a reminder in a different form, and there are new points made too, so overall i think it's doing me good.
the diet is getting me down a bit - having a hell of a time trying to shift any of the weight (not helped by offputting exercise weather - wet, grey and damn chilly out there) and while on wednesday i was back down to 76.9 (where i was the first sunday before i started to go up again) by yesterday i hadn't shifted so much as a 100th of a kilo. nicht so gut. but i'm persevering, and today i realised that all the times i've ever managed significant weight loss have been when i've been travelling - so basically i need to be walking 5-8 hours every day and eating bugger-all. this isn't exactly a practical long-term plan, though, so i'm going to try to go out on a reasonably long walk each week, and i have hatched a plan for djeli and i to walk across luxembourg one weekend (although a luxembourger friend says this only takes half a day, so perhaps we need to walk across, have lunch, go back, and then the next day traverse it top to bottom and back again!). today i am going to brave the weather and walk from knightsbridge to victoria which will get me to the library for my pullman fix.
*sigh* well it seems that my slow metabolism is doing for me yet again in the diet stakes. i started off well enough - went from 78kg to 76.9 the first week of the new diet, but now i'm back up again to 77.3. on the plus side (hah. no pun intended), i'm less than the 77.8 i was on wednesday (largely, i suspect, because i haven't always been eating complete meals, for one reason or another).
this is actually a fairly standard result for me - because my metabolism isn't normal, if i eat the same amount of food as a normal person i put on weight, so under normal conditions, diets start out well for a week, or even a month if it's extreme (e.g. when i had to cut out all fat from my diet when i had gallstones and dropped a dress size in a month but lost pretty much nothing after that), but sooner or later it all stops working and the pounds start to pile on again. so a little disappointed, but djelibeybi at least is making amazing progress - he's lost 3.5kg in two weeks which is great.
i think the solution for me is to shrink the portion sizes, while keeping the proportions of carbohydrates, protein and so on intact. i don't think i need to worry about veg because i should eat more veg anyway (not hugely fond of the stuff) and have been having trouble getting through all the salad i'm supposed to eat on this, so forcing myself to eat a little more veg-stuff than is comfortable should be a good thing.
interesting discovery of the week: wednesday night's cajun fish fillets revealed that i react pretty seriously to cumin. which, combined with coriander disagreeing with me, has just wiped out every indian dish in the plan, and explains why i've never been able to handle eating indian food. nice to have a name for the culprit!
it might take a while to work out the exact quantities i should be eating, but at least i'm seeing an improvement in my digestive problems, a huge reduction in sugar crashes (thanks to matching up carbohydrates with proteins, i haven't had a single crash in two weeks - previously i was having to deal with this on average two or three times a day) and generally feeling healthier, if not thinner. so now i just need to maintain the proportions while eating less food. wish me luck!
as of yesterday, djeli and i have embarked upon our new-improved-us programme. we've started in on the csiro total wellbeing diet (for those of you who don't know, the csiro is australia's national scientific research organisation) and so far, so extremely funky - beef provencal casserole for dinner last night, roast capsicum and tomato soup today (quite easy to make, although roasting the capsicum and then trying to get it out of its skin was a bit of a pain) with a toasted ham sandwich, and a chicken stirfry tonight, just to give you a small sample of the food we're eating. all homemade and so far everything delicious. even the soup. even though i don't actually much care for either capsicums or tomatoes. odd. i'm modifying my diet from the csiro's plan slightly because of health issues (mentioned in the previous post. i won't go into them again here) which, according to my new book, seems to mostly consist of following the csiro diet, but making sure i get little protein-filled snacks throughout the day, and to avoid eating carbohydrates without following them with a protein - so i had bacon and an egg this morning with my wholewheat toast, and mid-morning a banana followed by a handful of nuts, and will correspondingly reduce the amount of chicken i eat tonight to balance things out. so far i'm feeling pretty good. generally not hungry and haven't had a sugar crash at all in the three days since i started matching up proteins with my carbs, which for me is amazing, considering i've been used to having at least 3 crashes a day. digestively things have improved too, but we shall wait and see.
and just to ensure i am completely accountable with this stuff, i have started off weighing 78kg (i should be 55 or so for my height). my first goal (heh. i accidentally typed 'goat' there first) is to see if i can balance out my digestive issues and kill the sugar crashes. then to get myself back to 74kg which is where i was when i got to australia 2 months ago. then 70kg, then 65kg, then 60kg. if i can get myself down to less than 60kg (which is what i weighed when i left school) i will have a party and undo all the good i have done. or maybe just serve everyone bowls of bran :-)
yup. they've gone. no more wisdom teeth, and i am amazed to say that i have suffered no bruising, no serious pain (yet - i run out of panadeine forte tonight, but haven't really been needing to take them every four hours like i was instructed - mostly every 6-8 hours and then only cos uncomfy rather than in screaming agony). i had heard that i was likely to come out looking like a victim of domestic violence and had even planned for that eventuality with an idea for a black and blue themed birthday party for next week but it looks like that idea will have to go out the window cos merely pink and a bit swollen.
so all in all, not terribly traumatic. coming out of the general anaesthetic was a bit nasty as it tends to be and even swallowing water was hard at first, but by the time i got home in the afternoon on monday (they took them out about morning tea-time) i was doing ok with the liquids. yesterday was a bit nasty - was feeling quite nauseous for a large part of the afternoon, which i think was a lack of food, but i'm now able to eat solids again, albeit squishy ones - overcooked pasta, rice cooked in chicken stock (very nice, actually) softish cheese - so that has passed and overall i'm feeling ok. so back onto the cd-ripping. today i've been working my way slowly through my collection of cds from sony's stravinsky edition while listening to an assortment of recordings from my mother's collection - some arvo pärt, prokofiev and shostakovich piano music, etc. apart from a slight achiness and the rather nasty heat in the middle of the day, it's been really rather nice. midgemuckle is making us teriyaki chicken for dinner, so hoping i'll be able to
consume some of that too. yum!
oh, and of course the jelly. today's flavour is raspberry - tomorrow's will be blackcurrent, and after that i think i might be feeling brave enough to test out the pink lemonade flavour :-)
i'm getting really grouchy with this wretched bug. this is the third round i've done with it since john first brought it back from zermatt, this time it's attacking my glands and being all ear-nose-throaty, so everything's swollen up and ears aching and difficult to swallow. and because of this i have to miss out on a weekend of bonfires and fireworks. we are Not Amused, i tell you.
but on the flip-side of the coin, there are compensations:
- home alone for the weekend with nothing i really *have* to do
- lovely comfort-convalescent food for dinner - avgolemono soup with rice & chicken bits, followed by jelly
- debussy on the stereo
- silly tv tonight (austin powers) and the couch to myself
- blackcurrant lemsip and the latest issue of waitrose food illustrated magazine to get me through the afternoon
