30th January 2008

Ooh the curry was good! I'm just home from work, and I've had a good dinner!  Again, I started with a teaspoon of olive oil, and  fried up some chopped onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, and a good piece of grated ginger. I added finely chopped courgette, and then the spice - I didn't have much time this morning, so I just went for a teaspoon of curry powder.  Then I added the chopped chunks of chicken, and a good splosh of water. Popped the lid on, and let it simmer over a low heat for about 25 minutes - delish!  However, I felt it didn't quite have that little extra that moves it from being a nice curry to a Nice Curry - so I chopped up some grapes, and sliced up some of the yellow plums I've got in the fruit bowl, and roughly chopped up a small handful of almonds.  The plums really did the trick - they stayed sharp, and really lifted the taste. However when I do it again, I think I'll hang onto the grapes, until 2 or 3 minutes before serving - keep that fresh juiciness!

 

Now you'll note from all this that I forgot I had a good half box of mushrooms I could have used. I'll take advantage of this forgetfulness, by having a mushroom day tomorrow.  Perhaps some mushrooms on toast, or a mushroom omelette for lunch, and when I get round to thinking about dinner,  I'll fling a few mushrooms in there. I'll have to go shopping tomorrow, so I've no idea what I'm going to have for dinner yet. Perhaps a little fish I think, a bit of variety in the diet is always good for oneself! In fact, I quite like the idea of conjuring up a low fat kedgeree - if you've never had kedgeree, you haven't lived. They used to serve it up for breakfast in Edwardian mansions, with  devilled kidneys, and the like. Its a rice dish, with smoked haddock, hard boiled eggs, peas and parsley. Its a wonderful smokey, fishy flavour, just gorgeous. On the other hand though, this week is developing something of a rice motif, that I think is not exactly what I had in mind.  Perhaps tomorrow should be a green vegetable day. Every now and again, I like a green vegetable day - when you eat nothing but fresh green veg all day long.  Still we'll see!

Tuesday 29th January 2008

Not too bad a day at all. Not so sure about the diet-wise bit! Still it was better than the average day I've been having over the past while, so it's got to be reasonable.

Now lets see, what did I eat? I woke quite early, six o clock, more or less on the dot without the alarm going off, which is always quite a pleasant experience! I got up and made coffee and toast - a small piece of wholemeal toast, with lots of seeds. Butter though, not so good. I'm finishing off a box of Lurpak, and there's not much more of it to go. I bought  low fat Lurpak for the rest of the month, which is good. Coffee was the standard instant, and I drink it black without sugar.

I did take my box of fruit, and yep, I did have a few grapes and so on mid-morning. Which was very very good, as I've a large box of chocolate biscuits sitting right behind me! Our office is a swap food office, with people bringing in sweets and chocs - and fruit as well, pretty nigh on constantly. So I felt quite good resisiting. But I'm also one of those people who's not terribly big on 'announcing' diets. You only end up blowing it, and then you feel worse than if you'd kept your mouth shut. In fact, keeping one's mouth shut is the whole point of the thing isn't it?

Lunch was the aforementioned egg sandwich, but I crumbled and did have the crisps. Bad girl, slapped wrist - I did think to myself, get organised here, make lunch to take in, and then you won't be facing temptation at your weakest moment - when you're hungry.  And yes, this afternoon, I crumbled on the choc biscuit front - two choc biscs, and (oh yes, horror...) a mars bar cake roll thingy. Well they were just sitting there! I know it's the first real day, I should be stronger...

Dinner was rice, with lots of veggies - onions, peppers, courgette, mushrooms,  a bit of lean chicken and some chunks of sausage. Now I did fry this lot, but it's that wonderful frying method where you start off with a teaspoonful of oil (olive) and a good tablespoon of water. So you could say I stirfried it.  I finished dinner off with a good slice of melon.

 

Tomorrow is a more difficult day. Difficult in the sense that I'm doing a 4 - 9 shift, and its always a huge temptation to dive into the burgerking on the way home. I find it far easier to avoid this temptation if I've something nice waiting at home for supper, so I think as I've more of the chicken left, it's a day to make a chicken curry before I go to work. It's supposed to be cold tomorrow, and I'm sure that chicken curry to heat up, with a bit of rice, will be just the thing.  And since I'll be home, I shall probably have salad for lunch. I haven't really made up my mind yet, but I'll let you know tomorrow if it works out!!! - and of course, if I can stay away from those biscuits!

Monday 28th January 2008

Frankly, I couldn't have found a better day to start a new eating regime if I'd tried.  Two a.m. this morning and what happens? I wake up with a throbbing pain in my left cheek, and subsequent investigations seem to suggest I've broken a tooth. Great eh?

So, since my eating processes are presently somewhat interrupted, I did not have fruit for breakfast - I had a slice of dry toast to mop up the remnants of the pain killers before they wrecked my stomach lining. (Sorry this is turning unnecessarily medical...)  However by lunchtime, I was up to a bit of salad, which promptly had me heading back to the paracetamol.  You'll be pleased to hear that this evenings' meal was avocado, and a large slice of melon. Nevertheless in the interim I have eaten a few, frankly, unsuitable things - the last of my sweet biscuits, and a single bar of treat sized chocolate. I'm keeping those around, because every dieter needs her treat. Call it a reward for being good, call it a sin, call it what you like but if it wasn't there, I'd binge on something else unsuitable. In fact, I'd probably go buy it.

So my plan for tomorrow. Breakfast and snacks will be the fruit I packed for today - plums and grapes, possibly with the addition of a little melon. Lunch will be an egg sandwich from the shop down the road. I go there for lunch quite often, and I think I'm probably the only one of my colleagues that does. Why? Because it reminds me of the place I went to get my lunch when I was a sweet young thing working in Hudson's Bookshop in Birmingham. Every day I'd go there and get an egg sandwich and bag of cheese and onion crisps. I enjoyed it!  I'm afraid that I have a complex history with sandwiches. My father was the chief sandwich maker in the house, and he enjoyed mixing it around - he'd put complex flavour mixes together into them, years before anyone else thought of doing that kind of thing. If I tell you that when he made bacon and eggs he'd fry up half a banana for everyone, you'll get the idea. So I used to pick bits out, and nibble at the edges - frankly anything to get a mouthful of a single flavour. I don't like mixing flavours together, unless I've cooked them together. Curry, Spag Bol, that kind of thing - it blends into a real single flavour. A sandwich doesn't blend at all well, until it's all chewed up.  So I like a single flavour sandwich, and egg is one of my favourites. Not egg mayonnaise, not egg salad, just egg, with a little salt. It's not a fattening thing, god knows the spread they use is pretty scraped and I get the wholemeal bread so I don't think that's a problem. I'll skip the crisps, and have fruit for a snack.

Dinner - well I'm back to my original idea, pasta in some form or other. I'll let you know!

Sunday 27th January 2008

Can't believe it, January almost gone already. Time flies when you get to be my age - ah those long timeless summers of childhood - how well I remember dressing the dogs up in our dolls' clothes! Poor old Porgy and Bess, they were incredibly well behaved little dogs. To have to put up with two little girls, eager to see exactly how they would look - do you know I swear I remember Bess being paraded around in a doll pushchair wearing some sort of bonnet - where on God's good earth would we have got a bonnet from? Ah well, she had something on her head anyways... and I'm fairly sure we put Porgy into some sort of dress. And they took it, not a growl, not a bite... not even a snap. Pretty good going for Jack Russells. Alas they have long gone, many years ago now. But they were wonderful little dogs.

So. Well yes, this week I went out to buy new jeans. And I had something approaching an epiphany in the changing cubicle at Evans in Broadmead - one of those ghastly sorts of things where you casually turn around to view what exactly you look like in the rear view mirror. Rear view being the operative turn, frankly. So I made the dreaded decision, dieting is where it's at for me from now on. This weekend I've done my best to eat up everything in the house that's fattening. (Not quite the gorge-fest that it sounds like!) From tomorrow I start the new way - I refuse, from past experience to call it a diet. Call it a diet and you're inviting failure. Anyhow, I must take more exercise, and eat better food. I've made lunch, to take to work - a salad of lambs lettuce, tomato's, peppers, cucumber & raddish, with a little lean meat chopped into it. I've got a fruit box, with some grapes and yellow plums for emergencies & pudding. Actually breakfast too, since I'm not very good at making myself eat before I leave the house. I haven't decided quite what supper will be, but I think pasta in some shape or other.

A further part of my plan is an investment in an organic box of vegetables. I've got one of those metabolisms that hangs on to the fat it's got the moment that the last teaspoon of fat passes my lips, I'd swear that it's some kind of separate, intelligent part of me, that knows what I'm up to, and actively moves into starvation mode. The only way to fool it, and I know this from all of the many, many diets I've tried in the past, is to stuff myself stupid with food. It's very very difficult. Don't get me wrong, I love to eat, but I love to eat wrong. The high fat, high sugar type of stuff that piles on the pounds. To get rid of this, I have to eat in quantity, high fibre foods, low in fat etc, to cod my metabolism that it's still able to make hay whilst the sun shines and the good times are still here. So long as it doesn't know I'm actively 'starving' myself on a diet, I'll be fine, and a good way to do that is a good variety of veggies. So I'm going for an organic box, because it provides a far better selection of vegetables than I can get at the local supermarket. They do reasonable quality (ok, well poor quality) supplies of the normal everyday stuff - from an organic box I can get salisfy, okra, portabello mushrooms - you name it and it comes delivered to the door. So the box must be sorted out.

Loosing weight means planning and paying attention. I tend to work on a princepal of what do I fancy, I'll have that. I don't think in advance. So I thought - at least to start with - I'd blog what I'm planning to eat the next day, and of course a record of what I did eat on that day. So the blog's going to turn a little food orientated for a while! So tune in tomorrow to find out how I get on with the salad and fruit, and whether or not it did turn out to be pasta!

More tomorrow!

16th January 2008

Hello there!

My but it's a wonder as I type this that the Avon isn't lapping gently at the door - happily I live on a hill, and Bristol hasn't been flooded out anyway so I've no worries.

Different story slightly over towards mother's though. Just have a look at this!

These are the fields going over towards Winsley, bottom of Bathampton valley on Saturday.

This is the water pouring through under Pultney Bridge, onto the weir in Bath - it doesn't really look that spectacular in this photo, but by now it's about a good couple of feet higher, and the water was speeding along at a terrible rate.
Let me see if I can find a picture of the weir...!

This is looking over towards the island...

And this is looking across the weir, over towards where you used to queue for the Tiergarden.

Lots of people were leaning over the bridge having a look. It was pretty dramatic stuff, even if the photo's don't really tell you the half of it! They say that if we get through the next four days without much more rain we'll be past the worst of it, but there's more rain forecast over the weekend. Best go look for my wellingtons I guess!!!

8th January 2008

Still getting used to the 2008 bit - as I'm sure we all are!

I've been spending the past week or so trying to get used to my new phone. It's a new one, ie it's got a camera on it, so yep, it's strain the brain time - the instruction manual on it is absolutely useless, and apparently it needed some kind of cd I could load in to the computer to get it set up in the first place. Well I did overcome that bit, in that I got it set up via text from Orange - God bless their cotton socks, the technical department there is clearly staffed by wizards, endowed with a huge degree of understanding of the middle aged woman's delayed pick up of how do I work a new phone? Anyhow, (yes, ok, overlong sentence, not making a lot of sense..!) it's working, and I can even send photo's in emails. I've yet to master the downloading bit, but I'm sure I'll get there in the end. I have to. I've just found out how much it costs to send a picture in a text message!

 

Sorry quick break there for exchange of text message  with a friend! I sent her a load of bath stuff for xmas, and she's sent me a selection of fantastic spices, rubs and salts. I'm really enjoying trying them out, particularly the Penrith spiced salt, and the garlic spice powder, which I can't remember the exact name of right now, but it comes from the fantastically named 'really garlicky company'!  I should dash to the kitchen to find out the name of it, but it comes in a little purple pot, and it's the most wonderful stuff. You can sprinkle it on things, add it to things - it's a dream with rice. I added some to some home made burgers the other day, gorgeous!

So back to work. Feels much more like normal somehow, but I feel far less 'new year' ish than normal. Don't know why - Just oddly like last year. Maybe it's the weather.

So this is my news - for public consumption anyhow. No doubt there'll be more in due course!

01 January 2008

Happy New Year to everyone reading this!

 

I had an exceptionally quiet new year - it's not a holiday I'm particularly fond of. My dislike started way back when I was a youngster and off out on New Years Eve - the crowds, the pushing and shoving outside the abbey in Bath - and particularly at the time, there were loads of crusties all over the place, many of them with dogs. Back then (lord it sounds like the turn of the century, and funnily enough it was, but I make it sound like the turn of the 19th century...) you could take your drink with you out of the pub, and everyone was drinking out of glasses. Push and shove outside the Abbey, and then you've got a broken glass, and then a cut dog's paw. And whilst in general people look after their dogs, some people don't and somehow manage not to see the dog is hurt and distressed - and other's would be so distressed themselves as to be inconsolable.  I dare say the RSPCA would be extra busy on New Years Day, and probably still are. Lord only knows how many people have to suffer with distressed animals after all the fireworks that go off these days. Mind you, at least you know it's going to happen so it's not as if you don't get time to prepare.

So anyhow, I don't like New Year, and prefer to spend it quietly. Indoors, with the family if I get a chance, or if not, then I'm perfectly happy by myself.

 

My present to myself this year's been a new phone. I absolutely had to get myself one with a camera - and I've done it, and fulfilled my secondary ambition, a flip phone. Yeah I know, sliders are all the rage, but I wanted a flip, and I've got one. After all, it's my phone! Anyhow, having got the thing, set it up to the best of my ability, and yes, I've sort of worked out how to use it - for the most part, I then had to get my network to enable the email capability - because I can take photo's, but I can't send them anywhere. And I don't have the right size of USB cable as yet to download. I mean getting it enabled was a big deal - you've got to remember that whilst I'm reasonably IT savy, it takes me a while to work out a new system. But I was impressed that Orange managed to do it all via a text message. Which reminds me of something, when I went shopping for the wretched thing, Orange didn't have a flip phone, so I thought well you can choose your network with any phone, I'll go and look in another shop. At one point I wandered in to a Vodafone shop.

So there I am, looking at phones. And this irritating youth comes up to me, all Can I help you Madam - well I wasn't so freaked by this as I clearly did need some help I felt. We went through the details of the phone I was looking at, and I was sort of half way sold on it. Then this stupid little oik says to me What network are you on? Orange, and I'll be wanting to keep it on Orange. This presumptuous little tick then looks at me as if I've announced I've got a ticket for the Titanic (the one with the iceberg, not Dr Who) and says I'm so sorry. I say what do you mean, and he laughs pityingly and goes, well Orange.

Ok fine I said. Bye, I said, and left the shop. Stupid stupid boy as old Mainwaring would say, and even I could tell him that he's got an awful lot to learn about salesmanship.  You never critisise a customers choice. You could possibly try telling them they must be very lucky never to have had any problems, and were they aware that there's an issue about XYZ, but don't tell me I'm to be pitied. Besides which I'm not. I've been with Orange for the past - well ever since I've had a mobile which is longer than I care to think about, and I've not had a problem with them ever. Which is why I'm still with Orange, and I've gone to some trouble to ensure I'm still with Orange.  The silly boy will learn at some point, if he didn't learn then, but the guy who got the money was the one who recognised I was in a hurry, speeded it up and didn't waste my time with extraneous sales chatter or try to persuade me to change networks.  It was another shop of course, but then that goes without saying.