I am not counting today.  Not counting points or calories or all the other ways one can track what one eats such as using My Fitness Pal.  However, that is not because I am eating with reckless abandon.  I will only eat healthy food but I want to have a day off calculating and recording what I eat, besides photographing it.

I started with a banana mashed in to half a tub of pineapple Co Yo with 1 tbsp chia seeds.

Love these blood oranges. So I chopped one up and put it on top.  It was so sweet and juicy which went perfectly with the creamy tropical tasting Co Yo.  So good.I made an amazing humous today.  Amazing because it was so smooth.  I got the recipe on one of my favourite food blogs called Smitten Kitchen.  Her recipe for humous is here.  I faithfully copied the recipe and even deskinned all the chickpeas!  It wasn’t as bad I thought it would be and it really did make the smoothest humous I have ever had.

You do end up with a pile of skins in your compost that look as if they have been swept up from a chiropodists floor!

The other ingredients were tahini, lemon juice, garlic and salt plus some reserved liquid from the can of chickpeas.  This recipe adds no oil except as an optional garnish so it must be lower calorie than the shop bought versions.
I garnished with a light sprinkling of paprika and a drizzle of olive oil.  It was exceptionally good.  Possibly the best I have ever had. To go with it I roasted some vegetables and they came out perfectly.  I roasted red onion and quartered carrots for 10 minutes, then added peppers and courgette for another 10 minutes, then I added cherry tomatoes which I had pricked to prevent them busting.  I roasted them all together for 15 minutes. The vegetables were stirred in to some couscous.  To save calories I did not add anything else and the dish was lovely as it was.  There was a very high ratio of vegetables to couscous. I also made some tzatziki I found on a blog called Easy Peasy Organic.  Literally Lara made it as she had wondered in to the kitchen at the perfect time.  Easy Peasy Organic says to blend the ingredients but Lara finely chopped the spring onion (from the garden 🙂 ) and coriander and then stirred them in to the yogurt with some lemon juice and salt.  The recipe for the tzatziki is here.   The boys were rather diasppointed there was no meat or “at least some crisps for the dip” said Harvey.  So we added celery to the table and everyone agreed there was plenty of food and it was delicious. I really enjoyed it – this is my kind of a spread. It was sunny today 🙂  One day of sunshine and warmth and so much happens in the garden.  These little grape hyacinths are trying to come out.

All the daffodils actually did come out.  Good to see you ladies !  I think dafs are female as they look like ladies in large bonnets.Strange creatures decide it is time to play with water in the garden too.  I did say “no” to the water slide – it wasn’t that warm!

We spent a pleasant part of this afternoon in the Bell & Jorrocks with Fiona.  There was live music playing and a beer festival.  I abstained from the beer although did have a few crisps and peanuts with my Diet Coke.

The sun brought loads of people to the village and it was a lovely atmosphere.  I could very easily have sat in the sun drinking beer all afternoon but am rather glad I didn’t. Supper time.  I used a Delia recipe for macaroni cheese with bacon and leek.  I added an onion too. You fry up the chopped onion, leek and bacon in some butter. Cook the macaroni which I didn’t have so I used 3 types of wholemeal pasta as I only seemed to have dregs left in the packets.I made a cheese sauce, mixed the sauce with the cooked pasta, leeks and bacon, grated some more cheese on top and put it in the oven at 180 °C for half an hour until it was bubbling.  It smelled so amazing we could hardly wait to eat it.

This is comfort food which was perhaps not ideal on a warm spring day but it was so delicious no one objected.  I am not kidding myself that this was diet food but at least the ingredients improved the healthiness of it i.e. wholemeal pasta rather than white and the 3 leeks added a vegetable to a dish traditionally eaten without any.

I enjoyed a day of no counting but I am also looking forward to the discipline of counting and tracking again tomorrow.