Lose Weight and Gain Health

Today started so well.  I always like to start on a positive note.  Smoothie for breakfast: blueberries, banana, soya milk, vanilla fat free yogurt, 1/2 tbsp chia seeds and 1 tbsp tahini.  It was delicious.  And very purple.

I made wraps for lunch as we were going to London to watch one of the London 2012 Olympic test events – Beach Volleyball in Horse Guards Parade.  I was so EXCITED!!!  But full of resolve so made up wraps (wholemeal tortilla, spinach, rocket, red pepper, cucumber, chicken and blue cheese) and took along a punnnet of cherries.  James and I had the chicken and cheese and Harvey had tuna mayonnaise.

Luckily the weather forecast was wrong and instead of the predicted rain we arrived in London to glorious sunshine.

We settled in to our seats, Michelle joined us and the sport began.  The beach volleyball was fantastic.  We watched 2 ladies quarterfinals: Brazil Vs Australia and GB Vs China.   It was lively and fun with the crowd getting in to it and clapping and Mexican waving.  And GB won so we had a lovely little patriotic moment too.

Surrounded by Londons magnificent historic buildings, the “beach” and viewing stands make a fabulous venue.

Now I know the men like going along to see the scantily clad athletes.  The volleyball players do indeed have amazing physiques and are an inspiration to us all.  I am not quite convinced about the gratuitous semi-clad dancers that appeared from time to time though.  Especially since that dancing was dreadful – Britain Has Talent could have provided far better.  However, my husband and all the other men seemed to enjoy it!

And at least we girlies got the “sweepers”, who perhaps unkindly were sweeping to the Benny Hill theme music, but it was very amusing.

The beach volleyball was finished by 3pm so we set off to the National Portrait Gallery via a teashop.  The National Cafe had some empty tables and is a large, high ceilinged and pleasant place to sit and have a cup of tea.  I was tempted in to having a cream tea (took about 1/2 a second to tempt me) which I justified as I still had some weekly points to use and I had already planned a low point supper which was all ready at home to be reheated.  So I enjoyed my cream tea.

Fortified we went to the National Portrait Gallery and enjoyed the BP Portrait Award 2011 exhibition.  No idea why the winning photo was selected as it seemed so dreary and ordinary compared to the others.  Several of the paintings, and one in particular, looked like photographs, even close up.  It is incredible to me that someone could use paint to create a portrait that looks just like a photo.

I love the NPG and am in awe of anyone who can paint/draw/sculpt a face which I find particularly difficult.  And to have this incredible gallery here, which is free to go to, is extraordinary.  next time you are in London, go and see it.  www.npg.org.uk

Lovely as the day had been so far, watching sport and admiring art is exhausting so we thought we should find somewhere to sit outside and enjoy a glass of something refreshing.  We settled ourselves down in Covent Garden Piazza  and enjoyed listening to a very talented busker.  Michelle and I had a lovely glass of wine.  Which swiftly led to another.  And before I knew it, the Diet Devil had begun to take me over.  The second glass of wine was joined by tortillas and salsa and I was then completely overtaken.  I was transported, in a trance like state, up the stairs of Chez Gerard and seated at a table on the balcony.  Resistance was futile.  All rational thought and resolve were far away as we ordered a bottle of wine.  The bread and butter were devoured with gusto and then behold, a beautiful steak and frites appeared.  And with Bearnaise sauce which is my favourite steak accessory.  Marvellous!

How time flies when you are having so much fun.  By the time we got to Charring Cross it was 10:30pm and so we weren’t home until nearly midnight.  So much for being home for supper.

I managed to consume an incredible 77 points which has obliterated all my weekly bonus points and some of my activity accruals too.  However, the joy of Weight Watchers is that you have extra points for such a blow out and as long as I am really good on Sunday, I should end the week within my point allowance.

I had a fabulous day out and at least I didn’t have a pudding!  I like to end on a positive note.

I have noticed many of the nutrition and lifestyle blogs I read, use Chia seeds.  I had never heard of them before so I did some research.  The main benefit to dieters seems to be that they have a gelling action when exposed to water which helps to keep you feel full after a meal for longer.  They also contain omega-3 fatty acids which beneficial for heart and cholesterol health, protein, fibre, anti-oxidants, a significant source of vitamin B and several minerals: calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium and boron.  But the seeds do not taste of anything so can be mixed in to other meals such as porridge.  Sounded good to me so I ordered some and today ate them for the first time.

I mixed half a tablespoon in with my porridge this morning.  I also added half a banana for sweetness, a teaspoon of pumpkin seed butter for protein and fat to sustain me until lunch time and blueberries for a vitamin boost.  It was delicious and my son and I really enjoyed it.

I have become very fond of beetroot this summer.  Fresh home cooked beetroot is a different beast to the vinegary purple mush the supermarkets sell.  Mine are not big enough yet so I bought some in the market yesterday.  Lots of people boil beetroot but I just chop off the stalks and leaves, wrap the bulb in foil and bake it in the oven at about 190 for 1 – 2  hours, depending on how big they are.  I use the stalks and leaves raw in a salad.  They are very tasty and and the purple veining in the leaves is very striking.  The tortoise gets the ragged leaves!

They don’t look very pretty when you open the foil parcel.

But when they are cool I peel them and chop them up to reveal their amazing colour.  I have not photo shopped this photo or edited it in anyway – this is the colour of them.  Wow!

I wanted some potatoes for lunch and went to dig some up.  The first ones I have dug up this year.  We have a lot of slugs in our garden and I have often been disappointed with potatoes in the past, so I set off with some trepidation and low expectations.  But what a crop!  They were large and unblemished (apart from the one my fork scraped) so I was delighted.

And they scrubbed up well too.

For lunch today we were having the fish I had bought in the farmers market yesterday.  I bought 4 fillets of grey mullet.  I put all 4 fillets on a sheet of foil, which was on a baking sheet.  I dotted the fish with butter and added ground pepper and then wrapped the foil over the fish to create a foil parcel.    I put them in the oven for 20 minutes at about 190.  Grey mullet is a flaky and meaty fish and they tasted amazing.  Children can be fussy with fish.  They don’t like bones or skin.  So I put them on the foil skin side down.  Then, when I served them, I just carefully slid a fish slice between the flesh and the skin and all the skin stayed on the foil.  So no yucky bits on the plate to put the kids off.

Lunch was great; grey mullet, potatoes from the garden, Fatima’s beans left over from yesterday, salad from the garden and beetroot.    And 4 clean plates were testimony to its yumminess 🙂

Exercise time!  I recently watched an episode of ‘Coast’ (one of my favourite programmes) which visited Dungeness.  It looked fascinating and as the afternoon was warm and sunny we hopped in the car with the dogs and drove down there.  It took about 45 minutes.  What an amazing place.  The landscape is wide and flat and the skies seem enormous.  The nature reserve is the biggest shingle promontory in Europe and is an area of scientific interest as it has so many plants growing in it.  There was a lot of sea kale and   I was tempted to pick some and take it home to cook it.  But as it is a nature reserve, I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea so I left it.  Harvey picked up a sea kale seed head that was blowing around but we eventually left that too.

Quite a few people live there, in little huts and dwellings converted  from old railway carriages and there are some charming painted wooden fishing boats which have been winched out of the sea and appear to balance impossibly on the beach.

Shame about the ugly old power station and pylons.  And an even bigger shame my camera battery ran out of juice so no more photos until tomorrow 😦 We had a lovely walk and then a cold beer in the early evening sunshine.  It was great.  Dungeness we love you and we will be back.

Back at the ranch it was supper time.  The boys had pasta with vegan pesto and I had the last of the Morrocan Couscous with chickpeas – that recipe was only supposed to make 4 portions but that dish has kept on giving!  It was a bit dry and I couldn’t wait any longer for my little treat so I added the small pot of white crab meat I bought at the market yesterday.  Crab is one of my most favourite food items in the world so I treated myself (and only myself as it is so expensive) to a small pot.  I ate it with some mayonnaise and salad and I relished every single last morsel.

Today was a great day.  We all ate well and we discovered somewhere new and wonderful and local.  Cheer me up?  Not necessary as I have been happy all day.

Last week we were looked after superbly by our little Turkish angel, Fatima.  She cooked delicious meals 3 times a day.  They were all home made using fresh ingredients and all meals were full of fruits and veggies.  She made a delicious bean and tomato dish and another one with carrot and yogurt.  I used to enjoy chatting to her about her cooking and she told me how she made some of her meals.  As my sister Abi was coming for lunch with her 3 children, I decided to try and recreate two of Fatima’s lovely veggie dishes.

My plants were laden down with green beans.

Some were a bit large but I picked them all anyway – 481 g.  Nearly half a kilo – what a result 🙂

Fatima’s beans and tomatoes:

1 white onion, 5 garlic cloves, 2 tbsp olive oil, 500g French beans, sun dried tomato paste, 4 large ripe tomatoes – skinned, oregano, salt, pepper, water.

Finely chop the onions and garlic and fry in the olive oil until soft (about 15 mins).

Top and tail the beans and cut each one in to 2 or 3 pieces.  Add to the onion with the oregano and fry for about 10 minutes.

Add the sun dried tomato paste, skinned, chopped ripe tomatoes, salt and pepper and stir until well mixed.

Cover with water and simmer until beans are soft.  Mine took about 40 mins as the beans were really too large.  It is less oily than Fatima’s so if you are not dieting, I would have added more olive oil while it was cooking.

Fatima always served this dish at room temperature so I tipped it on to the serving dish and left it for the flavours to meld.  Looks pretty good to me.

Time to go and buy the rest of lunch!  Thursday is Farmers Market day every week in Rolvenden and it is great.  If you live nearby then go and support the local growers, bakers and producers who sell their lovely wares there.

I bought some fish which had only been caught a few hours earlier and the whole stall smells of the sea.  No nasty fishy smell so you can tell it is really fresh.

I also bought some beautiful tomatoes, beetroot (mine are not big enough yet), plums, chickens (they were little so I bought 2), baguettes, cheese and a strawberry tart with creme anglais.

Once at home it was a busy time to get lunch ready.  I popped a chicken in the oven to roast and then made Fatima’s carrots in yogurt.  In my haste I forgot to take any photos but it turned out really well.  I grated one large onion, 2 smallish potatoes, 1 courgette and 3 good sized carrots.  They were fried slowly until just soft in olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper.  Meanwhile I crushed a large garlic clove and mixed it in with 4 heaped tbsps of greek yogurt.  When the veg were soft, they were stirred in to the yogurt.

I also cooked some sausages for the children and put in some small baked potatoes.  I cut up the baguette to eat with the Bleu D’Auvergne and Brie de Meaux I bought from the French man at the market.  I also picked a lovely selection of salad leaves from the garden which I mixed with the beautiful tomatoes I bought in the market.

My visitors arrived and lunch was ready.

Fatima’s beans went down well and my little nephew (6 yrs old) had seconds of them !!  It was a lovely day and as always, over much too quickly.  I enjoyed recreating Fatima’s dishes today and sharing them with my family.  I hope Fatima would have enjoyed them.

One of the first things I did after coming home from holiday (before even going in to the house) was to check the progress of my raised veg beds and veggie patch.  I was shocked by how many weeds had grown in just a week!  It is hard to work out which plants are the peas, carrots and radishes and which are the weeds.

Admittedly the weeds in the veggie patch have been growing for more than a week!

Buried in there somewhere are beetroot, swiss chard, courgettes, sweetcorn, French green beans, helda beans, peas, potatoes and broad beans.  And loads and loads of weeds.

Well it was a lovely sunny day so I set to it.  I really enjoy gardening so it was not a chore.  It was very satisfying to see such a great result, it was good exercise as it involved lots of bending and stretching and I was outside.  I would always choose to be outside rather than inside.

So after a lot of balancing and stretching and careful weeding, the 3 raised veg beds looked great.

And after digging, wrestling with nettles as tall as I am and several hours weeding, the vegetable plants revealed themselves again

I feel bad for neglecting the plants.  I was like a child with a new toy; I abandoned the trusty old veggie patch when my new raised veg beds were built recently.  Despite that, the sweetcorn has persevered.  It’s a bit straggly but there are corn cobs growing :-).  And they were treated to a very long watering session and lots of fertiliser.

There is more to do to release the other plants from their weedy entrapment but that will happen another day.

So how did I do with the family food today?  Well, we all ate healthily today and I ended up with a point to spare and lots of activity points in the bank.

There was only one thing I wanted for breakfast.

In Turkey we ate juicy and full flavoured sweet melon, peaches and apricots but I really missed the great British berry.  I love all berries, especially strawberries.  So this morning I had a smoothie made with strawberries, banana, soya milk and a tbsp of tahini (for protein and fat).  It was delicious.  And adding the tahini meant it sustained me until lunch time.

Lunch was left over Moroccan couscous with harissa and chickpeas, to which we added feta cheese and salad leaves and spinach from the garden.  The leaves are so fresh and flavoursome they need no dressing, mayonnaise or salad cream.  And some more strawberries.

The little fella didn’t want couscous again and he can’t eat dairy so he had a tuna, spinach and tomato sandwich on wholemeal bread.  He garnished his sandwich himself and took his own photo.

We ate lunch in the shade of the apple tree.  Daughter joined us too but she declined to be photographed.  Hubby was at work so couldn’t join us but he is now on holiday so he will be with us for the next 2 weeks.

I love having lunch outside on a sunny day.

Supper was spaghetti bolognese.  Nothing else.  No salad or other additions.  Just homemade bolognese sauce (onion, garlic, lamb and beef mince, rose harissa sauce to jazz it up a bit, sundried tomato paste, passata and fresh tomatoes) and spaghetti.  This does not really come under the very healthy category as it was white spaghetti and the sauce was high in saturated fat.  But I was reminded that I can not impose a radical new regime on my family.  They have been really supportive and open minded about trying new meals but they still want some old favourites.  And so do I.

I enjoy coming home after a holiday.  When I have just had such a lovely holiday though there is a part of me that wishes I was still there, with dear friends and the children in Kas in Turkey.  But we are home and there is much to do.  After getting the first load of washing on the line I went to Waitrose to restock the fridge.  While there I decided to try 2 of their recipe cards; Asian prawn and noodle salad for lunch and Moroccan couscous with harissa and chick peas for supper.  I will have to add some meat for my meat eating husband.  Waitrose had sold out of some of the ingredients but that didn’t put me off – I am used to adapting recipes and often use recipes for inspiration rather than a prescription to be followed.  I also stocked up with loads of fresh fruits and some veg.  Not too many veggies as the veg patch in the garden is looking gooood!

I joined Weight Watchers about 2 months ago.  I have lost 19 pounds so far but have been very slow at losing recently so I want to be super good and have a big loss this week so I have promised myself I will track points diligently.  I had porridge with a mashed banana and a tsp of cashew nut butter for breakfast.  I try to make sure every meal has carbs, protein, fat and fruit/vegetables.  I try to restrict tea and coffee to 2-3 cups each a day.  I drink water, rooibos tea and recently fresh mint from the garden steeped in hot water, which is refreshing and tasty.

Mint "tea"

Lunch was great.  Using the Waitrose recipe card, I made the dressing: 1 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tsp Nam Pla fish sauce, juice of 1 lime and 1 tsp clear honey.  I cooked and drained the noodles and then stirred through the dressing.  I then added the prawns, grated carrots and a handful of green leaves from the garden (spinach, beetroot tops, corn salad and rocket).  It was delicious and very low in points.

In the afternoon I set up this blog!!!  This is my first one ever so it is rather basic to start with but I will keep these early day posts as they are and hope they get quicker and easier to write and look more professional as I become experienced.

I had a lovely afternoon;  I walked the dogs through the woods over the road and the children ran laps round my route so we bumped in to each other and the dogs were confused about who to be with.  It was sunny and warm but not too hot so perfect for walking.  Back home we sorted and edited all our holiday photos and whittled 500 down to about 300 and posted the best 50 on FaceBook.  Happy memories.

So on to supper.

I chopped up peppers, carrots, mushrooms and tomatoes.  Roasted them in the oven with a little bit of rapeseed  oil.  The couscous and harissa  paste was mixed with vegetable  stock and left to fluff up (took  about 10 minutes).  I threaded  some chicken on to skewers  and rubbed Jerk seasoning on  them and then placed them under the grill.  I mixed the roasted veggies in with the couscous and hey presto, supper was ready.

Le voila – Harissa couscous

with chicken kebab.

Mmmmmmmmm.

Today was a great day.  Still feeling mellow and relaxed after the holiday, I ate really healthily and exercised.  I completed lots of chores, and set up my first ever blog 🙂 And I finished the day 5 points below my daily limit which is unusual!  But I am not at all hungry.  And I am now sitting back and relaxing watching a DVD of the film ‘Burlesque’.