Tuesday, February 24, 2009

A foodie triumph

Well, to everyone else it's probably just normal eating but to me having a not great day at work, feeling like you really want to stop and buy something greasy on the way home for dinner (even though you know you have food at home that needs to be eaten before it goes off)and even giving in and buying a bar of chocolate and some peanuts on the way home and even after arriving home and looking at the food you have still thinking that it's not what you want but then.....then deciding to at least have a slice of toast and while that's cooking deciding you might as well throw that soup into the pot to heat up and so while waiting for the soup to heat up the first slice of toast gets the last of the cheese and a bit of chutney put on it and becomes a starter, then having a brainwave and adding the mettwurst that also needed to be used soon into the soup to heat and eat with it and putting the yoghurt and stewed apple into a bowl just in time for the soup to be ready and all of a sudden you have a three-course meal waiting for you of healthy, almost all homemade food, well, that to me is a triumph. A TRIUMPH! And in fact, another reminder that I don't really need to eat that much if I eat properly because I realise I'm full when I'm full and not half-an-hour later when I've eaten twice as much as I need. I need to buy in some more easy starter type foods again as having a little something to munch on while cooking the dinner really does help me not to overeat (for those who didn't know it takes about 20 minutes for your stomach to register food and so, if you've gone straight to a main course and shovelled it in because you're really hungry and think you need seconds because you're still hungry, it might just actually be that your body hasn't caught up on itself yet).

Actually, my starter and main course have filled me very well so I'm waiting for a while to have my desert. If I decide not to bother it'll do for breakfast tomorrow morning. This is another thing I struggled with for years and still do - it is okay to leave food on your plate if the alternative is overeating. The part to work on is getting the portion control right in the first place so that you don't have too much food on your plate.

The problem with having food that really needed to be used was that I visited a friend for the weekend. He is a chef but one of those who has no interest in cooking at home and just tells me to go to the restaurant to eat. I'm happy to go and get my dinner there but he wouldn't exactly be much of a one for the whole three regular meals a day life and forgets that most people do need to eat more than once a day (he tends to graze all day in work and drink beer at home so doesn't eat a huge amount of actual meals - how someone with so little interest in eating can be such a good chef escapes me but I know he's not the only one) so when I visit I usually end up going to the supermarket on the way or, like this weekend, realising I'll arrive too late to do that and so bringing food with me from home (which also meant I could use up those last few veg in the fridge to make soup rather than leave them there for another week when they might even have been beyond redemption by soup). As it turned out I didn't finish all the soup or all of the yoghurt and stewed apple I had brought with me. This was due to a number of delays on the way home and a somewhat disturbing decision to try a McDonalds and see if I was missing anything (had a burger and small chips, gone in about ten seconds but at least I only had mild indigestion later) and a ham and cheese brezel yoke (also something I haven't had for years and it undoubtedly contributed to the indigestion) which meant that I wasn't hungry enough to go to the trouble of taking anything out of my bag on a very packed train to eat later. But with all the delays I was so wrecked by the time I got home I just dropped my bags when I came in and went straight to bed. Then this morning I was going to be late for work and didn't give them a second thought either. So, given that the soup and yoghurt and stewed apple had been out of the fridge for a day and a half by the time I got home this evening they really did need to be used or dumped. I am very happy that I didn't waste them.

No comments: