Conversation

What a lovely evening.  The conversation never flagged once and given that it's after half-three and I just got home, that's a lot of conversation over the course of, well, six or seven hours.  Topics ranging from opera and composers' lives to the chemical composition of lysine, from nutrition and diet to books and authors, from old-fashioned comedy to lists of things it's better never to order in a restaurant once you've learned to make them yourself, from the outrage caused here a couple of weeks ago by a performance of Tannhauser which was staged in the nazi period to sharing stories of student life and from gun control laws to how many different ways there are in English to pronounce words ending in "ough" (eight, in case you're wondering).  And that's just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head.  I haven't laughed so much for a long time, nor felt so in awe of how much some people know about so many different subjects.

I went straight from work and had gnocchi (in a tomato sauce with mozzarella and basil) to eat.  Had a cup of peppermint tea after dinner and very late in the evening a shot of Killepitsch, a local liquor. Otherwise I stuck to drinking water the whole night.  Can't quite believe that I wasn't even really all that tired when I left the others.  They were going to try and get one last drink while waiting the 20 minutes for a taxi-driver friend to get there.  I was just so hungry though that I knew if I stayed in town that long I'd end up going for a pizza or a kebab or something similar so I left them and headed off to get a taxi directly home (I only live about five minutes drive from town anyway) so that I could have a slightly healthier couple of slices of bread. My hunger isn't sated properly but hopefully now I'll be able to sleep without waking up too ravenous.  I'm glad I didn't let the horrible rain today put me off going out after all.

Detoxing day 3

Apart from drinking the makes-you-pee tea every day I'm not so much detoxing as I am just eating healthily. Crucially, however, I am not snacking and this has definitely been facilitated by having to leave work early for doctors appointments the last two days.  So I will need to be careful tomorrow when I'm not only going to be working a full day, but will very likely end up doing an hour or two of overtime to catch up as well.  Choir has been cancelled but people are going to meet for drinks at a restaurant and I'm in two minds whether to go or not.  On the one hand, it'd be nice to go out and not be thinking about leaving as soon as I arrive because I know I have to work the next day (it's a bank holiday on Thursday).  On the other, it's money I would be better advised to not spend.  When I was first thinking about this I thought it was typical that the one time I can sleep in the next morning and so not worry about having a bit too much to drink, I'm trying to do a mini-detox.  Then I realised that although I do kind of fancy getting pissed, I still don't have any problem going out with a bunch of people and drinking fizzy water or herbal teas while they're quaffing beer. I'll probably just see how tomorrow goes and decide spontaneously whether to go or not.

As for day 3 of my mini-detox, while I have felt hungry during the day I haven't really had a headache, except for an hour or two towards the end of work and that was most likely caused by stress.  I did develop a coldsore overnight though, which is very annoying.  The second one I've ever had.  I wonder if it was going to happen anyway or if this detox is stressing my body physically more than I think.  For lunch I had some of the carrot and ginger soup that I made on Sunday.  To bulk it up a little I handed a small amount of small alphabet pasta shapes.  It filled me up quite well alright but I didn't really like the pasta so I think I'll just stick to soup next time or maybe add some lentils or barley.

I had two slices of bread with cheese and dried tomatoes when I arrived home at around six o'clock and didn't eat dinner until nearly nine.  That was a small salad with oak leaf lettuce, some more dried tomatoes (they're the type that come in herby oil, just in case anyone is mistakenly thinking that I'm being really, really virtuous) and a simple vinaigrette dressing.  I also had three more small slices of bread (that's the problem with round-shaped bread, not all slices are equal) with a bit less than two teaspoons of the wild garlic pesto I made yesterday.  Delicious.  Really, really delicious in the I-want-to-eat-it-all-now-but-that-small-amount-was-more-than-satisfying kind of way.  I can't believe it has taken me this long to get around to making my own pesto.  It's certainly something I have intended to do several times.  Actually, I've intended to make hummus multiple times as well and never have.  I think I'm going to go and put some chickpeas on to steep.  After all, I'll have a bit of time on Thursday to think about cooking them.  I've been wanting to try Smitten Kitchen's recipe for ethereally smooth hummus and am pretty sure I still have tahini in the cupboard since the last time I intended to try making it and never got around to it.  

Tomorrow will be porridge for breakfast, soup for lunch, apples for snacks and I think it will be a good idea to bring a small sandwich to eat at around five or so, especially since I'll probably end up working past six.  I'm going to try and make it to the market before work in the morning and try and get my hands on some strawberries, too.  Haven't had any yet as the weather still hasn't been great and they're probably not too sweet yet but the last two days have been sunny so I might get lucky.

Detoxing day 2

While I did a fairly proper eat only fruit and veg day 1 detox, I knew that wouldn't be terribly realistic during the working week.  To get me off to a good start this morning though, I left some porridge oats steeping in milk last night and this morning at around half-seven had a cup of hot water with lemon juice, followed by a bowl of porridge with one teaspoon of sugar.  I woke up with a slight low-level headache and I hoped that kind of a substantial breakfast, along with just a little sugar, would help me to get over that.  It did help and luckily I had a very busy morning, unusually having to spend quite a bit of time away from my desk and running all over the building so I made it through the morning without any serious cravings.  By the time twelve o'clock came around though, I was properly hungry.  Since I wasn't having a proper lunch break today and just eating at my desk (because of leaving early) I didn't wait until my normal time of one o'clock and just dug into my salad there and then.  Oak leaf lettuce with some dried tomatoes and wild garlic and a simple vinaigrette.  I was terribly proud of myself for not stopping to get a bread roll to have with it, too.

My hunger wasn't quite sated but they do say you should only eat until you're about 80% full (or is it two-thirds? They say so many things!) so I just ate my apple and left it at that.  I also drank two cups of detox tea while I was in work, although I've decided to rename it makes-you-pee tea.  I was up three times during the night!  So while I do want to keep drinking the tea and avoiding junk for the rest of the week (that'll finish the box), I drank the third cup this evening shortly after seven in the hopes of getting a less disturbed night tonight.  Despite the headache I did wake up feeling pretty energetic so that's a positive anyway.

I think if I hadn't been leaving work at four o'clock I would have really struggled to stay away from the vending machine. I did eat three tictacs I had left in work, as well as a cough sweet as the headache returned an hour or so after lunch.  It's tricky finding the balance between getting through that initial period without going backwards or sabotaging yourself by forcing yourself to be miserable.   I headed off to the doctor and had my laser treatment.  It only lasts ten minutes so I was out of there just after five.  That's a whole hour earlier than I could even begin to think about leaving work at.  I made the best of it by stopping to pick up some pine nuts (5.99 for 60g - I remember why I never buy them!) and pecorino cheese so that I could make pesto with the rest of the wild garlic I had.  I found a recipe which didn't rely on exact quantities but gave measurements that were more useful to me.  And after a short break when I got home, during which I had two slices of bread, I got up and started doing stuff.  Hoovered and washed all the floors, cleaned the bathroom, pureed the soup, did all the washing up and made pesto.  Not bad for someone who suspected when she got home that her headache might stop her getting anything done.  I have a wash on the go and have just finished a portion of the Indian spices potato and veg soup that I made yesterday.

I think I'll definitely be trying this pesto recipe with some basil soon as well.  When the pine nuts are gone though I'll be trying variations with other less expensive nut options.  I wasn't well organised enough to have sterilised jars ready or patient enough to put it into ice-cube trays so have just put it in Tupperware in the fridge and will use it up in the next week or so.  Here's the basic recipe:

1 amount of wild garlic
Half that amount (in weight) of pine nuts
Match the weight of wild garlic and pine nuts with pecorino cheese (i.e. if you have 100g of wild garlic, it's 50g of pine nuts and then 150g of cheese).

I've heard before that the easiest way to make pesto is just to whizz it all up in a food processor but I have to agree with one commenter on the website I found the recipe on (which I cannot find again now) that the garlic won't be properly chopped in the food processor.  It'd be worth cutting the garlic separately and just pulsing it and the cheese shortly, together with the already chopped nuts.  I added in enough olive oil to get it going in the processor and then put it in Tupperware and added enough olive oil to cover.  I just had a taste of what got spilt on my fingers and it was delicious.  And the colour is fabulous, somehow far more green than the wild garlic was by itself.  I'm looking forward to using it soon.

Sunday night chit-chat

What are you:
Reading
Bed book: Princess Bride (William Goldman) - more than halfway through now
Tram book: Arguably (Christopher Hitchens) - I should read more collections of essays and short stories.  Food for thought and I can often start one during the short tram journey to work and finish it at lunchtime.
Kitchen book: Candide (Voltaire) - started this in March but someone spilt something near it and it got a bit wet so now I'm finally getting back to it.  Another one of those books I've had on my to-read shelf for years.

Watching
Going to settle down to watch either Iron Man 2 or Music and Lyrics.  I want to go to see Iron Man 3 while it's still on in English but can't remember much of the second film so it would be good to re-watch it.  On the other hand, I think I'm more in the mood for a rom-com.  Went to see Star Trek: Into Darkness yesterday which means yesterday was a bit of a Star Trek feast as I watched the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek film in the afternoon.  Now I want to watch the original series again. :)

Listening to
Just the sound of the soup bubbling away in the kitchen at the moment.  Trying to get at some podcasts on iTunes but that bloody program just does not like me.  One of these days I'll figure it out, I'm sure.

Cooking/baking
It has been a weekend of soup with me trying to do a mini-detox.  One large pot of vegetable soup made yesterday, one of carrot and ginger soup this afternoon and there's another one on at the moment so that I could use up the rest of the cabbage and chard.  I added potatoes to this one as well as some wild garlic and the sweet potato that has been lying untouched for months and lots of 'Indian' spices.  Have had one small and two very large portions of soup today, have some in the fridge for tomorrow, nine servings in the freezer and still the last pot to puree and deal with.  I also still have a big bunch of rhubarb to use up and will probably just stew most of that tomorrow and use the rest to make a mini crumble.

Happy you accomplished this week
Posted off my niece's birthday present (and it arrived).  Got a few odd bits of decluttering done, including the kitchen windowsill and also managed to cook and use up just about all the food I had waiting to be used, including my massive haul of veg from the market yesterday.  And I sorted out the few games I have and put them all together in a box, which looks much tidier on the shelf.

Looking forward to next week
Not sure I'm really looking forward to it but I have my first two of five laser treatments tomorrow and Tuesday.  I'm not really looking forward to it and it's a pain that I have to pay for it out of pocket but if it finally releases some of the giant knot in my left shoulder/neck area...well, less pain I could definitely look forward to.  Added advantage to these appointments is that I will need to leave work early to get to them but it will be too late once they're finished to go back to work so I will actually be at home at a decent hour, too.  And we have the last of our multiple May bank holidays on Thursday.  Also, registration for the community college opens this week so I will be registering for the preparation course for the proofreader's exam I want to do next year.

Thankful for today
That I can eat just soup all day for no reason other than I want to try and eat healthily and not because it's all I have.  While looking for a recipe for carrot and ginger soup I also found a recipe for carrot-stuffed onions which I can't wait to try.  And longer and longer evenings.  They'll never match the long evenings in Dublin but still, bright until after eight and still not quite dark by twenty to ten is pretty good.

Bonus question: what chore around the house do you dislike doing the most?
Dusting!  It was this realisation which helped to curb my habit of buying cute little ornaments.  I now have very little other than photos and candles out on display.  The candles I use all the time and dusting the photos isn't quite as cumbersome a chore since it's always nice looking at photos of family and friends and good times.

If you'd like to join in with Sunday night chit-chat, post away and then head over to Half-Dozen Daily to link up.

Detox vegetable soup

As so often happen, the weekend did not quite go the way I had planned.  I slept later than I thought I would and woke up famished.  That rarely happens but when it does I know better than to force myself to wait a long time to eat.  Then I realised I still had one slice of quiche still left in the fridge so I ate that, telling myself that I'd go to the market then and start my mini-detox in the afternoon.  But I had also forgotten that I took what I thought was bean and veg soup out of the freezer on Thursday evening to have on Friday evening.  On Friday evening though I used up loads of leftovers and wasn't hungry enough to eat soup as well.  And then when I opened the Tupperware (someday I'll go back through this blog and add the trademark symbol to every mention of Tupperware but until then Tupperware, please forgive me and be at least happy with the fact that when I say Tupperware I really do mean Tupperware and not just any plastic box) I realised it was actually the last portion of the rustic turkey and orange pot that I made at the end of January.  Beans would have been slightly stretching the idea of eating only fruit and veg this weekend but meat was definitely going way off course.  It was still delicious though.  Must make that again some time soon.  Since I was so off course anyway I also ate the three small Mars bars yesterday, had an apple in the afternoon and finished the day with a medium bag of salted popcorn at the cinema.  I say medium but I had the feeling that I ate through the entire film and I still had some left when I got home.  Nice that German cinemas are starting to sometimes offer salted popcorn as well as sweet. though.

So the detox yesterday was a bit of a bust.  I did, however, go to the market and spent nearly fifteen euro buying all of this lovely lot:

White cabbage, kohrabi, chard, wild garlic, rhubarb, apples, lettuce, carrots

I did use a small amount of butter for sauteeing the onions but otherwise the soup I made was all veg with just a small amount of stock powder.  I used:

2 smallish onions
2 leeks
6 carrots
Half a bunch of wild garlic
1 kohlrabi, including stems and leaves
Handful of chard
Half a head of white cabbage
Teaspoon of tumeric
Rest of the jar of passata that I had opened earlier in the week

All of that went in to a big pot, was brought to the boil and then I turned the heat down and just left it simmering away for about an hour with the lid on.   This morning I pureed it in batches and put a small amount into a small pot to heat up for lunch.  I sipped on a cup of hot water mixed with the juice of half a lemon while I did that and then got carried away with clearing off and cleaning down the windowsill in the kitchen.  Something I don't think I've done for about three years.

There was a piece of wool lying there that I had knit and felted and never gotten around to making anything out of - I had left it lying there in the sun to dry as it was fairly thick, I think.  That was what started me cleaning actually as I noticed a moth not far from it and when I moved it slightly there was a lot of what looks like dust and is mostly moth eggs and then when I turned it over there were pupae and larva, too.  Nothing moving at least so it all went straight into the bin and then I cleared off the long-neglected plants and washed down the windowsill very well.  I also dumped the rest of the little bits and pieces that always seem to accumulate on spare surfaces and threw out the used soapnuts that were in a container.  I've been saving the soapnuts I use for washing once they're used up as I read that even when they seem to be spent, you can boil them up and use that liquid for cleaning, too.  The first time I tried to save my used ones I put them in a sealed container and obviously they weren't quite dry when I did because they eventually got mouldy.  So then I started keeping them in an open container.  But I've never gotten around to doing anything with them and if they must have been at least as dusty as the windowsill was, which is probably not really what you want from your cleaning products, so out they went.  I hate to just throw stuff out but I need to be a bit ruthless at this stage.  I can already feel the difference this relatively simple task has made to the place - every time I walk into the kitchen it feels so much nicer (the windowsill is directly opposite the door, so it's the first thing you see when you walk in).

I've just spent an hour and a half on the phone to one of my sisters so I'm a bit behind now.  Things I'd still like to get done today: (edited with updates in brackets at around ten o'clock)

1. Sweep and clean floors
2. Give bathroom quick going over
3. Iron and put away everything that's been washed this week (have done trousers and a shirt for work tomorrow but that's it)
4. Make more soup (I bought loads of carrots on purpose so that I could try my hand at carrot and ginger soup, still have half a head of cabbage to use up and a pile of chard that has been slowly wilting on the countertop since yesterday) (done - just need to puree the last batch but it's just finished cooking so I'll leave it till tomorrow because I can't face another round of washing-up this evening)
5. Wash lettuce to have salad ready for lunch tomorrow and Tuesday (done)

Not a huge list but quite a lot to do all the same.  So far I've only had one bowl of soup but I didn't plan on spending a long time on the phone today so now I'm kind of hungry again.  I'm having an apple and will go and make carrot soup when I've finished and then eat some of that.   Going to make myself a cup of detox tea, too.  I had some yesterday and while it might not become my favourite it's quite nice to drink and at least it's warming.  It's cold here again today.  Where did spring go?

Things I've been up to

Trying to get back in the habit of drinking herbal teas.  I'm not sure if it was something I ate or the fact that I was wearing trousers with a belt but I have been horribly bloated and had indigestion every day this week - I've kept it just about under control though by opening my last box of "flat tummy" tea, which is a digestive mix that my sister's local supermarket in France does.  I stock up when I visit here, every time promising myself that I will go to the tea shop here and buy the individual herbs to mix up my own batch.  It's great stuff, though and between that and peppermint tea, I've managed to keep the indigestion from really hurting.

There was no big decision to get back to eating properly and bringing lunch every day but this week has worked out in such a way that I only ate lunch out once (and that was on Wednesday, when I go straight to choir from work and I did bring a snack with me for after work, instead of stopping to get takeaway).  I even took some soup out of the freezer yesterday and heat that up before work this morning.  It's a bit depressing that heading into the last week of May it has been cold enough to appreciate a flask of warm soup for lunch, but it was lovely soup at least (the last of the spicy carrot and lentil soup).  I've also used up almost all of the leftovers I've had in the fridge this week, with just the rest of the jar of passata from Monday still to go.   And I only made one trip to the vending machine in work this week, too.

Tomorrow I plan to head to the market and buy enough veg to make a huge pot of soup.  To try and get my digestion system properly over whatever it is that's been going on this week, I've going to just eat that soup and maybe a bit of fruit over the weekend.  Maybe I'll finally get around to drinking that detox tea I bought in January (and just realised that I still have one of the two sweet potatoes I bought that day as well, might end up throwing that into the soup tomorrow, too).

I got the bill for participating in the Happy Birthday Handel performance of the Messiah next year so have paid that plus the deposit for the accommodation that weekend.  I had that amount saved in my new holiday fund already but to make things easier from a banking perspective I have just transferred a smaller amount to my annual expenses fund and used the rest to pay those bills. Whenever I get a chance to go into the bank I'll transfer the money from the holiday fund into the annual expenses fund (can only do transactions from those accounts in-branch) to even things up again.  But it was so nice to have that bit of money already put aside when the bills arrived.

For no particular reason this week I also started to clear up some of my email inboxes.  I've gotten back into the habit over the last few months of opening and deleting or filing most of what I get as soon as I get it but during the couple of years where I was badly depressed an awful lot of stuff built up.  Still have quite a way to go but it feels good to have made a start.

And finally, here are two amusing little youtube tidbits for a Friday evening (I'm going to see my first Wagner opera in a few weeks so this was particularly apt):

And I may be going to see the new Star Trek film tomorrow (that came up after I decided to do my mini-detox this weekend but I can survive one film without popcorn), which reminded me again of this ad:

Using up leftovers - French bread pizzas

Many, many moons ago Suze from Simply Seeking Serenity commented on a post I did about food waste, asking if I would post some of the things I do with leftovers.  I don't think I ever did get around to doing a proper post on that but in a new effort to also make sure to cook and use up everything, I've decided to post  details every time I do this for the next while.  

After eating leftover pasta salad from the barbeque on Friday all weekend, I still also needed to use up the baguette that I was left with.  A few things came together to give me a flash of inspiration on this one and French bread pizzas it was.

I sliced the baguette in half and then again into lengths a bit longer than my hand.  I opened a jar of passata that I made last summer, feeling smug all the while about having lovely home-bottled summery goodness on hand.  My brother scored dozens of garlic bulbs in the reduced section of the supermarket a while back and when I was in Ireland a few weeks ago he gave me some.  I cut one large clove of garlic in half and rubbed the cut side all over the bread.  Then I spooned some passata onto each slice.  You can see in this photo, particularly the slice at the front, how quickly it gets absorbed as I had done half of them before I thought to go and get the camera and just in the time it took me to walk into the other room, a good bit had soaked into the bread.  So I added a second helping of passata to each slice.

Next up I finely sliced half an onion and added it to the top of half of them.  Then I took the grated cheese out of the fridge.  I bought a large block of cheese several weeks ago and never got around to using it.  I checked it on Friday and had to cut a fair amount away to get rid of the mould that had started and the rest of it was not terribly nice in texture anymore.  I prefer my cheese more on the creamy rather than the crumbly side of things.  So, I decided to grate it all, thinking that I would make a quiche on Saturday.  Only I never actually went shopping so have no eggs and therefore didn't make quiche (the impetus to use up that cheese helped decide me on making these French bread pizzas in the first place).  I added plenty of cheese to each slice and topped a few of them with chopped dried tomatoes.  I've been buying these quite a lot recently and plan to use however many jars I get through by the time tomato season comes around to give me an indication of how many I should be drying myself to see me through the winter.  

And that was it.  I remembered to sprinkle some oregano on at the last minute and they went into a pre-heated oven at about 150 while I did the washing-up and hung up the washing, so about twenty-five minutes I think.  Could have been less but I wanted to get that stuff finished before I sat down again. Et voila. 

The finished product - delicious, if I do say so myself

I planned to only eat half but was hungrier than I realised and ended up eating four of these.  The other two will be for lunch tomorrow.