My CRON experiment

2011-07-16T12:49:00.000-07:00

If I wasn't typing this, I'd be standing in the doorway of my kitchen looking up through the courtyard into the garden and beyond. It's a breezy, cool July evening and the trees (chestnut, ash, oak, fir) are swaying irritably in the wind - like me, I imagine they long to be caressed by the warmth we should be having every day in summer but this year comes only rarely: such an fickle lover, the British Summer. I would be looking up the path through lavender and cat mint and bright flaming scarlet crocosmia, to my sweetpeas climbing up their wigwam and the buddleija overhanging them, to a sky that is (for once) blue in the fading light.

But I'm not. I'm typing this and sipping plain cocoa-and-water and when I look up I can see the vases full of sweetpeas that I picked earlier. At the moment my house smells of supper - artichokes with vinegrette, and grilled halloumi with tomatoes and cucumber and leaves - with overtones of what I can only identify as "grandmother", which seems to consist of fresh coffee and baking bread and lavender soap (and is faintly disturbing, to be honest. The ghosts we can conjure in our kitchens are manifold).

So yes, I am typing this. It's been more than a while and it's been a while since I thought about this blog, this pretty much anonymous outlet that I should utilise more often, perhaps. It's a matter of catching myself unwares; if I don't think, I am more likely to do. And I often need a kick to get myself into gear...

So. I last blogged in December 2009. In brief, not a lot has changed (shame to say). Ennui is a hideous thing. I did do the month long cookery course. It was enjoyable and in some ways an education but it wasn't what I wanted; I already know how to cook, and this was a course for much younger people to be taught how to cook and how to cook in a certain way. Let's just say there was far too much butter and cream involved for me. And far too few veggies. I was the only one on the course who lost weight. (Not that I ever complain about that.) But, it did knock my confidence a lot. It's only been in the last six months that I have managed to pull back to wanting to be in the kitchen, to wanting to create, and to feeling that I have something worthwhile to give when I am creating. I'm back onto cooking blind, meat and fish for friends that I will never taste but seems to please them. It gives me so much satisfaction.

The lasting gift I took from the course is both gift and personal curse - the ability and addiction to baking bread. I love it, I just love it. The magical transformation of 4 ingredients, or 3 if I am feeling clever, into something so comforting and visually impressive is incredibly, again, satisfying. It almost feels like a cheat. Flour, water, salt, yeast - and 3 hours later, it's like an artisan market in my kitchen. I don't even need to weigh or measure anything any more; I can tell how the loaf will be by the feel of the dough in my hands. It is beautifully tactile.

(Speaking of weighing and measuring, it goes without saying I no longer practice CRON. Healthy eating, yes. I do try *not* to eat the bread. But CRON, no. Sorry.)

So, well. A lot goes on in a year and a half, and a lot doesn't. I am incredibly lucky in so many ways. I love where I live (oh my garden my garden); I have fabulous friends; I even have people who check back on the blog after months! But it all feels so fragile; as though it could all slip away at any time, as though there is a price still to be paid. Ridiculous, huh? Or the beginings of a mid-life crisis, perhaps. I began this blog when I was 34. I'm going to be 39 next week. How on earth did that happen? How fast does time go? :-)

Maybe more later. Maybe in sooner than another year. xxxx

Letting It All Go

2009-12-03T05:53:00.000-08:00

So, at the end of August I was hoping to make a Fresh Start on various things - exercise, diet, attitude, direction. And with that Fresh Start, there would have been lots of wonderfully fascinating blog posts that would have kept you hooked, on the edge of your seat, thrilled by my adventures, my daring, my skills, my achievements, gasping at my success...

Ahem.

Yeah, well. That didn't happen. Life got in the way, as life does - and it was always next week, next week, next week... Consequently I am writing this feeling unhealthier than I have done for a very long time, and looking it too. That photo I titled Gratuitous Vanity Shot? Vanity indeed. Serves me right. If I could fit into those shorts now without a muffin top, I'd be happy... Well, not happy but you know what I mean.

So, this post is a kick up my own backside really. A note to myself to Get A Grip. Yes, Christmas is coming up and yes, my diary is jam-packed full of meals out and parties. But that's not excuse to end 2009 feeling like a whale, so. Belated damage limitation ahoy. Wish me luck.

(It hasn't all been bad bad bad. I have more or less completely redecorated the upstairs of my cottage (admittedly after the ceilings fell down), and it looks so much nicer now. I lie in bed and look at my lovely wallpaper (such an exciting life, isn't it?) and coo with pleasure. And I have booked myself on a month-long professional cookery course, in March 2010. To see if I really can stand the heat in the kitchen.)

Summer Holidays

2009-08-28T02:53:00.001-07:00

I spent 4 wonderful all-too-short days in Portugal on the Algarve last week. Lots of pottering around, and lying in the sun (well, in the shade but there was lots of sun!), and generally relaxing. It must be so easy to be CR'd in warm climates; all I wanted to eat was lots and lots of the wonderful tomatoes and cucumbers that were in the markets.

Some random pics of interesting things, and a gratutious vanity shot.

Feeling Blue

2009-07-30T06:25:00.000-07:00

I think that this article about the places in the world where people live the longest, healthy lives is something I need to flag here and read again and again myself. Simple, no nonsense, straight-forward commonsense. And it's *not* hard to live life as if one were in a Blue Zone.

But I don't do it.

2009-07-27T14:41:00.001-07:00

Clearly I have failed to put anything into the new blog, which shows shamefully on my profile. Flake.

Still, have some flowers.

Crocosmia

Borage. Perfect in Pimms, apparently. But I don't like Pimms, so I don't know. I eat the flowers on salads, and scare people by putting them on cupcakes.
Sweetpeas. After I'd done the picking for the day. Triffids have nothing on them.
And now have some veggies:

View up the veggie patch...
Squash gone mad... yummy though.

Radicchio (sp?!) and swiss chard. We had chard for dinner tonight... the patch is, shall we say, somewhat denuded. I can eat A LOT of chard.

My enchanted asparagus forest. Unfortunately, this was something I could not eat a lot of this year, and here it is, taunting me with all its flowering glory.

As for CR.... Usual story - loads of veggies, but not counting calories. Probably far too much bread and cheese and, yes, wine, lately. Which I am feeling.

As for life, a hell of a lot of horrible stuff which paradoxically makes CR very hard. Life is too short v life cannot be long enough.

Anyway, xxx all.

Cholesterol Test Results

2009-05-19T05:04:00.000-07:00

Sainsbury's are doing them free, so I thought - why not?

Anyway. I think these are okay in themselves, but wonder if I practiced CR more rigorously (or, indeed, more often at all) whether they would be better?

Total Cholesterol Reading - 4.22 (I feel this should be lower)
HDL Reading - 2.26 (... and this should be higher?)
Ratio Reading - 1.9 (er...)
Glucose (non-fasting) - 5.0

And I weighed 110.2lbs on the scales this morning. The scales are mad. I probably could have gotten on them 30 seconds later and been 2lbs heavier.

(The last time I had some tests done was Dec 2007. Then my total cholesterol was over 5.00 and my blood sugar was, as I recall, 3.8).

May Morning

2009-05-13T05:37:00.000-07:00

I woke up early this morning just before dawn and lay in the gathering light, listening to the bird sing and breathing in the damp clean air that smelt and tasted of childhood holidays in summer. A gentle drizzle has been falling all day, and the garden is lush and green and glimmering, wearing the droplets of rain like jewels. Before my coffee, I planted rows of yellow climbing beans in the veggie patch and trained their grasping tendrils around their canes, patting their roots into the damp soil and tucking the loose earth around them.

Some pictures that I took last night, before the rain.

The veggie patch. On the left, from nearest to furthest: sweetpea canes, over-wintered endive lettuces, beetroot (grown mostly for leaves), peas, strange random leafy vegetable (that was supposed to be rocket but isn't and has come up again from what I failed to dig out last year when I cleared the ground), spinach; behind the spinach are rows of salad leaves, heritage carrots, rainbow chard and spinach; raspberry canes; various fruit bushes and rhubarb, and right at the back of the patch, runner bean canes. And then on the right, from furthest to nearest: peas under fleece; supports for yellow climbing beans, flowering asparagus, rows of parsnip seedlings; supports for borlotti beans (looking very sad at the moment; I think they are shocked by cold), and membrane laid down ready for squash, sweetcorn and tomatoes.

The flower bed above my courtyard. Lavender, sweetpeas, catmint, geraniums, and pots of various spring bulbs that are dying back.

The path from the courtyard up to the garden, with snaking hose that I was using to water the veggies with last night.

Flowers in the courtyard, and the beans waiting to be planted. I am particularly happy with the way the clematis in the pot is scrambling up into the yew tree and pyracanthus and am really looking forward to it flowering; last year it had amazing white blooms, blousey and elaborate, like old-fashioned ballgowns. I love my aquilegia too.

Ever Contrary

2009-05-11T09:33:00.000-07:00

After the last few weeks of a) holiday and b) mega life stress, I'm not too sure that it isn't such a bad idea to keep this blog going purely to keep me on the straight and narrow, literally and figuratively. And also while I have actually set up another blog, I've yet to post anything to it and am not sure what I would post anyway so... I may ramble on here for a bit. I might even count the occassional calorie, but I think the sheer numbers consumed thereof lately might terrify me so I might equally well not.

It hasn't all been doom and gloom though, thank heavens. It's the time of year where I can now count on eating fresh leaves from the veggie garden every day, which always makes me happy. I do love to see things grow; it is such an every-day miracle. I'll post some garden pics later on, when I am home. I've spent almost an entire week in London with P now and while his company is, of course, wonderful, I am weary of town and noise and concrete and pollution and excess of everything. Yesterday I was desperate to plant things and get my hands dirty and so headed for a garden centre, armed myself with implements of destruction, and spent the afternoon hacking through the wasteland of P's garden, uprooting brambles and couch grass with the intention of planting him pots of herbs and tomatoes and peas and lettuce this evening after work. However, I forgot that the only key to the back door is on his keyring, which is in the pocket of his jeans, which he is currently wearing and he is at work several miles away so the planting is unlikely to happeny. Boo hiss.

Prior to gardening I was at the farmer's market and bumped into MiniCronnie and G at the leaf stall. Small world! Lovely to see you both and look! I am blogging, even if it's only you reading it.

I was buying lots of leaves to take to a friend's house for dinner. In the end they didn't get eaten (so that's my tea sorted for tonight) but we did eat piles and piles of white asparagus bought over from Germany by my friend's friend. It's a very strange thing... I've only ever had it canned before, and wasn't too sure I liked it - slimy, over-salted, over-cooked... but I guess that is the way it is eaten in Germany; the friend's friend boiled it for 20 minutes and it was much as one might expect a veggie to be after that; very soft, but not unpleasant for all that. I think I prefer my asparagus the Sara way though - green and steamed or roasted, or sliced with a knife from the allotment and eaten raw before I make it to the back door, which is how I've been eating it the last few weeks, because I am asparagus glutton with novelty asparagus shoots.

Er, yes. Amazing how much I can ramble about nothing at all, really. Anyway, photos to follow and maybe something a lot more interesting than this, either here or on the new blog. We'll see.

Au Revoir

2009-04-18T13:15:00.001-07:00

In comments on my last blog entry, Matt asks me if I am still on CR.

I said quite breezily, oh yes.

But I think I probably need to say again that I don't do CR properly. I eat lightly naturally; my diet is mostly veggies, fruit, low or non-fat yoghurt, and cheese. I have cycles with what I want to eat and sometimes that means more grains and some times it means more fruit and sometimes it means all I want to eat is broccoli. Purple sprouting or just plain calabrese. Mmm.

But the CR label, especially with all this new Oprah generated interest on the CR lists, is not one I want to have. Of course I want a long and healthy life. I also want one free of worry and stress, and I have a temperament that puts me in danger of obsession and guilt. I read postings on the CR and CR Community Lists and (with no offence meant) it depresses me. Life is too short for so many worries about means of sustenance. Life is too short anyway. I have lost too many people in the two short years I have been blogging to... well, I guess I have to put my eggs into the basket of my genes rather than those of 50 years of controlled, deliberate eating. Not that my eating will be anything other than controlled or deliberate, but that is Sara. And not CR.

Hell, does that make sense?

Love to all,

S.xxx

Green Smoothie Fail

2009-02-24T04:36:00.001-08:00

I've been meaning to try a green smoothie for well over a year now; I don't know why I never got around to it - I guess a natural aversion to the concept of smoothies; I really don't like the idea of drinking something so... viscous. If that's the word. I even went as far as buying a smoothie maker last year, but after the first dramatic attempt to get it going resulted in nothing but a horrible smell of burning and some defiantly solid blueberries, I just gave up and the thing gathered dust and irritated me by taking up counter space before I sent the thing off to a charity shop, hoping it was my incompetence that produced the burning and not a faulty machine...

But inspired once more by Matt's postings to the CR lists and on his own blog, I decided to take the plunge yesterday.I used my food processer which seems to be fairly powerful rather than investing in a blender this time (live and learn). In went half a pack of young spinach leaves, and a cup of tap water. Blend blend blend... Then a banana, in pieces, and a handful of blueberries, and another cup of water. Blend blend blendalotandthensomemore.

And I had a jugful of green gloop that looked just like all the other jugs of green gloop that one can find courtesy of google. I had a cautious taste. It was okay. Tasted a bit more bananary than I'd like, but... well, packed full of green goodness as it was, who could complain about that. In fact it was pretty good.

So I poured it out and sat and drank it. Fairly slowly. I didn't just chug it down.

I'd like to say that afterwards, I was buzzing with energy and vitality; I'd like to say that it had the same miraculous effect on my feeling being completely totally knackered all the time and infused me with new life and enthusiasm. I'd like to say I am a complete convert and nothing will ever touch my lips but green smoothies twice a day and I will be forever RAW and GREEN.

But no. I had the worst attack of indigestion I have EVER had an hour afterwards, which sent me curled up back to bed shuddering in agony for most of the day. GRUMP.

It's bizarre. I'd say that 90% of my diet is green and 75% raw anyway. I love green veggies. I love fruit. But clearly green and fruit together do not do it for me. At least not in that combination.

I can't say I'm tempted to repeat the experiment.

Green smoothie Fail. :-(

Winter Wonderland

2009-02-05T09:14:00.001-08:00

Snow. Snow snow snow snow, snow snow snow... *Happy Sara*

Green

2009-02-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

It's 5pm and still light outside, although the sun is setting and it won't be more than a few minutes before I can see the first few stars glittering in the clear and freezing sky. It is very cold. Apparently there is snow in London but not here yet; maybe later... Nevertheless, I will shortly diving beneath a lovely woollen blanket with a hot water bottle and curling up with tacky movies and books for the rest of the evening.

It's been perfect weather to indulge my current obession with making soup. Inspired by this post on one of my favourite foodie blogs, I have been making lots and lots of green soup recently. My creations have turned out far, far greener in colour than the picture shown; incredibly so... but then I have been ramping up the kale and adding spinach and other green goodies big time; I've never been one for following recipes meticulously at all. But this base is a winner. Yesterday's variation on the riff included cauliflower rather than potato as a thickener, and onions and leeks and january king cabbage in addition to the napa cabbage (or chinese leaf, as we seem to call it here). I also added 2 packets of a spinach / rocket / watercress salad mix just before blending and... well, the colour was neither shy nor retiring. And the soup was pretty delicious as well - possibly a bit too brassica-ry, but it would carry some blue cheese really well and if I wanted to bring it out at a dinner party, it would dress up fantastically with some yoghurt or creme fraiche. So I have some leftover in the freezer waiting for its Cinderella moment.

I also made a huge pot of hearty winter veg stew, to use up a pretty poor bottle of wine that I had picked up as part of a meal-deal for P mid-week. Lots of root veg (onions and leeks and carrots and parsnips and rutabaga and celery and the essential garlic), said wine, fresh and tinned tomatoes, lots of dried and fresh herbs, and puy lentils. Again, all mostly frozen to bring out later on, for convenient deliciousness. I think this would be great as a filling for little tartlet cases, perhaps with some blue cheese melted on top, and served with some cauliflower puree, brussels sprouts and red cabbage - a complete winter warmer, a comfort food dinner for friends.

It makes me happy to have my "ready-meals" to pull out when I want them. It's been a life-saver in London recently since P and I have such different foodie requirements. To know that I have something nutritious and wholesome just ready to defrost or microwave for me, which lets me put dinner for both of us on the table without wasting lots of money on veggies that he won't eat, takes such a load off my mind. I really hate spending the working day thinking about what I am going to take home for dinner that evening that will suit us both, and my mindset is such at the moment that I think about it far too much (stress, and stupid stupid recession and lack of job for P).

Right, the first star is in the sky and my blanket (maroon, welsh wool, snuggly wholesome comfort in yarn) is calling me. As is the rather delicious purple sprouting broccoli that I picked up on the organic veg stall in the market yesterday. For all the cooking that I love to do, I would far rather eat just plain, steamed veggies if I am on my own. Hopeless case!

Love to all.

expletive of your choice the Credit Crunch

2009-01-24T07:26:00.000-08:00

If I read one more newspaper article about how to cook great food cheaply, how to furnish your house on a budget, how to buy cheap wine, how our (still incredibly prosperous, people!) society has been plunged into the chasm of recession with no lifeline - I swear, I am going to do more than scream.

This media hysteria is driving me wild. Yes, it's a shitty time. Yes, people are losing their jobs. P hasn't worked since November. He might lose his house. He probably will lose his house if he doesn't find work soon. It's a bummer. It sucks.

BUT. We are still lucky beyond measure in what we have. In fact, for most of us, I dare say nothing much has changed since the beginnings of this recession but perception. And for food - now it seems to be as trendy and fashionable to buy a cheap chicken as it was practically social death, darling to do it this time last year; hell-oh!

For heaven's sake we were getting there. We were getting towards responsible, considerate eating; we were considering provenance, and the care of the flesh we were eating when it was alive (well, we doesn't mean me here, but you follow me) and now - now we are steps away from "I don't care how it came to be on my plate, I just care that it's there (and also that I scored a miraculous bargain at one of the cheap-as-chips supermarkets, aren't I clever?)", and the farmers, the growers, the artisan producers who care about their craft can just go hang.

Grrrr.

See? One more word, and I am going to go postal.

And breathe.

Tonight, I am cooking for friends for the first time this year. We are having leek, onion and jerusalem artichoke tarts (which means I am making a veggie filling and putting it in pre-made pastry for them and not for me); the most beautiful January King cabbage I have ever seen and that I want to frame and treasure for ever in its majestic brassica-ry-ness rather than slice and steam; rosemary carrots; and possibly sweet potato mash or roast potatoes. And I'm going to pull the last of last year's gooseberries out of the freezer and make gooseberry crumble. It will be a frugal meal but by happenstance (chance?) and not because it is fashionable.

I admit I am naive. I know we are in dark times. But I cannot help feeling that we are mentally driving ourselves into deeper times and I wish it would stop. Just look at the hope that arrived this week in Washington. I'm not expecting miracles because that would be foolish but a spread of optimism across the western world is very much needed and then we can stop focussing on our "collapse" and help those who are already collapsed and already in need. Shift those priorities back to where they always need to be. Is MHO.

Back To The Land

2009-01-17T06:34:00.000-08:00

This morning was the year's first venture back into the garden, to dig the rest of the Jerusalem artichokes from their winter bed. I've got some kind of flu-ey bug again so the whole thing took longer than it might, what with me stumbling around weakly and tripping over my own wellington boots and, at one point, burying myself knee-deep in soil when the pile of earth I was trying to shake the tubers from collapsed around me. But now there is a huge pile of artichokes sitting under running water in the sink; some destined for my neighbours, and the rest for soup. Mmm, soup. Granted they aren't the most low calorie vegetable in the world but as far as I remember they are packed full of iron and good things.

I don't even try to calculate the calories in the batches of soup I make anyway. I've never quite worked out how to do that with CoM. This morning, because I was feeling a little better than I have been, I made a batch up with half a leek, a couple of celery stalks, onions, garlic, a tin of tomatoes and 100g of red lentils, simmered for hours and topped up with water every so often, flavoured with thyme and sage and oregano and a little chilli, cinnammon and a teaspoon of demerera sugar to balance the flavours. It was just what I needed after a morning's digging and I have 2 batches frozen and 1 more in the fridge. Today's CoM report will be incomplete because of it but considering I have been invited around next door for pizza and salad this evening, this is probably a good thing.

I've been tracking calories and nutrition again when I can. I'm not surprised by the results. Eating as I do (if I don't give into the temptation of yummy bread and evil dairy, which I tend not to do when I am eating alone), my calorie intake is low but the nutrition is high. I still need to work really hard on protein though. Yada yada...

I'm already looking forward to this year's gardening although I can't believe it's 12 months since I was planning last year's with the neighbours. We'll probably spend some time this evening making up our planting plan and sorting through the mountains of seeds we've acquired. I think I need to organise a village seed-swap. In fact, that's not a bad idea... Hmm. Must think more.

Hot lemon and honey and Saturday papers and a nap now, I think. Hope this bug buggers off soon; it's really annoying me.

Broccoli Kitten

2009-01-16T01:16:00.000-08:00

In lieu of actual content...

The New Start (# 1)

2009-01-03T06:47:00.000-08:00

2009 brings me success in downloading the right version of java to run Cron-O-Meter again! Yay yay yay. So now I have no excuses not to watch what I am doing. I remember how interesting logging my nutritional intake was two years back (two years, what happened to 2008??) and I wonder if it will hold the same fascination this year. I can only try and see. Given that the scales had me leaping off them in horror this morning this can only be a good thing. Surely 3lbs in one week has to be water retention. :-( I suspect, however, it is the legacy of evil dairy and (being honest) wine. Sigh.

Today is a gorgeous frosty blue-skied freezing winter's day. My friend L and I took a walk around a nearby town, Bruton, this morning. Not only did we manage a bracing walk up steep narrow lanes and woodland paths, we had wonderful coffee that gave us both caffeine shakes, shopped in a vintage shop that had 50% of the vintage clothes and yielded me up a gorgeous cafe-noir faux fur jacket for twenty quid, and then stumbled like giggling kids up the still-frosted slopes to the Bruton Dovecote (scroll down to bottom of page for pic) after driving down several narrow lanes trying to find the thing (now you see it, now you don't, over and over again). Then we headed home to my place and had the butternut squash / lentil / tomato soup that I made for lunch yesterday from the remains of NYE supper. Now I am contemplating heading out into the blue yonder once more to hunter-gather a Saturday Guardian and do no more with my day than curl up reading with a blanket.

My New Year with all its good intentions will begin on Monday. I want another few hours of wallowing before I have to face reality and all its horrors. I want this to be a good year, better than last, but I know (with no desire to be melodramatic) that there is no way barring infinite miracles that it can be. I need all the strength I can get to give to those who will need it.

The Fall

2008-12-30T05:20:00.000-08:00

Ok, I take it all back about feeling confident about cooking meat as a veggie.

Not that I even have to deal with the lump of dead cow that is currently scaring the living daylights out of me every time I open the fridge, but. Ew, ick.

The friend who was supposed to be hosting NYE dinner is sick, so now NYE will be a joint effort between my friend E (next door) and myself. E will cook The Cow. All well and good. But I had to go and buy The Cow from the farmshop this morning - rib of beef, 3 ribs.

Almost four kilos of cow corpse. Given the cost of it (not mine, bless E), please God the butcher didn't see a blanching vegetarian and decide to palm off the mankiest beast that had ever ended its days under a sharp implement (no, I don't want to think about it) onto me. Never mind creating deliciousness out of this for my carnivorous beloveds; all that I am going to create with this monstrosity is one very large hysterical fit.

*sigh*

Happy New Year, all. xxxx.

The Dragon

2008-12-29T08:33:00.000-08:00

In the end I had a very quiet, peaceful and lovely Christmas with my mother. I cooked butternut squash with orange and pomegranate; brussels with chestnuts and roasted shallots; roasted parnsips and carrots (and one potato for her), and braised fennel. And veggie gravy. Yummy. We just chilled out and took long, cold walks along the river and watched TV (something I do rarely, and wow have I had enough of it) and it was just lovely.

This morning I made the Best Soup I Have Ever Made (until the next time). Making soup is my current addiction. Veggies are so cheap at the moment (which is scary and comforting at the same time). Parsnips, carrots and onions are 50p a bag in Sainsburys, and if I had more room in my freezer I would be a one woman soup production machine. The Best Soup I Have Ever Made was thrown together with a pack of parsnips, a bunch of carrots, 2 sticks of celery, 2 onions, some garlic, one star anise, a shard of cinnamon stick, a shake of the cumin seed pot and a very restrained one of the dried chilli, all simmered together with plain water for about an hour and then whizzed vigourously in my food processor (star anise and cinnamon removed). I really think soup is a miracle in potentia and today the miracle happened. OMG, v yum. I've got 3 lovely boxes of it frozen ready to grab whenever I want now.

Of course sometimes the miracle doesn't happen and in order to make room in the freezer for the miracle that did happen, I now have a vat of pond slime (aka celery-from-the-garden-soup-which-I-know-I-didn't-try-hard-enough-with-so-is-all-my-own-fault) defrosting in the kitchen. But... waste not, want not! But mmmm, parsnips!

The Cold

2008-12-19T22:20:00.000-08:00

I'd have to have been superhuman not to have caught this. P came down with something absolutely disgusting in the middle of last weekend, and while I fought very hard against it with lots of lemon juice and honey and garlic and broccoli (not all at the same time), consecutive nights of him hacking and choking and spluttering all over me (I assume not deliberately) took their toll, and I feel like a walking plague. Perhaps it is the vestiges of my CR'd immune system kicking in, trying to rid my body of this bug as quickly as it can and, apparently (risking TMI here) any way it can... but my, am I not pretty right now.

Still, I should be okay by Christmas, I hope. I've taken 2 days sick and had some much needed bed time, and I have the days before The Day off work next week as well. P and I are spending it apart - he's in London because his football team are playing on Boxing Day, and I'm going to my mother's. Mum has asked me to sort out our Xmas lunch / dinnner, so I need to get that in hand.

Last weekend I cooked the anti-CRON festive dinner for P and 2 of our bestest friends. My friend T and I went to Borough Market and foraged as I planned the menu in my head, changing it depending on what looked good as we walked around.

We ended up with:

A salad of chicory, raddiccio, and frisee, mixed with sliced orange, scattered with pomegranate seeds and tossed in a light dressing of pomegranate molasses, white balsamic, EVOO and grain mustard. I stuffed a pheasant with lemon, garlic, thyme and butter; rubbed it with salt and pepper and roasted it; P did the honours for me and shredded it once cooked, and the shreds of meat were scattered on top of the salad leaves (although not mine, obviously).

Roasted haunch of venison. I had had the idea of cooking sea bass but what can I say? Walking around in the rain on a freezing cold day, Bambi looked a far more solid bet for the carnivores, and I wasn't wrong. I roasted it on a bed of jerusalem artichokes, carrots, onions, whole garlic and thyme, with the pan deglazed with red wine after the meat was removed.

I roasted plain veggies for me.

We polished off a HUGE savoy cabbage, and a romanesco cauliflower.

Yum. I'm told I am really good at cooking meat and getting the flavours right. Quite how, I don't know; I can only describe it as sort of like painting in my head, things click. But then I might just have incredibly generous and complimentary friends. :-)

But my mother is not at all a meaty person. She doesn't like fish. She also doesn't like chilli, garlic, or most spices. In fact, all she has demanded for her Xmas lunch / dinner so far are roasted parsnips. The lazy part of me is thinking about going with that, adding some extra veggies, steaming some kale, and chucking some pomegranate seeds around for that festive touch. It's only the 2 of us; any excess just seems unnecessary and unwanted work. We shall see. I guess it all depends if I am fit for human company by then.

The Hunger

2008-12-11T09:25:00.000-08:00

I don't know what is up with me lately; whether it is the cold weather, or the stress that I've been under / am under / feel all around me when I see my friends suffering and am unable to help... but my appetite has become voracious. And this really annoys me. I hate feeling hungry (if hungry is what it is); it hurts, it makes me snappy and bad-tempered, edgy, unable to settle, nervy - frankly more mad than usual. And no matter what I do, I don't seem to be able to get rid of the feeling. I feel as though I am eating all the time. Just, grrr!

I am irritated that I cannot download the version of java onto this machine that I would need to run CoM again. If I was tracking the calories or nutrition in what I am eating, it might explain why I am hungry, or feel so desparately unsatisfied all the time, even after a meal. Maybe I've got my protein too low, my carbs too high - I'm almost certainly not having enough good fats. I've been eating fruit and adding agave nectar to my yoghurt; maybe that's it. The last thing I need is to be coming up to these few weeks of parties and dinners and feel as out of balance as I do.

Today I've eaten:
55g oatmeal (I weighed that!) made with water
10 almonds
fat-free cottage cheese (let's say 100-125g) mixed with pumpkin seeds and flax seeds
2 bowls of homemade veggie soup (mostly carrot, 1 leek, 2 sweet potatoes, 2 onions, garlic, water - it made those 2 bowls plus 3 .75l containers as leftovers)
2 apples
c.175-200g fat-free yoghurt with a tablespoon of museli and some agave nectar
carrot sticks (say 150g or so)
c.75-100g smoked tofu

Dinner is going to be broccoli, zucchini, and leek, possibly some peas. Can you tell I'm trying to finish up the contents of the fridge? :-)

I don't think I've forgotten anything... Written down it doesn't look all that much - but I just can't tell any more.

Thoughts? Suggestions? (Nice ones please; I'm fragile.. :-) )

Bright Side

2008-12-09T05:22:00.000-08:00

This promises (so far) to entertain me all afternoon (alongside the joys of coding .net, of course).

So, come on. Let's have some guilty foodie secrets in comments here. CRON or otherwise; past or present... Hmm, one of my own? Um... P would say its my prediliction for steamed broccoli with sea salt and black pepper but I hardly think that counts as a guilty secret.

In the past, I have to admit I adored Kraft Mac&Cheese. Out of the box. In all its buttercup glory. And cold rice pudding, or cold custard, out of the tin.

Couldn't bear either now, of course, but oh the nostalgia!

"Post" (Haste)

2008-11-25T03:45:00.000-08:00

Bad things happen to all people, good or bad. The last few months have been pretty dreadful; people have died, died suddenly, unexpectedly; died slowly, after a long, declining fade; people have become ill, it seems as though there has been bad news on top of bad news until I find myself wondering fearfully when it will stop. And then I remind myself that all these things are part of life and they will not stop. Life will continue to be bitter just as it will continue to be sweet. Life is not fair. There is no rhyme nor reason behind far too much of the suffering, but there must be comfort in this: it is not personal;; it cannot be. The ego needs to acquiese, to still, to be at peace. The winter evenings are long and dark but the sun does rise every morning; the world spins on its axis; life goes on, we go on, we endure. And sometimes we don't. And that is a part of life too, one that is very hard to accept but has to be accepted. We have to see the beauty in the shadows; we have to not fear the dark.

Of course that's far easier said than done and I've spent the last several months in quite a dark place raging futilely against the seeming injustice of it all - why my friends, why my friends' friends, why my grandfather, why my world, why my life. Needs to stop. I'm getting there. On crisp, cold days like this one, when I can look out of the window as I type and see a clear, cold sky filled with a weak but persistent light, see the trees silhouetted against the skyline, see the last shocking scarlet flashes of the autumn leaves clinging on to the branches, hear the birds fluttering, chattering, even singing - it's just another winter. And winter is beautiful. We even had snow last week, briefly; I lay in P's bed and watched the flakes fall fatly past the window and settle on the tiled roofs of the tightly packed London houses, sugar-coating the dirt and the mossy damp with soft white frosting before fading and disappearing in faint wisps of steam back into the sky. I am trying very hard to arm myself with optimism, and to think Good Thoughts.

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

2008-11-21T05:48:00.000-08:00

Time after time I begin an entry and time after time I delete it.

I think all I can post for now is that I am still here.

On the menu tonight

2008-09-09T09:45:00.000-07:00

Onions roasted on a bed of rosemary with thyme and black pepper
Puy Lentils (tinned, I'm afraid, but pantry stocks are low; will warm up with herbs to match the onions).
Cauliflower puree (CR'd version - cauli steamed with garlic, zapped with Total 0%, seasoned)
Steamed rainbow chard, petit pois

I am cooking dinner (or veg accompaniments) for friends tonight.

I am feeling quite ashamed that only one of the above is straight from the garden but really, there is only so much squash and beans a girl can take.

But the summer bounty is coming to an end. My beloved leaf patch is looking decidedly stalky. The cabbage white caterpillars have massacred my curly kale, the complete and utter little slimy wriggly bastards. I did persuade the ten year old son of a friend of a friend to spend a delighted hour picking the little buggers off each leaf and depositing them in a jam jar to feed his mother's chickens with... but it's done no good, and the chickens apparently spat them out. I can quite appreciate the sentiment, because I'm not too sure I could even stomach a bite of the kale myself now. In the squash patch, I have two courgettes that are marked for my lunch tomorrow (current lunch fave - steam squash, mix with chopped tomato, black pepper and Philadelphia Extra Light... yum), and that's about it. There is a pumpkin I am saving for a Halloween supper if it doesn't get carted off to a Harvest Festival.

However, we're still good for carrots, chard, spinach, beans (for another few weeks, probably), beetroot and Autumn raspberries. I've planted more cavalo nero, white sprouting broccoli, purple sprouting broccoli, stonehead cabbage (very unenthused about this one, even I have a limit on greenery), and lots of winter salads in pots and in the patch. So we'll see what happens.

Technically I could have been self-sufficient this summer, but I wasn't disciplined enough to eat only what I was growing. I wanted tomatoes, and I hadn't gotten around to growing those. And I failed on broccoli, and cauliflower, and romanesco.

But still, it's been quite an impressive gardening year.

I'm thinking I might be CR-ing more seriously in the near future. I haven't really counted calories for a while, but my weight was dropping so I assumed I was CR'd, if not ON'd. Not sensible, but... I hardly have an unhealthy diet. Now it's on the way back up, from 107 in July or so (too light!), to 111 this morning (hmmm, slippery slope). I feel like being more disciplined with myself, so am investigating some pilates classes, trying to summon the motivation to get back to the gym (this is very hard, has never been this hard, why why why, is it age, sheer laziness (yes, probably the latter)??), and downloading CoM onto the machine I use isn't going to be far off.

But if anyone is following this blog for healthy living tips, there's probably a while to go yet. :-)

Love to all.
S.
xxx

Fall

2008-09-02T03:03:00.001-07:00

One of my favourite sounds in the world is the singing of crickets in the evening as the dusk and darkness fall. Crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas - whatever they are; that throw up that low chirruping hum that makes the very air seem to shimmer with sound, that sound the hypnotic pulsing in the shadows that is the essence of dying heat and daylight - oh, it brings back such precious memories to me; of gazing up at clear star-studded skies in Colorado, night times floating in the warm waters of the hot springs in the arms of a lover, the sharp reek of sulphur rising with the steam, and all around the murmuring of the crickets. So imagine my joy when on a rare warm night last week, sitting in my friend's garden, that sound rose again into the night silence from a sun-warmed pile of rubble. And imagine my horror when I exclaimed in delight and she couldn't hear it. Was I hallucinating? Longing for the summer we haven't really had so much that I was conjuring its essence from memory and sheer force of will? The next night was equally warm (last Saturday, and yes, that was really the last day of summer!), and I was sitting in the same spot, with the same friend and other acquaintances of hers, and once more the low song began in the stone pile... I called for silence and everyone listened and only one person, apart from me, could hear it from where we were sitting. All but that one person were twenty or so years older than me. It does seem that, in this country at least, the cricket orchestra only plays to the under 40's, unless you're up close and personal.

I was so insistent that yes, the crickets were singing, that everyone got up and headed for the stone pile (to shut me up, I think!); after several minutes of silence, the insects struck up again, almost louder than before, amazed or terrified by the sudden proximity of their audience. And this time everyone heard them. A relief for me, because I was starting to feel that maybe the years would rob me of the ability to hear that precious sound forever, and with it the essence of memory. But it won't. I will just need to keep my mind open to wonders that are not immediately apparent. I will need to keep listening.

Just say the word

2008-08-09T08:51:00.000-07:00

Post something, anything..., says Robin... and so I finally charged the batteries of my ancient digicam today, intending to take pictures of the garden (even though it is raining so hard right now I can hardly see it) and the ridiculous varieties of obscenely shaped squash that are appearing day by day (seriously, one of those is at least half a metre long now, and growing fast, and another looks as though it could be the mothership for an alien nation; I keep expecting it to develop flashing lights and spin off the vine). But... plugged the newly charged batteries into the cam, and... nada. Not a peep, not a squeak, nothing. Grrr. So the post that was going to be lots and lots of pictures (once again), is (once again) just me and my words.

Rain is good for the garden. It's great. It's wonderful. Thank you all you heavenly entities for your watery bounty. But please, stop it now, okay? I've gone through several sets of clothes today picking beans (why, why, why do the English keep planting runner beans, I mean does anyone actually (hand on heart) like them?) - runners, yellow flats and purples -; the said squash (10 in the fridge right now (despite making clear-the-fridge soup earlier), another 10 in a basket); a huge bouquet of rainbow chard... and don't even start me on the kale, or in fact the sweet peas (which went mad when I was in London the last couple of days and exploded into a riot of heady, blowsy colours - the hussies). I got my salad in and washed at 6am, so that's something.

No, I'm not really complaining. All this bounty is such a gift right now; I really am more or less self sufficient, and it's great. But the quantity is daunting. And rain puts me in such a bad mood. I had planned to cook for friends tonight and had the menu sorted in my head (I was going to roast squash and runner beans and chard stems; steam the chard leaves, dress with garlic and lemon juice; bake tomatoes with herbs; I baked aubergine earlier as per previous blog entry in anticipation thereof; mix a garlicky yoghurty dip with my beloved and as yet ungiven up Total 0%; and they were going to have pork) and I grumpily, when asked if really sure, cancelled on them (actually while typing this I was stricken with guilt and phoned and uncancelled if they still want to put up with me). But my GOD this rain... the kind of rain that makes you feel damp just looking at it, you know?

Plus I am on leave from work this coming week. And it's August. I want to chill in my garden in the sun with books and pink wine and laze around with friends and see my mother in her lovely little Devon town on the Exe Estuary and vicariously eat seafood with my wonderful friends who are visiting her with me (if I haven't wrecked said friendship with my moany bitchy oh-god-I-hate-rain grump).

Still, me time is good too. And the house is a pit and needs tidying badly. So I must look at the weather as a blessing in a soggy disguise.

CRON - ah. I think we can probably take it as read that this isn't a CRON blog any more, not right now. I'm not using COM at all; just doing my usual, lots and lots and lots and lots of veggies (right now beans, squash, chard, salad leaves, tomatoes, occasional aubergine), non-fat yoghurt; trying to work my way through a cheese mountain that seems to have accumulated in a tupperware in my fridge from various neighbours. Cheese is so yummy. Mmm, cheese. Mmm, sheepy cheese. I am pretty sure I'm not too far off hitting most nutritional bases though; I reckon I'd be 90% without even trying on vitamins and minerals if I did attempt to log what I'm eating. But I don't think that yellow blistered squash comes into the USDA database. :-)

I'm looking out at the garden right now - do you know, I think it might have stopped raining? - and it looks like September or later. The sweet peas I was training up the side of my horrible lean-to shed have flopped over under the weight of water; the golden rod is tumbling hap-hazardly over the steps, twining its dirty golden flowers with the last of the lavender; the black-eyed susans are budding, their stems whipping in the growing wind; my basils are flowering and so is the chervil, delicate fronds and fat leaves that would smell like heaven if the sun came out. I can hear the leaves of the ancient oaks and chestnuts at the back rustling like fall, and the sky is a heavy, laden slate grey. The church bells have just stopped pealing; a practice, a summoning, a rememberance, or a wedding I don't know (I suspect not the latter). My once-christened BBQ is full of water, and the tin buckets that we used for flower arrangements for the wedding are plinking and plunking with each drop that falls in. It's hard to believe that a couple of weeks ago we had a garden party and people were hiding in the borders, clutching their icy flutes of fizz, because the sun was so strong and so hot. I guess that is an English summer.

Another Year Older

2008-07-28T08:53:00.000-07:00

I turned 36 last week. 36, OMG. I'm trying not to freak out too much, because hopefully I will get a lot older(!) but wow, 36 is a big number. I have no clue what happened to the first half of my thirties. Must try not to lose the other half in quite the same way.

I really must get my camera sorted out / software installed to sync my phone with this machine, etc. I would love to post pictures of the garden and the veggies but you'll just have to take my word for it that everything looks fabulous. I love being practically self-sufficient... even if it means I am living mostly on zucchini, and Italian yellow blistered squash (which are the most obscene shape, and make me giggle like a loon every time I harvest. I am very juvenile, despite my advancing years. They are so delicious though - off the plant, straight onto the BBQ, or even munched raw).

This past weekend we had a garden party for a few people in the village. The weather behaved itself wonderfully. It's currently really quite warm, and actually I am looking forward to the storm we have been prmosed for later, not least because it means I might not have to spend the two hours watering everything that I currently need to. But if that's the only downside to all this bounty, I can live with it... :-)

Ooh, and I finally got my cavelo nero into the ground, along with some seeds for romanesco cauliflower. It's a bit late, but I can always hope for a bumper brassica harvest. I've got loads and loads and loads of curly kale on the go. I could feed an April and an MR for... oooh, days at least.

Oh well, another dull blog post from Sara... Just saying hi, really. Hi. :-)

BabaGOODoosh!

2008-07-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

Quick, no-brainer (and no originality, but hey).

Heat oven to high, whack in 2-3 whole aubergines (eggplants), cook until wrinkled and utterly molten inside. You might need to put them on a baking tray.

Cool slightly, and then scrape out the insides into a dish. Mash a lot.

Make a paste with 2 cloves of garlic and sea-salt to taste. Add juice of 1/2 lemon.

Add to aubergine gloop. Mix a lot. Taste and season with more salt if nec and black pepper. Forget the tahini and olive oil.

Serve to as many people as you have.

(Even P loved this. And that's saying something).

Things you don't want to see in your veg patch

2008-07-13T12:53:00.000-07:00

There are, of course, many. Slugs, snails, caterpillars... but I'd take any of our invertebrate friends over the dessicated rat that I found this afternoon, near to the radishes, the spicy leaf mix and one of the (many) zucchini plants. OMG, barf, yuck times one million. P, thankfully, came to my assistance with a spade and removed what little was left. Said deceased beastie was so far gone I can only think something else dragged it there... because surely I wouldn't be so far immersed in my gluttony for greenery that I would have failed to notice a decomposing rodent for several weeks. (Please God, thank you very much...). Urgh.

However, thay say love is blind...

Washing My Dirty Brassicas In Public

2008-06-16T05:52:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to update for days, but kept thinking that I'd do a photo post of my garden and the veggies to go with my (little) news... but my digicam is so ancient, needs charging, produces really quite poor quality photos and, well, I'll give up on that idea for the time being. :-) You'll just have to use your imaginations, if you're in the mood.

My life recently has been almost wholly centered around the garden and the veg patch. I think it's fair to say I've pretty much fallen in love with it this year; I just want to be with it all the time. Hmm, makes me sound more tragic than usual really! But honestly, going out in the morning when the sun is almost always shining (it stops shining fairly quickly, I'm not being blessed with the UK's only summertime down here) and picking my leaves for my huge bowl of salad, is just so special, and precious and life-afirming; I just want to hold onto every moment, yet every moment goes so quickly. I am trying very hard to live in the here and now. There is some uncertainty about how long I can hold onto this place at the moment. I rent, and I am hoping with every ounce of my being (shrinking ounces, as it happens, but that's another story) that this will continue to be the case. I can't afford to buy myself; property prices are plummetting but they would have to plummet and then some for me to even be able to get close to grabbing onto this slice of heaven in my own name, but I might be able to get close another way. We shall see.

In the here and now, as I said, I am gathering my salad bowls every day. I need to harvest again for this evening's meal actually, since I just gobbled the lot for lunch today. I snip beetroot leaves, mixed salad bowl lettuce, rocket, baby red chard (growing up fast, so won't be baby for much longer!), curly kale (the other morning I went out and washed each leaf by hand to get the butterfly eggs off because this is *my green* and those little critters are *not* going to have it), nasturtium leaves (hurry up flowers), mustard leaves, and mizuna; the whole lot gets washed several times and then dumped in an enormous salad bowl for me to add what I want to it. Today it was the remains of last night's mixed bean/pea/mint veggie combo and some roasted beetroot. Yum. And then some Total 0% with agave nectar and some crumbled pecan and some oats for dessert. Coffee.

Given another few days I will be eating my own broad beans, raw from the pod with shavings of pecorino cheese. It doesn't take a lot of cheese for a complete taste sensation, so I urge you to try it if you can - I'm afraid this is unadulterated full-fat cheese, but I am getting more and more anti-processing lately so I'm advocating a little of the real stuff, and not often. Peas aren't far from being eaten either. And I've had two very small, very yummy zucchini. No sign of a glut yet. Despite having, um, at least 30 varieties of squash plants out there at the moment....

I'm keeping an eye on my distaste for processed, non-seasonal foods, just to make sure I don't tip over into being completely, utterly insane, rather than just insane. But I might have to give up my beloved Total since I think it is the one thing (over wine, and coffee!) that I think I have got addicted to, and that worries me. I eat it for the extra protein boost but - it's got to be intensively produced, who knows what the cows are fed or in what conditions they are kept to produce their milk, and the stuff is shipped from Greece, so has to undergo even more processing... And it's increased four-fold in price recently. No, I need to switch back to the local Yeo Valley and either stop fretting about my protein, or source it (naturally) elsewhere. Oh, but I do love Total 0%... *sigh* Anyway, in the same vein, I've just chucked a load of cereal for being health food in disguise - if I'm going to have grains, I want them to be pure oats, or sugar free, local museli, not processed Kraft cereals no matter how "fortified"; fortified is fake; I don't want to go there any more. Now, if I could just kick the craving for wonderful, dense, artisan rye bread... but a little and not often (as per cheese) won't hurt me. And let's face it, I can't see me giving up coffee (apparently one can source it from Cornwall, but there are limits), or switching wholly to wine produced in the UK (99% urgh, although most of what I have been sipping lately has been from small producers in France so...), so I am still quite hypocritical and.... ok, just fussy and plain mad.

Has anyone else read Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"? I would recommend it. It has brought a lot of my fuzzy thinking around the issues lately into focus. She is such a fantastic writer. It would also be fair to say that I am insanely jealous of her lifestyle, but there we go! I am so fortunate with my own.

This weekend I was lucky enough to have fresh raspberries and strawberries from my mother's allotment. We have rhubarb and gooseberries in the veg patch here, but only Autumn Bliss raspberries which aren't fruiting yet (although the cuttings from the same plants that mum put into her allotment are, in abundance; a lot to be said for micro-climates). I've more or less given up eating non-seasonal fruit on a regular basis too, so this was a much anticipated treat. Visiting with my mother was a lovely end to a week off work, most of which was spent intensively gardening both here and in a friend's garden. If I never see an 8 foot bean cane again, it will be too soon for me. Erecting around 60 of them to cope with the bumper germination of various bean seeds I've managed was far less enjoyable than I had anticipated - 8 foot pole, strong breeze, bright sun, and 5'6" Sara in a temper are probably not a good combination.

Oh, and Arturo - last time I tried to read your blog (last week) one of your pop-ups gremlins tried to install and run an executable on my machine(!), so can someone let me know if it's safe to venture back into the land of the Yogitect? :-)

Love to all.

xxx

Farewell Thunderchild

2008-05-20T20:56:00.000-07:00

P and I had to have one of the cats put to sleep last week. Thunder, one of the floppiest bundles of feline joy I have ever had the pleasure to hear purring in my ear. He developed a very sudden and aggressive cancer of the larynx and it was almost immediately apparent that we had no choice but to let him go. So last Wednesday night we slept with him in the bed between us, and last Thursday morning I held his paw and put my face down by his and heard him breathe out his last laboured breath in one long whimper of (I hope) relief. It is very sad. I miss him dreadfully, and the next morning when we woke up, there were not enough tails and paws in the bed.

J continues to rally. This seems to be such a miracle; no, is such a miracle. That something could be done when he was so low, that something was done. I am very thankful for it. We're not out of the woods by a long way yet, but there is more hope now. At least he is being pulled back into the world, rather than lingering in the suspended half-life that is existence in an isolation unit in a stroke ward.

So a sad thing, and a happy thing, and neither to do with CRON.

Once again I am two minds whether to continue this blog at all. Linda writes in her journal that if you aren't measuring your calories, or monitoring your nutrition, then you are not practicing CRON. I am doing neither right now. I'm eating everything I ate in more or less the same quantities as I did when I was practicing properly last year, and I'm losing (or have lost) weight. The latter is not surprising given we've not been eating out half as much in between hospital visits, work and travelling. I'm monitoring the weight loss, but I'm not monitoring my diet with CRON-0-METER. I'm a good ad lib eater; I have confidence in a lifetime of good eating habits to carry me through right now. The results of the blood tests I had done back in December were apparently excellent.

So if I am not CRON, do I blog? Hmm, don't know. Doesn't stop me reading other blogs though, so I am around.

In other news, I've been gardening fiendishly. The courtyard is crammed with pots of herbs and flowers and I am eating my own salad at least once a day. I can't eat it any more than that because a hungry Sara would do more damage to a tub of leaves than an army of slugs, and I do need to leave some things to grow. Another month, and even I should be defeated by the quantity of greenery that has been sown. The squash plants are growing steadily, although they could do with some more warmth. The beans are climbing away up their poles. I really *must* get my kale into the ground.

Yesterday I thought of channelling the spirit of Miss M, and eating the nettles and ground elder that I was dragging out of the flower beds, but in the end my nerve failed me. I had visions of mistaking the apparently nutritious and delicous tasing ground elder for something less benign, and being found poisoned in my kitchen surrounded by evidence of my veggie gluttony. Maybe in a few days. It is a crime just to chuck nature's bounty on the compost heap, after all. And there is a lot of ground elder out there for the picking.

Thanksgiving

2008-05-10T14:38:00.000-07:00

Someone somewhere must have access to a hotline to God because J has rallied once more. I didn't see him today, but P tells me he was off oxygen and off the horrific monitors that had us transfixed like some goulish soap-opera last weekend.

After last week's hailstorms and freezing cold, we are having summery days. Oh, it's so lovely to be warm. Mmmm.

I have a weekend at home and spent all of today getting the veggie patch in order. My purple climbing beans are now in the ground and we have (ahem) 30 squash plants waiting (slight unexpected germination issue). I'm even getting my courtyard sorted out, which is mostly dedicated to leaves, herbs and veggies this year. I'm 2 weeks off being self-sufficient for salad for the next 6 months. This makes me very happy.

And I have an asparagus patch! It is torture letting it all get on and grow rather than eating it though.

However, tonight we had much asparagus - steamed and dressed with a little olive oil, rock salt and black pepper - for appetizers as the sun went down. Everyone else had beef, and I cooked veggie dishes of beetroot baked in foil with thyme, rosemary, and a little oil, and then mixed with red onions roasted with fresh rosemary sprigs and balsamic, and topped with a little feta and mint; carrots and leeks steamed and then dressed with a warmed mixture of honey, grain mustard and lemon juice; a huge green salad with flowers and herbs; and new potatoes with mint and olive oil. You can guess which of those I didn't eat. :-)

Sometimes I feel guilty how much I love my life here. It feels like such a gift. I forget that it is, and that I need to pay for it, and London and the job that I hate is the price I need to pay.

But it's been a good day. I hope whoever it is who has the hotline stays on it, because J needs good days like this too.

May Day

2008-05-01T09:54:00.000-07:00

J is very bad today. P and his family have been with him since late last night and now all we can do is wait.

In defiance of (or reaction to) this, I have spent much of the day when I could get away from the PC planting as many seeds as I possibly can into pots (for micro-leaves) and seed trays. I just want to create. I wish I could cook for friends tonight too, but I think it's just me and I have little appetite.

Outside it's hailing, but there is evening sunshine teetering on the edges of the storm.

British Summer.

Foodie Weekend

2008-04-27T03:23:00.000-07:00

P and I went to the Real Food Show at Earl's Court yesterday. Billed as London's largest farmer's market, there were probably several hundred producers gathered under the one roof - lots of bread, cheese, wine, ciders, beers, chocolates... and hardly any veggies at all, which did seriously amaze me. We came away with far too much bread (because I can't resist dark, dense, artisan rye bread, heavy with seeds, or home-baked soda bread) and cheese (two varieties and ages of parmesan, my favourite sheepy cheese, some blue goaty), and wine and (for P) beer and cider. We picnicked briefly in the park for tea - but the weather didn't hold, and I had been too optimistic in not taking a jacket out with me.

I also came away with more veggie seeds than I will ever be able to plant. Yellow climbing beans; purple climbing beans; borlotti; custard squash; romanesco cauliflower. I need to do some serious garden work when I get home.

This morning I woke up knowing I hadn't had enough green. So while P slept I pottered up to the farmer's market in Walthamstow and loaded up on mustard greens, rocket, baby spinach, lettuce, red russian kale, purple sprouting and some radishes and shallots for good measure. I was the first customer to buy veggies at one particular stall; the second was G, Linda (Minicronnie)'s partner. We've only met the once so he didn't place me at first; when he did, I laughed that there were very few people who would be buying so much greenery at 10am on a Sunday morning. :-)

Now I am back at P's house and wondering what to do with the rest of the day. I kind of can't face any more foodie shopping, which is my default London activity when I spend weekends here. Later on he will go and visit J in hospital (who relapsed seriously last week but now, thankfully, is rallying again), but I won't because I have a slight cold and don't feel I can risk it. But we have the afternoon, so maybe we shall do something with that. We'll see.

Blank

2008-04-19T06:31:00.000-07:00

I feel as though I need to (should?) update this blog, because I haven't just vanished; I'm here, still Sara-ing away - the usual, the usual; home-London, London-home; great CR, not so great CR; wine, whine. :-) But things are very... up in the air. P's father is still in hospital and now, for heaven's sake, has some kind of infection that has him back on oxygen. Our greatest fear now, obviously, is that having survived major heart surgery, and a fairly serious stroke, is that the hospital environment currently more detrimental to the speed of his recovery and to the state of his health in general - but what can we do? Private care is financially impossible - and there's no guarantee that conditions would be any better in a private hospital anyway. He's not well enough that he can just go home. This does, quite frankly, suck. And I am on the periphery of this limbo; it's taking far greater toll on P, his mother and his siblings. And poor J (P's father) must be in a terrible mental state.

Doesn't matter if CR helps with our future health and longevity (although that's no reason not to focus on it; I still do - I think, but then given my eating habits it's hard to tell what's CR and what's just Sara). We should just thank Whatever that we have (reasonable) health right here and right now. And I do, I do.

Even if I have caught P's cold. Which, ironically, might be what has laid J low again.

Tonight I foolishly agreed to make risotto. Risotto. *sigh* Hey ho. Lots of veggie side dishes, I guess. We have artichokes to steam. And some radicchio, which I am planning to make a salad from with some beetroot I have roasting in the oven right now and some shavings of sheep's cheese that needs using up. Plus tons and tons of salad leaves from market and farm shop.

The rain can sodding well stop right now as well, please.

Moan, moan, moan huh? :-) Hardly an update worth reading. Love to all and I hope all are well.

S.xxx

ETA, because lovely acts are always worth mentioning to the world. This morning I went to a Gardener's Market in my nearest town. Such fabulous plants and herbs and flowers (indoors, so nothing was shrinking back from the cold and the wet). One of the owners of my favourite plant nurseries was there - fantastic couple, work their butts off to raise such a variety of stunning beautiful things in a fairly isolated location but one that is fortuitously close to my home. They specialise in bulbs, and I took the opportunity to ask him what might have gone wrong this year that meant that my Queen of The Night tulips just failed to appear altogether, while the fabulous orange/red with the black hearts came up as reliably as ever. (Answer, likely rotted in the soil in the wet January). I thanked him, and continued wandering around, and when I next passed the stall he handed me a bag with a full pot of Queen of The Night in bud "as a replacement" because he "hated disappointment".

Bless him. I do seem to whinge and whine so much but really, I do know how fortunate I am. How very, very (touch wood) lucky.

Time

2008-03-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

The clocks went forward this morning. Of course, being ditzy me, I failed to realise and thought my PC was playing me up when it told me it was 6am rather than 5am when I gave up on sleep and staggered downstairs for my morning internet fix, and so was rather surprised when the neighbours offered me morning coffee at what I thought was 8.30am but was actually rather later. P fared somewhat better and was actually on a train to visit his father by the time I gathered enough wits to phone him and make sure he had more nouse than I did.

We both visited P's father on Thursday evening. He is making progress but his condition is very distressing, and the hospital, frankly, sucks. I am sure that the nurses are doing their best for him, but of course they can't be everywhere at once nor give him the individual attention and more importantly mental stimulation that he requires. I felt horrible leaving at the end of the visit. But he continues to improve and so, no matter how slowly that improvement is, it's good.

I know this is supposed to be a CRON blog but this last week, I certainly haven't been CR-ing. Apologies for that (if anyone is expecting deep and meaningful CRON revelations, that is; I'm not apologising for not CR-ing!). P and I have had a lot of meals out; a neighbour injured her foot and was unable to stand, so I've been cooking for her and her partner, and those evenings have been somewhat convivial as well. I have, however, apparently completely revamped her concept of how vegetables can be served and cooked and she, like me, is now swooning over the simple pleasures of steamed purple sprouting broccoli and kale. Steamed carrots tossed in a teaspoon of grain mustard and a teaspoon of honey (warmed 10 secs in the microwave) have met with approval too, and last week I made a salad with cannelini beans, lots of flat-leaf parsley, rocket, tomato, cucumber, black olives, lemon juice, garlic and chilli that went down a storm. I do love to cook.

Today I went to an open day at a herb farm and came back with lots and lots of packets of seeds - far too much, really. With the extra daylight I have started to sweep out my courtyard and plan where to put pots of salad mix and other veggies and herbs that I want to keep close to the house. It's still a bit early to think about planting in the soil (and it's water-logged anyway) but I might set up some trays of veggie seedlings in the kitchen, to pick for micro-veg in salads.

I very much like this light evening thing. It's a little bit of positivity. I need to hang on to the idea of regeneration, and the cycle of life right now. Things get better, they get better. They must.

Still here

2008-03-14T03:44:00.000-07:00

A brief and boring update, just to keep myself in the blogosphere... :-)

Not much going on worthy of CRON note. To be honest, full CRON has been fairly far from my mind with the situation with P's father - which doesn't really get much better but at least isn't (and please GOD won't) getting worse. It's really, really horrible to even contemplate that someone can go from more or less decent health (give or take a dodgy aorta) to being unable to move or speak or see in one slice of a knife on an operating table. We are so, so fragile beings.

Life goes on though, busily busily. Have managed to get more of a routine back into my weeks - weekends and three full days at home (good nutrition; good CR!) and two days in London (not so good, but then never bad, nutrition; CR on the back-burner); that helps. Am planning what to grow in the garden this year and have a bunch of seeds already picked out: various lettuce varieties, kale, chard, spinach, courgettes, butternut squash, beetroot, green beans, peas... Last year, what with the wedding and growing all the flowers for that, the veggie garden was a bit neglected in the end - and it didn't help that all the weird and wonderful squash varieties we thought we were growing turned out to be ornamental gourds and inedible. But this year I am optimistic. It's lovely seeing the world wake up again; one can take heart from that, in a way.

I also think I am winning the battle against the Christmas weight, finally. Which is good. I'll feel much better when I am back down at an upper weight of 112lbs rather than the 114-5lbs I'm at now; even carrying a little extra feels more uncomfortable than I'd like... but anyway, that's not really the point; I do wish it didn't matter to me but it does... Although not as much as eating well. April says she feels the lack of good nutrition when she's not fully with CRON and I do too. Yesterday I was craving chocolate, for heaven's sake - ordinary, sugared, crappy chocolate. I just hadn't hadn't had enough green for lunch.

Enough inanity for now... Later!

Insomnia

2008-03-04T19:50:00.000-08:00

Someone on the CR list posted about the effects of CR on sleep. I don't know whether it's CR, or me aging, or me not needing as much sleep as I used to and still trying to get as much, or what, but in the last year I have had more episodes of bad insomnia than ever before. Like this one. 3am. Meh.

Still, I watched No Country For Old Men earlier in the evening. I suspect that has more than a little to do with it. What an unrelentingly cruel movie; fabulously done, but so so so bleak. I guess being awake is preferable to being in the half-daze of troublesome dreams it left me with.

The Inspiration of the Long Distance Runner

2008-03-04T06:08:00.001-08:00

101 year old man intends to run London Marathon.

And there was me feeling quite pleased with myself having managed to get to the gym 4 mornings in the last week so far and do my 30 minutes treadmill stagger each time!

Cautiously Optimistic

2008-02-28T09:51:00.000-08:00

Over the last few days, P's father seems to have been making gradual, positive progress towards a recovery. It appears that he had a stroke after his heart surgery. However, today he was able to open his mouth of his own volition to have his teeth cleaned, and he is sitting in a chair rather than lying in bed. As yet he can neither see nor speak, but we are hopeful that the system will continue to reboot and he will be back with us, fully compos mentis, very soon. Thank you for your good wishes.

INO, I found Robin's latest post today fascinating, setting as it does a hypothetical non-CRON day against a CRON one. It reminds me, not that I really need to reminding, that getting one's RDA's on a CRON diet without using software is really impossible. It's ironic that when I was using CRON-O-METER regularly, P would chastise for me disordered eating, but when I do not, and sit down with him and eat my way through a plateful of romaine quietly, he doesn't comment at all. Yet I know that that plateful of romaine really doesn't do it for me! Often I am in danger of eating unhealthily-healthily.

Today I have eaten (in order, as far as I can remember) fat-free yoghurt, LLBY, pumpkin seeds, goji berries, flax seeds (4am insomnia); a mug of hot soya milk some of which was poured on 10g of puffed spelt, almonds, and a brazil nut (2nd breakfast, like a hobbit); more yoghurt, LLBY and cinnamon (after gym); salad of romaine, cavalo nero and mustard greens with eggwhites (back to shelling my own); cooked beetroot, the kind that comes vacuum packed (because it needed eating up); some more gojis, a few more almonds, a couple of walnut halves and some more pumpkin seeds; and a baby cauliflower and a baby romanesco cauliflower with two chopped tomatoes and a little feta. I don't know the calorie count or the nutritional profile of any of that lot, because I can't get CRON-O-METER downloaded onto my new PC (something to do with the settings of IE, which I just cannot change; it keeps wanting an Active-X script running and it won't have it - any tips welcome). But as far as calories go, knowing there is no bread in there, I'd estimate it to be just under or just over 1000 cals and the nutrition to be around 80-85% vitamins and minerals. I imagine I'd be low on iron and E, and certainly on D because I've stopped taking my supplement after the latest scare. I might have some broccoli later to bump things up, but I'm about to head out to a friend's place for a movie so if she did insist on feeding me, I have room for it.

Where am I going with this? Well, I guess I would just like the reassurance that C-O-M gave me that my healthy diet was healthy, and not just pseudo-healthy, lacking in nutrients. It's not bothering me too much; I'll get C-O-M installed somehow, sometime... The other thing was that I try very hard to get P to eat healthy food when I am with him, but not my food. Quite often I make a large salad, cook greens, and we share those, but I will do meat for him - steak, or lamb, or something that looks as though it could look nice if I wasn't a rampant veggie. I'm a little distressed to find that what I thought was healthy - good steak, for instance - isn't! Still, the nutritional profile of all of the meals on R's posts could be bumped up by 200g of steamed spinach whacked on each plate, I would have thought. A small difference, but a crucial one... At least P is usually more than willing to eat his greens even if he does draw a line at a plate of kale. :-)

More off-the-cuff ramblings from me... Golden Compass now (a disappointing adaptation of a fabulous book if there ever was one).

Update

2008-02-25T05:20:00.000-08:00

I've been wanting to find the time, inclination, motivation and words to update for a while... but the four never seem to arrive when I want them to, let alone together. Imagination seems to have done a bunk as well, along with all ability to stick to a proper CRON regime. Or, in fact, any regime at all, since I have rarely been in the same place for more than 48 hours for several weeks now.

So here I am, stuck in DTBIC land, which would be much more of the BIC if I managed to stop drinking as much wine as IC. Gah, as Bridget Jones would say.

Still, that's pretty trivial.

P's dad is in hospital right now, having undergone heart surgery on Friday. And he's not waking up, or rather, waking very very slowly indeed. Which is really, really concerning.

We've spent quite a lot of time at the hospital these last few days; it's the specialist centre for heart ops in the UK, so he's really in the best place. Well, I say we've spent time in the hospital. Personally I've spent it in the canteen with endless cups of coffee and books while P's family watch his father sleeping around the clock. And having spent time in the canteen, I have just been horrified, horrified, horrified by the catering available. I mean, here we are, in a hospital, and what can visitors get to eat while their nearest and dearest languish on their wards?

Sweets. Chips. Crisps. Cake. Biscuits. Fizzy drinks. Practically everyone who came in yesterday ate a full Sunday roast dinner. There were, admittedly, some unappetizing salad options and some diet yoghurts which I did take advantage of (and I bought my own salad box up with me yesterday), and there was some fresh fruit available. Now I know that people with their relatives in hospital really couldn't give the slightest what they put in their mouths; it's sustenance, it's comfort, it's something to do. But I wish that the hospital included, under its duty of care to the patient, duty of care to the relative. Because all they are doing by serving that kind of food is lining up the next tranche of cardiac arrest victims. :-( Just don't offer it. Take the crap away.

I know it's not that simple but it really upset me. Shoot me for a cold, callous, unsympathetic food nazi. Guilty as charged.

P's father, incidentally, is not, to my knowledge, ill now because of his diet in his past. There is a history of weak hearts in his family.

I just don't ever want to see P in his place.

I don't want to see me in one of those places. I won't get there because of the food. And I know why I will be there if I am. So why am I so hasty to criticise the bad food habits of others when I have terrible habits of my own? I know I have no right.

Hell. I just wanted to ramble. Move on please, nothing to see here.... That's if anyone is still reading anyway!

I am still here...

2008-02-09T14:32:00.000-08:00

... but not blogging about CR because, for all intents and purposes and no matter what, it is - unfortunately - not happening.

However, it is February in Great Britain and today I lunched in the sun in a village that really deserves a much better website with a friend and no jacket. Bright blue skies above scored with vapour trails; bright white spring sun beating down; snowdrops white and quiet and damp in the shadows on the banks, folding up their secrets into their silent, seemingly-eternal selves.

Tonight the sky is dark and silver studded, ripped open like a book I could read if I could. So clear, I can see the whole dark moon, bone-white-curved shyly into the fractional-caress of the sun.

:-) And I wonder why CR isn't happening?

As ever, xxx to all.

So that's how it works!

2008-01-30T04:31:00.000-08:00

A year and several days on, and I finally work out how to microwave a package of eggwhites.

(Slightly excused by the fact that we've only had packaged eggwhites on shop shelves here for a few months to my knowledge, and even then I've only seen them in Selfridges and Wholefoods).

Yes, prior to this, if I've been eating eggwhites I've been hard-boiling eggs and burning my fingers separating them out. It hasn't encouraged me to use them often. This 500g package though, after 10 mins in the microwave in my lasagne dish, has cut up into little cubes like tofu or quorn - far more appetizing than scraps with shell.

So, that's me sorted for protein for the next few days then.

I never learn!

2008-01-28T02:08:00.000-08:00

Last week I came up to town wearing my new jeans (admittedly a size up from the ones I was wearing with comfort back in July 2007, but temporarily so, surely) and feeling sexy and slinky. I might not have looked it but I felt it and that's always good.

Today those very same jeans are mumsy and frumpy and too tight.

It's a mystery.

(Oh, okay, so it's not a mystery at all. Damn my lack of self-restraint with calories in liquid form, and an over-fondness for expensive white burgundy. It's never the food.)

Still, no use beating myself up about it. Onwards and upwards... I can see lots of soup in my immediate future.

Hello World

2008-01-20T21:52:00.000-08:00

Not much of CR interest going on in the life of Sara right now, but Arturo has reminded me it's too easy just to vanish back into the ether unless I keep posting here (I'm always reading the blogs, lurking away). I'm still plugging away at trying to lose the New Year pounds; I guess I need to remember that my body hangs onto weight, and while other people seem fine to drop 2 or so in a week, it will take mine at least a month of being fairly (or more) rigorous with watching what I eat. So much easier said than done when I socialise so much. Still, I'm eating well, and these last few days I've been experimenting with a version of Hilary's breakfast suggestion (300g Total 0%, 10g LLBY, 10g pumpkin seeds, 5g flaxseed, 5g gojis); at around 300 cals, it's certainly filling, and the sheer OMGIAMAGLUTTON feeling I get from eating 2 pots of yoghurt in a row first thing in the morning is enough to send me to the gym afterwards so... I guess that's a good thing! :-) Seriously though, it packs over 30g protein and yes, finally, I think this is making things feel a lot less edgy. So good.

Outside of CR considerations, I've eaten in a couple of really fabulous places in London over the last couple of weeks. We went to the new champagne bar in St Pancras station; freezing cold, but right next to all the Eurostar trains rumbling off for more glamorous, if not warmer, climes. Followed by a visit to Acorn House, where I ate the veggie accompaniments (scraping amaretti crumbs off the butternut squash - why, why??), and argued with P (who had ordered the veggie dish) about why veggie dishes in restaurants need always be so boring and pastry/pasta/rice based... Except when they are eaten in 32 Great Queen Street, however, where last Tuesday I had a fabulous salad with fine shavings of raw Jerusalem artichoke and pomegranate seeds and chicory and raddiccio and walnuts, followed by a comforting, earthy broth of wild and field mushrooms with barley. Mmm, mmm, mmmm. Maybe there's a reason it takes more than a week... :-)

The other thing of note that has happened this week is that I applied for a job a couple of weeks ago; sent off my old CV, slightly tweaked, and a cover letter and then basically forgot about it. On Thursday I got a technical telephone interview out of the blue, and then another with the head of personnel. My confidence is so shot right now that both calls left me in floods of hysterical tears, torn between fear that I had messed it up entirely and fear that I haven't and will therefore have to have a proper interview where (my shot confidence says) I am certain to embarrass myself and have my total uselessness at IT held up for all, including me, to scrutinize. I hadn't realised I had got this low and down on myself and that's a shock. I seriously need to work on rebuilding my self-esteem. But I am not sure that moving into another IT job, which is likely to be more stressful if ultimately more rewarding, is that right thing to do. When my back is to the wall I will get the job done - but I need to work out if putting my back to the wall is really what I want to be doing every day.

On a brighter note, I was talking to A Young Person (30) in the pub the other night who, when questioned, genuinely believed me to be aged around 27/28. Cool. I might feel old and knackered then, but perhaps I don't look it (even through beer googles). :-)

Right, it's 6.30am and I must take my yoghurt-filled self off to the gym for the daily stagger on the treadmill.

Love to all!

A stuttering start

2008-01-13T06:58:00.000-08:00

Hmm. Rather ashamed to admit that despite the best of intentions, I don't seem to have got my second CRON year off to a good start - I've gained a pound if not two since the beginning of the year (*shame* (It could just be water retention though... *hopes*)), and I keep being ambushed by hunger and the close proximity of starchy carbs, aka delicious breads. Someone said (what I think of as) the dreaded words to me the other day - "Oooh, you are looking well". I always translate this as "My, haven't you put on weight lately...", while knowing of course that my friend means anything but. But it's true. 115lbs this morning which is in no way a disaster, but irritating because I really don't want that insidious creep to 120 and beyond happening again, and even more so because I was hovering just over 112-113lbs at Christmas. I am much better and much more myself at 112, and 110 is where I want to be. So, same goal as last year then. But I'll settle for 112.

This morning I managed a gym session (urgh, so boring), and an extremely blustery and cold walk on Salisbury Plain with friends and dogs. Benefits of which were all off-set by pub lunch (butternut soup, bread) and the necessity of getting calories back into me asap because I was frozen. This afternoon I have nothing more planned than huddling up with the papers, hot drinks, and Jazz FM. Dinner will be little gem lettuce and the remains of a huge pot of low-fat cottage cheese that I foolishly opened the day before going to London and now am trying to finish off before it goes fizzy and climbs out of the fridge by itself.

Then a day at home, two more days in London, and then a week (thankfully) at home to make a second/third/fourth start on cutting the carbs and upping the protein and making gym exercise an every day thing. And shaking up my diet a bit. I am planning to cut the fruit out at breakfast and replace it with extra protein and fats (yoghurt, seeds AND nuts), and see how that goes. If nothing else it's an easy way of reducing my calories and I get all essential vitamins / minerals that my servings of fruit provide in my veggies anyway. I'd like to get my carbs down this year and see if that helps the stupid blood sugar problems I have. Also need to cut the caffeine and, obviously, resist eating bread when I am eating out.

I think it's fair to say this is now, as April described it the other day, more weight-watchers with an eye on nutrition than CR.

Very, very, very quickly indeed...

2008-01-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

I've had lots of things buzzing around my head recently that I wanted to write in a blog post, not least because I think tomorrow counts as my CR birthday - well, the day of my first post on this blog, so sort of my CR birthday... but haven't really had the time to get them out there in any coherent order...

I used CoM for the first time in several weeks yesterday and, as usual, when I totalled my food up for the day was around 1100 calories with 98% vitamins and 98% minerals - not bad going for ad hoc. Lots of veggies and low fat cottage cheese and fat free yoghurt and some eggwhites for good measure. Today isn't so good, I've been really snacky all day, and I missed the gym due to a combination of insomnia and unexpected late sleeping with bad dreams (hence exhuasted when I finally did wake up)... although I did go out for a healthy hour long walk, thinking about my 14 years... The report below is good for breakfast, lunch and various unncessary snackings from the fridge but with dinner still to go. Cooked by me, but to be eaten en famille with the neighbours so can't weigh and measure it really, but it will be mushroom stroganoff (ok, mushrooms cooked with some olive oil, white wine, garlic and onions and mixed up with Total 0%) so that should take care of the B's, cavalo nero and green beans (hopefully the latter should sort the E). There's ciabatta but I am determined to resist it... I'm feeling quite full, I've eaten far too many eggwhites today that I meant to save for tomorrow, plus more cereal than usual to finish up the packet; if I was alone I'd probably just have a plate of broccoli and be done with it.

===========================================
Nutrition Summary for 08 January 2008
Report generated by CRON-o-Meter v0.9.3
===========================================

General (68%)
===========================================
Energy | 942.3 kcal 79%
Protein | 73.1 g 81%
Carbs | 112.2 g 93%
Fiber | 27.3 g 78%
Fat | 28.0 g 31%
Water | 1308.3 g 48%

Vitamins (91%)
===========================================
Vitamin A | 13955.9 IU 598%
Folate | 553.4 µg 138%
B1 (Thiamine) | 0.9 mg 80%
B2 (Riboflavin) | 2.5 mg 231%
B3 (Niacin) | 9.4 mg 67%
B5 (Pantothenic Acid)| 2.8 mg 56%
B6 (Pyridoxine) | 2.1 mg 162%
B12 (Cyanocobalamin) | 2.6 µg 107%
Vitamin C | 169.9 mg 227%
Vitamin D | 420.7 IU 210%
Vitamin E | 13.0 mg 86%
Vitamin K | 380.9 µg 423%

Minerals (95%)
===========================================
Calcium | 1073.7 mg 107%
Copper | 1.5 mg 169%
Iron | 18.1 mg 100%
Magnesium | 355.8 mg 111%
Manganese | 2.5 mg 139%
Phosphorus | 1041.6 mg 149%
Potassium | 3747.3 mg 80%
Selenium | 115.3 µg 210%
Sodium | 1135.3 mg 76%
Zinc | 7.4 mg 93%

Lipids (42%)
===========================================
Saturated | 3.3 g 17%
Omega-3 | 1.4 g 130%
Omega-6 | 6.1 g 51%
Cholesterol | 6.0 mg 2%

(Rather irritatingly the yellows were back this morning. if it's food related, I ate a ton of butternut squash last week, and have been eating broccoli practically every day, and last night had a pile of kale. Over Christmas it seemed a lot better. I dunno... *sigh*)

Aftermath

2007-12-28T05:13:00.000-08:00

It is always these days between Christmas and New Year that I find difficult; a period of no-man's-land time, hours that seem to demand to be filled with the same partying excess as those in the days preceding them. Not that there was an awful lot of excess this year, but still I'm not entirely sure where to put myself right now. It's probably not on the sofa with a bottle of red.

I had a wonderful few days with friends and family. Christmas Eve canapes and fizz was immense fun, and enough people accepted last minute invitations to make it a lot more of a party than I had intended it to be - nothing wrong with that! Christmas morning was spent pottering in the kitchen and cooking at a lesiurely speed while P slumbered late and my mother went to church; we opened presents and had yet more fizz with the neighbours before I served lunch late, and after that we managed a bit of a walk before dusk fell and we huddled up en famille to watch tacky movies and read books and listen to music. Boxing Day saw P and my brother at the races, and my mother and I on an abortive sales excursion to Bath, and then in Bradford on Avon eating a delicious lunch with too much wonderful fresh warm home-made bread which I suspect was responsible for yesterday's wince-making figures on the scales (better today, and hopefully even better tomorrow).

Yesterday I tried to adjust to being on my own again, and am doing the same today. This morning I even made it back to the gym. Yay, go me. I am determined to keep that up this year, to get back into the habit of going. It's not so bad early in the morning. Since then I have pottered around town, drunk coffee, done some desultory clearing up of dried plant stalks and leaves in the garden and now I am waiting for some more neighbours to return from their holiday trip so I can steal their dog and force myself out for another long walk in my new woolie hat.

The past few days have reminded me, not that I ever need much reminding, how much I love cooking for company. I never cook much for myself; my food doesn't need much, if any, effort to prepare. I can quite happily eat broccoli florets straight from the bunch, straight out of the fridge (not that I often do - I do at least get the knife out). But I really enjoyed the cooking I did this year. There was the Christmas eve canape selection, which was pretty much how I anticipated it being in my last blog post. For Christmas lunch, P wanted ham, so I soaked a green gammon for a couple of hours the day before, and then poached it with star anise, celery, carrots, and onion studded with cloves. On Christmas morning I mixed honey, balsamic vinegar and whole-grain mustard into a sticky, sloppy glaze, poured it over the meat and roasted it in the oven. After an hour, to my relief, it stopped looking like, well, like what it was (boiled dead thing) and started looking picture perfect. Veggies were fennel braised in white wine and veggie stock; steamed chantenay carrots; steamed January King cabbage and broccoli, with chopped chestnuts. Roasted potatoes, as I had planned, for everyone else. I made cabbage parcels stuffed with a little mashed parsnip, and mushrooms and chestnuts cooked in white wine with garlic and onions for myself. We ate leftovers on Boxing Day, and yesterday I ate cold leftover veggies for tea, like a glutton straight out of the serving dish.

Today I have eaten pineapple and pomegranate seeds, several stalks of celery with low-fat cream cheese, a salad of rocket and chicory with beetroot and a balsamic/mustard dressing, a few almonds, a brazil nut, some grapes and a dried fig. Yes, I am grazing. :-) But if one is going to graze, grazing through a fridge of green veggies is not a bad way to go about it. If I don't cook for neighbours tonight, my supper will be salad made with lots of chopped parsley, pomegranate seeds, clementine, chicory, with a few pieces of pecan and chestnut, and some cottage cheese on the side. Baby steps towards CRON 2008.

Twas the Night Before Christmas

2007-12-23T22:40:00.000-08:00

And all through the house
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a mouse

Actually it's 6.30am on Christmas Eve, and I am wide awake and have been since 5, but the house with P and my mother asleep upstairs is pretty quiet. I've been pottering around, trying to sort out the chaos which is the fridge. There is a space issue - it's so crammed full of veggies and salad and other good-but-not-so-good things that... there is no room for fizz! The horror! :-)

Tonight I am serving champagne and canapes to neighbours and friends. My mother asked when her main meal would be... I said, you are having:

- oven baked sausages in some kind of sticky glaze
- mini baked potatoes with creme fraiche
- mini beef wellingtons
- grilled asparagus (totally unseasonal but what else is a CR girl to eat?)
- smoked salmon on blinis with (ff) cream cheese and dill
- oatcake canapes with goat's cheese and beetroot
- chicory filled with (ff) cream cheese and walnuts

... and you want a main meal?! Um, no - that's your lot. :-)

I suspect I am over-catering. I was expecting my brother, who is 6 foot 5 inches of strapping 34 year old with hollow legs, to be here, but he's not arriving until tomorrow. This evening's leftovers are not going to help my fridge-space problem.

So... Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope you all have lots of fun and delicious healthy food and all the energy and bright-bushy-tailedness that comes from the consumption thereof to see you through the season. Speaking of which, it's time for my festive breakfast of pineapple, blueberries and pomegranate seeds. Yum. Have a good one!

S.xxx

Season of Good Will

2007-12-18T02:41:00.000-08:00

I'm coming to the end of a week in London and I am shattered. And coming down with a cold, which is more than slightly irritating. I really don't know how I dealt with living here full-time just a few years ago; I feel peeled raw by the noise and the crowds right now. Still, less than 24 hours and I can look forward to... oooh, almost ten nights with no bright lights!

Since it is the season of good will to all men, I suppose I should make a real effort at extending that towards myself and cut myself some slack. Inevitably, what with not going to the gym, and eating out, and not weighing and measuring my food, I've gained weight. I don't need scales to tell me; I can see it. It doesn't please me that I will end this year as I end most years, feeling decidedly below par and undisciplined. P is being a sweetheart and saying he likes me more curvy (and taking every cheeky opportunity to pinch my butt)... but I don't.

However, this is the body I live in. And it serves me well. It might have hands that are more yellow than I would like right now (though I think less so, yay!), and it might be more padded than I would wish, and it is certainly less toned than it should be. But it serves me well. It does not break easily; it rarely gets sick beyond a sniffle or scratchy throat. I should appreciate it more. I'm tired of being so down on myself.

So I'd like this to be one of my NY resolutions. It can co-exist with the usual ones (more regular gym, loose 8lbs, drink less, blah de blah de blah), but developing a more positive attitude towards myself really is something I need to do once and for all. Robin writes about developing better habits... and this is all this is. Being down on myself has become a bad habit that needs to be broken, more than any other bad habit I have. The rest will surely shatter along the way.

In other news, I have made a complete pig's ear of Xmas shopping this year, and now am trawling the internet madly for gifts that don't smack of last minute desperation. *sigh*

My Delicious Lunchtime Salad

2007-12-11T04:26:00.000-08:00

1 small little gem lettuce, leaves torn
1 head of chicory (endive), leaves removed and torn
1 large handful of mixed herb salad (mine had rocket and coriander and lollo rosso)
1 tomato, chopped
2 spring onions (scallions), chopped
1 tsp wholegrain french mustard
splash of balsamic vinegar
generous sprinkling of dried thyme
freshly ground pepper
cannellini beans
1 tsp hemp seeds (or pumpkin, or sunflower, or whatever) - optional

Excuse lack of measurements (however, using about 100-150g beans (without hemp seeds) the calorie count is going to be between 150-200 cals the lot, max, I think). Put everything into a large tupperware and shake it up, a lot. Leave for 30 mins or so to marinate. Eat. Yum. It's good without the beans too. It's the chicory that makes it.

Follow with two cups of strong coffee and then wonder why you are no longer able to sleep at night. *sigh*

Letting It All Slide. And Some Festive Plans.

2007-12-10T07:04:00.001-08:00

Oh dear. I don't think I can kid myself any more that my recent habit of foregoing my morning gym visits for extra duvet time is not having an effect. Damn thee, gravity! On these dark, cold and wet mornings it is all too easy to be lazy, to find an excuse (today I am waiting in for a delivery. I am still waiting, and have yet to set foot outside the front door. It is now growing dark again). And it is New Year in 3 weeks. Surely gravity can hold on for a New Year's Resolution to be in the gym at least 4 days out of 7, and a return to serious CRON? C'mon, play fair! :-)

I am hosting Christmas here this year, and am trying to work out foods that will suit us all... and won't do me too much damage!

On Christmas Eve I have promised champagne and canapes to the masses (P, mother, brother, two sets of neighbours)... I've decided that in actual fact this will mean a ton of smoked salmon, some baby potatoes roasted and served with sour cream and caviar (read non-fat yoghurt and lumpfish roe, actually!), chicory leaves with cream cheese and walnuts (thank heaven for extra light Philadelphia), and maybe some non-seasonal but totally delicious grilled asparagus spears. On arugala.

Christmas Day... P has put in a request for a full-on traditional glazed ham. I have no idea how to do this but I'm sure I'll work it out! I'm going to serve a salad as a first course - rocket, chicory, and sliced oranges (regular and blood-orange), scattered with pomegranate seeds and walnuts or pecans. I am loving the bitterness of chicory leaves at the moment and eating it whenever I can... To go with the main course... I think braised fennel, cavalo nero, glazed carrots. Roasted potatoes for everyone else, maybe with apples and quinces. I'll serve a traditional Christmas pudding but I won't be eating any myself. I want a platter of delicious cheeses, and dried fruits and nuts to pick at; maybe some fresh figs...perhaps some dark, intense chocolate.

There is no getting away from food this month so the best thing to do, I think, is to only eat what I want, to eat the best that I can afford, and be mindful that, however yummy cheese is, and however much dark mornings call for toast and bitter Seville marmelade, the calories still count at Christmas! As usual, I'm not eating badly, never do. But I really shouldn't have had toast this morning. Nor that piece of sheep's milk cheese... Oh well. Salad leaves and broccoli for dinner.

So, what are everyone else's healthy plans for the festive season?

I'm planning to take the week of Christmas off work, and the first week in the New Year. Unfortunately I won't be able to go away, but I can take the time for peace and reflection... and moving my lardy butt back into the gym, and eating a lot of salad. :-) In 2008 I am going to work on combining fitness training with CRON in a far more rigorous fashion than I have lately. I want my muscles back, and gravity defeated. I am looking forward to the challenge.

Shutting Up The Head-Pigeons

2007-12-07T02:34:00.001-08:00

Blood tests all came back more or less fine (again). Liver function fine. My cholesterol is slightly elevated, which is bizarre (but then I hadn't been fasting so...); my blood sugar is slightly lower than it should be, and my white blood cell count is low (but then that always shows as low, and I'm always told it's nothing to worry about). All those things I can attribute to being run-down and stressed, and lack of oatmeal for breakfast. :-)

The results are being sent to me so I will probably post them here, for my own record if nothing else. Not that I will understand them, of course.

So anyway. Yellow but not dying. Time to plan a proper, relaxing holiday I think! Somewhere in the sun. With light.

Last night P and I spent a couple of hours at the Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park. We attempted to ice skate; we went on the big wheel and soared above the London lights, with the wind howling around our pod; P was a big kid and inner-tubed on the fake mountain; and I bounced around in the bungee-dome. Quite feebly I had to have most bounces orchestrated for me by the attendant because I'm too light to make a decent bounce for myself, but it was just soooo much fun. Afterwards, fired up with adrenalin and giggling like loons, we wandered off into Mayfair in search of dinner and ended up in the basement of Fortnum and Mason on Piccadilly, and then home for a relatively early night.

This weekend I have more festive shopping planned, and dinner with friends in Bath in one of my favourite restaurants. Have a good one, everybody.

Wassup Doc?

2007-12-06T05:33:00.000-08:00

- Do you eat a lot of carrots?

- No.

- Oh. Because eating a lot of carrots can...

- I don't eat a lot of carrots

- ... make you orange...

- No carrots.

- None?

- Not a one, no.

Got my full blood screen though. Might even have results by tomorrow afternoon.

Today, though, my thoughts and prayers are focussed on my friend's new-born daughter XJ, who has contracted Strep B Meningitis at 4 days old. Very worried indeed.

Still here

2007-12-04T03:10:00.001-08:00

I've been feeling quite crappy recently, with rampaging hypochondria I thought best remained unleashed upon the blogosphere. In an attempt to shut it up I'm going to have some more blood tests done on Thursday (with luck, for lo! I am still yellow-handed and it is freaking me out) when I visit a GP in London. I'm hoping that since it won't be my regular doctor they won't have any preconceptions about my state of sanity (or lack of it!). I just want the reassurance of a second set of tests to say nothing is physically wrong with me. Then I can just assume I am mad and work on sorting that out. :-)

Still eating well, as ever, although probably not enough. Which could, of course, explain my recent lethargy that has me heading for the duvet whenever I get the chance. Yesterday I did record everything I ate over the day and when I came to put it into CoM it came to just over 800 calories, albeit with 90/85% RDA's, which really is low and I wasn't trying to keep it low. Today I am making more of an effort to bump things up - I have had oatmeal, and I have chestnuts, and goat's cheese. Yum.

I want to start feeling a lot better soon. I've got some Xmas decorations up, and made a garland for my front door yesterday evening. But I don't feel very festive yet. A friend showed me an Advent Calendar she had treated herself to the other day and it reminded me of how, as a child, every day in December was filled with wonder and excitement and anticipation, and that pulling aside that cardboard door to see the picture hidden beneath was the highlight of the day. My brother and I always bickered about who would get the privilege of opening that final door on the 24th, which was always bigger and more elaborate than the others. I would love to feel that excitement again, that simple joy. It's this time of year more than any other when I wish I had children, because that's how we live again, isn't it?

Right, enough with the morbidity! Some Christmas Carols are in order, I think!

The Bell, It Tolls For Me

2007-11-27T01:34:00.000-08:00

11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.58, 7, 8.58. And everything in between.

I hate insomnia.

Technical Woe

2007-11-21T10:04:00.000-08:00

I don't know what it is about me, or my house, and digital scales - but the third set I've had this year has died. It doesn't want batteries, or hitting, or dropping on the floor in temper. It has ceased to be. It is ex.

So no weighing and measuring for me! P would be pleased; he thinks it's disordered behaviour.

I don't need the scales to know I've eaten well though.

Breakfast: Total 0%, pumpkin seeds, grapenuts, gojis.

Lunch : Big salad with arugala, spinach, romaine, pea shoots, green pepper, tomato, scallions, mushrooms, cottage cheese and salsa. Almonds, a brazil nut, and a pear.

Snacks: celery and salsa, oatcake with Philadelphia Extra Light, more almonds

Dinner: Super-easy one pot water-veggie soup with brussels, leeks, onion, garlic, broccoli, green beans, carrot, tomato, mushrooms and mixed herbs. Eggwhites.

I decided to cut fruit out from my breakfast and see if this made any difference in my hunger levels during the morning. It did, I think. I wasn't really hungry until just before noon when quite often it can be around 10am. Hunger or plummetting blood sugar or whatever has become a real issue recently, part of my angsty-angst I think. So I'm working on that.

I guess now is the time I wish everyone Happy Thanksgiving?

Happy Thanksgiving. :-)

Meeces in Pieces

2007-11-20T08:26:00.000-08:00

There is an article cited on one of the CR lists today which includes the mice being minced after they have been variously wined and dined. Ew. Poor, poor meeces.

I looked at my diary this afternoon and worked out that I have twelve days between now and Christmas when I can be entirely sure of how many calories I'll be consuming and the nutritional value thereof. Twelve days when I won't have P staying with me, or won't be in London, or won't be otherwise socially obligated.

Hmm. DTBIC-tastic.

Where did this year go?

Wet

2007-11-19T01:59:00.000-08:00

I'm ready to go home now for a week of quiet country living and detox and proper CRON. It's gotten so cold and wet I'd like this to be in front of a roaring fire. But I don't have one. So it will have to be central heating and blankets and the flicker of candle-light. And not from one being burnt at both ends.

I am day-dreaming about this as I sit at my desk with soaking wet hair and clothes after being caught in a deluge this morning, without umbrella or hat. My mascara has run, and I'm out of lippy and I have dark shadows after a late night gig last night, so I am a bit of a wreck and not looking at all professional. Home-working is so much better for sartorial disaster days like today.

I met Linda for coffee on Saturday, kindly made by her partner G. They are very interesting people and we had a good chat about all kinds of stuff, not all CR, punctuated by fussing over her cats. Thank you Linda, I enjoyed myself very much.

GM Omega-3?

2007-11-16T02:25:00.000-08:00

Urgh.

Oooh, good mood!

2007-11-16T01:48:00.000-08:00

The sun is shining and it was a glittering silver morning when I left P's house. My plans to get off the tube early and kick through the leaves in the park was scuppered by a stalled train somewhere down the tube lines, so I had to sacrifice my walk to a detour, but I am still in a bouncy happy mood. I had LLBY with my breakfast yoghurt today, for the first time in ages - a B boost? I wonder. ;-)

I also had raspberries and fresh figs and pomegranate seeds. I've made a salad for lunch which I am *really* looking forward to eating - mixed leaves, the rest of the pomegranate seeds, pumpkins seeds, satsuma, dried apricot and two walnut halves. It occurred to me after I made it that it is almost the precise dish I will be eating at dinner this evening with friends, but never mind. It looks so fun and colourful and autumnal. I've got some more yoghurt for protein to go with.

We did eat at The Gate last night pre gig - we shared the mezze plate of all the appetizers, and I had the woodland salad with wild mushrooms and hazelenuts and slivers of parmesan, truffle oil on the side (unconsumed). Really, really lovely. It just goes to prove to all those restaurants who keep trying to serve the vegetarian the huge plate of pasta, or risotto, or gnocchi, or bl**dy goat's cheese salad, that it really isn't difficult to be a bit more creative. Nothing on that plate could have taken much time or effort to put together. Just thought. More thought please!

When Life Gives You Lemons...

2007-11-15T04:34:00.000-08:00

P and I have been having a run of rather niggling bad luck. Nothing dreadful, just one irritating thing after another. There's been The Yellow, obviously. But P has been sick too, with an ear infection and then an eye infection and an on-going cold and cough that has him hacking away and frightening the cats. Someone drove into the back of my car and caused quite a lot of damage. I don't seem to have been able to get to the gym for ages and then yesterday morning, when I really planned to, I reached across my kitchen table for a lemon to squeeze into hot water for my purifying breakfast wake-up drink - and threw my back out.

Ow.

Still, life goes on at the same hectic pace. My diary is pretty much packed from here until Christmas! I'm back in London for work and weekend, and if all things go to plan, it is all go go go. Lemonade a-plenty.

Last night I ate with a friend at St John Bread and Wine. Doesn't take much to work out what I ate - actually, what we both ate, since she decided to be vegetarian for the evening as well. Admittedly I could have chosen a better venue had I known. :-) We shared a plate of delicious little gem salad leaves with fresh herbs, and some cheese afterwards with sinful raisin bread. Drank a Pinot Noir from Central Otago before dinner, and a Minervois with.

Tonight P and I are going to see Air play at the Hammersmith Apollo. We might be eating at The Gate beforehand. Spot what I'll eat if we do... spoilt for choice! Tomorrow there will be more food when we have dinner with friends at Clarke's. Saturday I shall attempt to fast... in preparation for Sunday which is the Decanter Fine Wine Encounter, followed by a gig by Arcade Fire.

And on Monday I shall fall over. :-)

In the midst of all this I am still paying attention to my diet and nutrition and, yes, to my calories. I'm aware I'm probably not getting full nutrition - low on the B's, probably low on E, definitely low on iron - and the calories are certainly higher than I like them to be, but I still need to find some time to work out a quotidien diet that will get me there without having to stuff myself too full of veggies to do so. I really, really dislike that feeling, and there has to be another way. I just need to work out what it is.

Anyway.

Today at work I need to set up a new and shiny PC to replace my old and very unshiny one. I am procrastinating. It's far too nice a day outside, bright brilliant blue, and I'd far rather be walking in Kensington Palace Gardens, scrunching through the fallen leaves and watching the ducks and geese squabbling on the lake. I love Autumn.

Go Read

2007-11-09T02:34:00.000-08:00

Mizzi has written a fabulous blog entry that has moved me intensely with its grace and sense of calm and acceptance. Thank you, Mizzi. The last paragraph was something that, for some reason, I really needed to read this morning.

The Long Road

2007-11-08T05:29:00.000-08:00

(I took this picture while out walking on Salisbury Plain the other week. It was very peaceful and also very sombre. Out of shot, to my distant left, the army were firing tank cannons and exploding mortars, the reverberations muttering across the still air).

On Tuesday I had lots and lots of blood drawn and today I called the surgery for the results and was told by the receptionist that everything came back normal - carotene, B12, cortisol, full blood count, protein... normal. Was tested for lots of stuff I don't understand, but apparently it was comprehensive. So not sure where to go from here - still yellow. Just stop worrying about it and resign myself to it? Guess that is my only option for a couple of months because I know I will get short shrift from the doctors if I waste their valuable time again. Maybe in January I will seek a second set of tests, privately. For my own reassurance. Hate this.

It must be almost a year now since I first heard about CR, and determined that I would start the experiment in January. I must admit that, weird colour changes and some weight loss beside, I can't say I feel very much different for it right now. I may, of course, not be working hard enough at it at the moment. I can only DTBIC.

Where would we be without R's a-CRON-yms?

I do enjoy reading the blogs I link to. Whatever happens, it's been worth experimenting to have made the virtual acquaintance of you all. Thank you, as ever, for your comments. I might even get around to posting something a bit more interesting and worth your while reading, one of these days. It might even be about CR.

A Red and Gold Day

2007-11-01T06:29:00.000-07:00

It's a beautiful Autumn day in London today. Mild, blue skies, soft and gentle breeze. Delicious.

Tonight we are going to the theatre for the first time in what seems like an age. To see Patrick Stewart in MacBeth. To say I am really looking forward to it is an under-statement. Afterwards, I am hoping to huddle in Soho, sipping strong scalding coffee in the dark, wrapped up in sweater and scarf and possibly woolie hat, and talking over the performance with P and 2 close friends. We might get a late dinner but I doubt it.

I'm starting to feel a lot more relaxed and less stressed about my CRON practice, such as it is. I'll be happy just to get a state of balance back around the whole issue, and I'm getting there. It feels a bit like coming out of a dark tunnel, or out of a storm into the quiet. I had a few weeks there where I was really losing it, letting the stress get the better of me. I'm now accepting that it's not possible for me to monitor my nutrition all the time, or indeed most of the time. I can only do the best that I can do. I've never been any less than honest about that in this blog. I do have lots of knowledge at my disposal to make ad-lib eating somewhat less ad-lib than someone who doesn't have the same.

I think the yellow in my hands is fading but it's difficult to tell. It was certainly difficult to persuade the doctor this week that they hadn't always been this way, but eventually I managed to get an appointment for another blood test, where they will check my carotene and B12 levels, and also do a hormonal screen. It might seem like a lot of fuss about nothing to them, and maybe to others as well, but it seems to me quite reasonable to get things checked when things appear to be odd. Thanks again to everyone who has commented reassuringly and shared their own yellow tales.

P wants me to conduct my own experiments - cut out foods high in beta-carotene for a few weeks, for example. Or eat cheese for the B12. He just wants to share pizza, I reckon. ;-) I think I'll just wait for the results of the testing and take it from there.

For London people - Wholefoods are now stocking free-range liquid eggwhites in the chiller next to the dairy. And this new restaurant in Notting Hill looks fabulous. This is the kind of food I want my calories to be in - simple, plain, seasonal, minimal in ingredients. No fuss, no frills. Just good simple cookery. And yes, with good wine.

Late to the Party - 8 Things

2007-10-30T02:07:00.000-07:00

With apologies to Nenette for not responding to the tagging sooner, 8 things I love about my body (and yes, it was difficult to think of 8, but if it's not obvious that I am super-hyper-critical of myself by now...):

1) I love my green eyes.

2) I have a very good, clear, practically flawless complexion which means I rarely have to wear any cosmetics, and rarely do.

3) I am starting to love the way my body tells me what it needs and wants in terms of nutrition, which is apparently different to what I think it needs. It would, however, be nice if it didn't do it in such startling technicolour fashion.

4) I love my cheekbones. I love all the rest of my bones, actually. The ones that I can see that I should be able to see. They are strong and have never broken.

5) I love my long hair and the way it is continuing to grow long and healthy and thick, at about 1 inch a month.

6) I love the way that my muscles respond to working out and become defined quite quickly

7) I love my body's powers of recovery

8) I love that my body is, despite my many fears, probably extremely healthy.

Touch wood. :-)

Update From Springfield

2007-10-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

I am becoming more and more certain that the hand weirdness is more likely due to my high intake of veggies loaded with beta-carotene over the past 10 months than to a precursor of my imminent demise. I'll be seeing the doctor again tomorrow to get full blood checks to put my mind at rest (and also to work out how to get rid of this!), but today P was sick with an ear infection and wanted to go to a walk-in NHS centre for antibiotics; while he was there, I decided to take the opportunity to panic a little at a nurse, and she agreed with me that while the colour is really quite startling, I'd be a lot sicker than I am if it was anything Really Nasty. So I hope so.

Mara's comment about the same happening to her with pumpkin while her fat intake was quite low is very interesting. I've been lazy about fat recently; I eat my almonds daily, but I've been neglecting my olive oil and my flax. Most of my dairy is fat free. So maybe that's a reason why the tint has appeared over the last few weeks, or become more noticeable at any rate. I also realised today that my lack of appetite for Big Salads might also be connected - my body has just had enough leafy greens for the time being! :-)

Out of interest I just did a report out of CoM for the last year's average on Vitamin A (I don't eat meat therefore I am assuming most Vit A recorded in CoM has to be beta-carotene). I'm averaging over 1000%, and I don't have a CoM report for each day of the year, so the average is likely to be higher.

P has said that if I have made myself yellow by eating broccoli, he will never let me live it down. But then if one is going to become yellow through excess, I suppose leafy greens are the best thing to have as the culprit.

This week will tell, I hope.

And then, it's back to reassessing my diet. It's not a failed experiment yet.

Cabbage Soup, Water and Weirdness

2007-10-25T01:57:00.000-07:00

Hi All. :-)

Thank you for comments left and well wishes and for checking up on me.

I'm mildly detoxed, although I was helped on my way by a stinking cold which laid me low in bed and kept me away for people for pretty much an entire week. Meh. Seven days without the wine (yay); I managed to stay away from wheat but only by virtue of eating spelt bread (comfort toast); I totally failed to stay away from dairy but at least most of it was fat-free.

(I fell off the wagon in spectacular but planned fashion last night with wine and cheese with one of my bestest friends in Vivat Bacchus. Very small portions of cheese though, positively dinky.)

I'm feeling a bit better about things in general, although I am still having annoying obsessive thoughts about food and nutrition and getting my RDA's. I think most of this has been brought on by not being at home all that much, and a week of actually being at home has helped. I deliberately tried to keep away from CoM but curiosity kept getting the better of me. I find it easy to restrict my calories, no problem. But, as we know, restricting calories without monitoring nutrition is at best foolhardy and at worst extremely dangerous - and I am aware of that. Hence the sort of panic when I know I am not eating as well as I could be. It's a panic that I consider to be both justified and irrational, and I am veering between the two. Does that make any sense?

I won't go on about it for fear of adding to the whole CRON = ED thing. Which I am extremely tired of, actually! :-)

Anyway, this last week I mainly ate cabbage soup. Or more exactly, soup full of veggie goodness and deliciousness with lots of dino kale and beans and smoked tofu. Mmm. The ingredients of the batches varied, but the soup is basically an onion, carrot and celery base, with mushrooms, chopped fresh tomato, thyme, rosemary, oregano and garlic, all simmered in lots of water, with dino kale and other green leafies added in towards the end of the cooking time, when the water has taken on all the flavours of the veggies. Then I stirred in acorn squash which I had baked and mashed, to thicken it, and added beans (turtle beans on time, aduki the next) and cubes of smoked tofu in varying proportions when I ate it. Very comforting and just what I needed with this horrible cold. Soup like a hug.

The weirdness in the title of this post? Well, hmm. The other week at work I was talking to someone at my desk, and he suddenly gave me an appalled look and said "What the f*ck have you done to your hands? They are all yellow!". And indeed they were. And are. And it is quite frankly very freaky. The palms of my hands, and especially at the base of them, towards my wrists, are clearly and undoubtably... yellow.

After several days of staring at my palms in various lights, and comparing them to P's and my mother's, and getting a bit anxious, I decided I really ought to take myself off to the doctors and get it checked out. I was, of course, thinking Oh my GOD, the wine has caught up with me, I am jaundiced and my liver is failing, oh bugger, oh hell, etc, despite the fact that my eyes were clear and I had none of the other symptoms indicated by scary google searches.

I hate going to my doctors because they think I am mad. I can quite understand R's concern about being labelled by her doctor, because I am well and truly labelled. But never the less, I went, and said - ok, I might be having a hypochondriac moment here (ha, ha, silly me), but look... my hands. Yellow.

Ooooh, yes - said the doctor. You are a bit, we'll take some blood. Liver function, that sort of thing.

Cue a couple of days of anxious waiting...

Thankfully, the tests came back normal. Liver function fine, no bilrubin (sp?) in the blood. I'm not jaundiced.

But what it is, I don't know. I'm now in the position where I need to go back to the doctor and say, ok, so it's not jaundice, so can we please find out what the hell it is because it is really, really embarrassing and actually a bit ugly. I have wondered if it's the excess beta-carotene thing, that I eat so much spinach and kale and butternut squash that it's coming out in my skin. MR might suit orange. I do not suit yellow. It is not my colour.

P googled around and suggested it might be a B12 deficiency. Which is always possible since I know I am low on B12 in my diet anyway (and strangely have been craving whole eggs and skim milk recently, despite them tasting disgustingly of chicken and cow) and I don't take my supplements because the ones I have are 10,000 times the RDA and I think that in itself is a bit scary. But I need to do something. Any suggestions, anyone?

So, well, that's where I am at the moment. Semi-CRON'd, demi-stressed, probably completely mad... and yellow. Ah, the joy of Sara. :-)

Reset

2007-10-12T05:58:00.000-07:00

Yet another angsty, attention-seeking blog entry deleted minutes after publication! :-) Was it cathartic? No, not really. But never mind.

So I am all over the place geographically and mentally. Will be for another few days yet. But next week I do have the opportunity to hit the reset button. And I'm going to make every effort to.

Means moving away from CR per se, and from tracking in CoM. I've been fretting too much about not making my RDA's, and eating far too many vegetables for my own physical comfort in order to make those RDA's. Too many Big Salads have resulted in a lack of perspective where now I feel unable to judge my own appetite and satiety mechanisms. Has that happened to anyone else? Or am I just susceptible to it because of my own past emotional problems concerning food? Right now I fear I am on a slippery slope to a binge mentality. I don't want to be there.

Anyway. Detox for me. No dairy, no wheat, no coffee... most importantly no alcohol. No, not even a single social glass. Not for seven days. Fruit and wholegrains and vegetables in moderate proportions. I need to trust myself again.

Wish me luck.

Keep Away From Our Kale!

2007-10-07T22:45:00.001-07:00

The secret is out. :-)

I'm being quiet because I'm sick of food right now - thinking about it, preparing it, eating it. And I'm doing far too much of all three. Sigh. No fun.

Never the twain shall meet

2007-10-02T04:38:00.001-07:00

I wrote a long post about hunger and satiety and regulation of appetite based on my experiences this past week, but frankly it's far too bloody angsty so can just stay unpublished for now. Suffice it to say, I think it's incredibly unfair that I can be quite so painfully hungry in London on a daily basis and still gain weight in 6 days. It just goes to show quite how much attention needs to be paid to micro and macro-nutrients when your natural inclination is towards a low calorie diet, and how easy it is to mess it up.

(I messed it up. Big time. Several times.)

In other small world news, it would appear that Linda and myself visited the same very small farmer's market in North London on Sunday. Did we see each other there? Who can tell? :-)

More Cravings

2007-09-28T05:14:00.000-07:00

Today in Wholefoods, a server was handing out samples of fresh baked baguette with cheshire cheese and chilli jam. Sara-fave-tastic.

I resisted the temptation.

Because I was craving chocolate. Dark chocolate, chocolate blacker than a moonless midnight and with a cocoa kick like an irascible mule.

Thanks to Green and Black's considerate packaging of tiny pieces of their organic 70% in individual wrappers (each piece approx 22 calories), this craving has now been satisfied.

Now I need to work out what to do with the other 11 pieces... I'm not usually a chocolate girl.

When Nothing Else Will Do

2007-09-26T04:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had a fridge full of veggies and a serious craving for a green thai curry. No idea whatsoever where that came from, or why, but given that I am off to London for almost a week this afternoon (meh), and really didn't want to cart said veggies up with me, I saw it as a perfect opportunity to actually cook for once. So I invited 2 good friends over for dinner, whacked some Viognier in the fridge, and thought about how to create a veggie green thai curry that would be good for me, good for CR and good to eat.

Obviously not complicated. I knew I had no intention of using coconut milk; I'd have just fretted about the saturated fat, even in a lite brand, and I don't even really like coconut anyway. But obviously the paste needed to be lightened somewhat... So in the end I "fried" spring onion, sliced red pepper, garlic and mushrooms in water, added this Green Thai curry paste, more water, thickened the mixture with cornflour, and marinated tofu in it for an hour or so (I'd cut the tofu into squares and grilled it beforehand). Then I steamed broccoli, green beans, the kernals from one ear of fresh corn, zucchini and summer squash, stirred all that into the sauce with some more curry paste and water (I probably used about 75g of paste all in), and when it was all heated through I added 150g of fat free Greek Yoghurt. I made a dish of spinach, chard and savoy cabbage, steamed and then stir-fried in 1tsp olive oil with chilli, garlic and spring onion, on the side. Lots of coriander and lime zest for garnish. Chicken and rice for my friends.

Yummy. Craving satisfied, 3 of us well-fed, and still leftovers for my lunch today. Uncrunched in CoM, unfortunately, but it's veggies and protein and nothing else. It could have been nothing less than nutritious, and just so what I wanted. Nothing else would have done. Very strange!

Monday

2007-09-24T00:47:00.000-07:00

Ah, the British Autumn. As I type this, it is bright and breezy and blue outside, but with rain lashing down, silvered by the sun that is darting defiantly in and out of the gathering clouds. It rained torrentially yesterday afternoon, cutting short my blackberry picking expedition, and this morning the fallen leaves from the horse chestnuts, and the keys from the sycamores, and the acorns from the oaks were smeared along the streets like so much glittering roadkill.

My weekend was so so. Too fast as usual. But not a whole lot going on of interest to anyone really. :-) Yesterday, which I spent alone, was actually a fairly good CR day, give or take the couple of pieces of spelt bread and 2 glasses of poor Rioja. I ate mostly cooked food for a change, and mostly as I cooked it, over the course of the afternoon. Butternut squash, zucchini baked with lemon, rosemary and thyme, carrots baked with rosemary, savoy cabbage, broccoli, leeks. A huge field mushroom. Tomato. Cottage cheese with LLBY and flax oil. Fat free Greek yoghurt with plums and berries. As I say, not all at once. I'm trying to wean myself off the big salads where possible, even if it means munching away all day on veggies; the thoughts of all that volume at the moment just makes me want cheese and crackers.

I also indulged in watching several episodes of an eighties TV series that I used to adore - Robin of Sherwood. It probably never made it to the US. I had a huge teenage crush on the lead actor, Jason Connery. (And another one on Ray Winstone - I always did have contrary tastes). Yesterday I was somewhat amazed to find that the crush on JC, which seemed to last forever at the time (and did, in its own way, inspire me to take up drama and writing and so I think of as slightly pivotal in my life), could only have lasted six weeks or so - because I only have a memory of watching six episodes - Saturday night, on ITV, at 5.30pm. The rest of them were new to me. And since I have a very good memory, I don't think I have just forgotten them. I still have a shamefully soft spot for RW, in all his grubby east-end glory.

Why does life spin by so fast now? I remember those six weeks stretching out like six months. *sigh*

But back to today. This morning's gym session was torturous. Not due to the exercise - I achieved my modest goal of running to the tune of burning off 300 calories which is the amount I took in at breakfast - a pleasing symmetry, if a fallacy. And I did my weights. But oh... the music. In excruciating succession we were treated to Cliff Richard's Mistletoe and Wine, Unchained Melody, Rick Astley's Never Going To Let You Down, Bryan Adam's Everything I Do, I Do It For You, and Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You. I wanted to beat myself over the head with both my 3kg weights at the end of that. Added to that horror was the chattering of the ladies who I am sure are very nice and lovely, but treat the gym as an early morning social venue - they are very vocal, very loud, and they do not save their breath for the cross-trainer. If Arturo shares his bus to yoga with three chirping birds, this morning the gym was occupied by myself, and an entire quarrel. Or maybe even a murder. Depending on how uncharitable a comparison I am in the mood to draw between the genus of feathered friends and the chatter that was going on around me today.

Right. Work, coffee, on with the day. I hope everyone else had good weekends.

Veg-out

2007-09-20T03:10:00.000-07:00

I defeated myself yesterday at lunchtime with my own Big Salad and had to nap for a couple of hours to recover and digest, like a boa constrictor with a particularly large mouse. Ow. I defy anyone on CR to eat the piles of veggies that I have to in order to get my RDA's and be hungry. It is simply not possible.

I don't learn either, because I've just done it again in the office (with leaves and spinach and leftover baked veggies that needed eating) and now face an afternoon of sitting at my desk feeling fuller than full.

I need to make meal plans that pack the nutritional punch I need into a much smaller volume, I think. I love Christina's new Daily Bento blog - such prettiness and fun - but I'm pretty sure that I'd have trouble meeting my nutritional requirements if I attempted to do the veggie equivalent. I need to eat so many green leafies.

Again, not entirely sure where I've been with calories this week. My best laid plans have often gone awry with being invited to eat at friends' houses in the evenings, but I'm trying not to fret too much about it. The world will not end if I don't have a complete CoM report at the end of each day, after all. I know I am at least 90% there every day. And I don't eat junk; never have.

Lifewise, Paz's comment on my last post was spot-on. I am totally dissatisfied with my job - envious of Robin and Deborah at the moment... :-) The worst of it is that I don't know how to get out. I really do not want to move to another programming job, and in fact my skills have atrophied so badly this year that it wouldn't be possible anyway. But my CV is totally IT orientated. I have no other experience to offer an employer in another industry; if I can't set up my own deli or wine bar, I'd like to try something a lot more creative, or even project management, but I can't see that anyone would even give me a chance to start without relevant experience, without contacts. Added to that the need to maintain the flexibility that lets me spend time with P in London, and the need not to be a financial drain on our partnership, and the whole mix becomes incredibly complicated. It's all so huge and it daunts me. I am mired in the how, how, how, and I just can't see the way to move beyond that. It's really frustrating; seemingly impossible alchemy to transform this to something golden.

Abergavenny Food Festival

2007-09-16T13:56:00.001-07:00

P and I spent yesterday at "The Glastonbury of Food Festivals" - Abergavenny, in South Wales - with a couple of friends. I took this picture in April, from the castle walls, when my mother and I spent a girlie night in a hotel there for a treat, and ever since I've wanted to take P there, not specifically for food and drink but to show him the beauty of the hills and landscape. I love high country. I love moors and bracken and wind-swept moutainsides. I miss Colorado so much, I feel it like an ache in my soul, and this area of Wales feels to me like a balm, and I should go there more often.

So the occasion of the Abergavenny Food Festival was not to be missed. It only takes an hour or so to get there from here, up through Bath, a blessedly brief trip along the hideous M4, and across the Severn Bridge with its fantastic views over the Avon estuary. It was the clearest day imaginable, a perfect blue, cloudless. And then Wales, with its forests and valleys, deep and green and mysterious. Abergavenny is a sweet town, and yesterday it became one large farmers' market, with stalls selling local produce, to be taken away or eaten on the spot, all over the place. We wandered from stand to stand - a half of cider for P here, a half of perry for him there, a nibble of goat's cheese for me here, a spoonful of something delicious for him there. Yes, I ate vicariously through P and he ate well - a plateful of steaming paella, cooked in the largest pan I have ever seen in my life (fully a metre across); fresh sardines with salad. I ate a mixed salad with garbanzos and beans and as many green veggies as I could get piled in (admittedly not many) and as we were eating (cross-legged on the pavement), we were asked by an official festival photographer if he could take our pictures - I guess we really looked as though we were enjoying ourselves!

We bought lots of deliciousness between the pair of us and our friends, and ate much of it en famille when we got home. Probably not a(nother) CR day.

Today I was restless. Restless, restless, restless with the kind of ache in my legs that is usually only relieved by running. Rye bread and tayberry jam for breakfast probably didn't help. :-) After a pub lunch, we walked by the Caen Locks for an hour or so. Stunning engineering; P tried to explain the mechanics of it to me but my head just whirled with it - driving a boat up water? Just goes to prove, what seems impossible can often be achieved.

I just hope this proves possible with my CR. I am still trying to work out where my self-discipline has gone and why. I really don't want to be constantly at odds with myself. It's really starting to annoy me, this lack of balance, this nagging irritation, this (for want of a better word) hunger which seems not to be hunger at all, but an all too familiar physical expression of some kind of dissatisfaction... I don't know, maybe I am looking in the wrong place, and CR is neither the reason for nor the answer to how I am feeling right now.

But! It's been a good weekend. And tomorrow is the start of another new week. And I still have three more days at home to CRON. And a fridge full of leaves and veggies. And dino kale! The Abergavenny spoils have been sent back to London in P's rucksack.

To Everything A Season

2007-09-12T01:32:00.000-07:00

I am back home, and it is definitely, suddenly Autumn. The air smells of smoke and leaves and damp and musk and cool. The plants in the garden are straggling, sprawling, beginning their slow return to the soil that they sprung from, so full of life and vigour back in the too-hot-too-early day of April, a gentle decline, a beautiful aging. The landscape lies quiet and peaceful, shaded in hues of brown and rust; the fields ploughed back to earth, the hedgerows glowing with secret pockets of soft jewelled colour - deep red apples, golden blushed pears, dark berries, purple plums dusted with bloom and oozing the last of their sticky, honeyed juice. The start of a long, slow exhale.

When I went to the market this morning to stock up on veggies, my tastes had suddenly changed. I didn't want strawberries, or melon, or any of the fruits of summer; I bought beautiful Victoria plums instead, and I will gather blackberries later to eat them with. I bought dark savoy cabbage, black and shiny aubergine, squash. I will bake them with chilli and garlic and tomatoes from the farm shop. I am craving autumnal, smoky flavours; food to relax with, food that brings peace and comfort and serenity, like being wrapped in a cashmere blanket by candlelight.

I had forgotten how much I love this poem until the first lines of it sprang into my head as I drove to the gym this morning; there were just the tiniest vestiges of mist on the fields, and the sky was the softest dove grey. It was the first poem I ever had to memorise in school. This year, the seasons have been topsy-turvy, upside down, chaotic. But this morning nature seems to have reasserted the proper order of things; it is peaceful, quiet and right.

So. To Autumn, by Keats.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

(Photograph by Corbis - yes, I just grabbed it from the Net; if anyone has a problem I'll take it right down. I can get my own later with said berries anyway).

Bad Mood, Bad Post

2007-09-08T07:57:00.000-07:00

The Frome Show was interesting in a Country Show kind of way - ie, for about an hour. But there are only so many displays of fruit and vegetables and flowers I can take; only so many burger bars I can walk past. The running ducks being herded by sheepdogs was fun, I guess (the foot and mouth restrictions haven't been lifted yet, so sheep herding was out of the question) but I felt really sorry for the poor show poultry, rocking in their cages, bashing their beaks along the bars.

I wasn't in a great mood before we went; felt really cold and shivery and it wasn't until the sun came out that I stopped feeling shivery and like death. Meh. And no, it wasn't a hangover; I had to drive from the station last night (and why Wiltshire fog waits until 10pm to manifest itself for the entirety of the drive along country roads and then disappears magically once I enter my village to leave a sky brilliant with stars and milky-way I do not know).

I am so very tired, with no good reason at all.

I've also changed my profile to confess to the vida con vino. I still think I am probably CR'd, and my food is totally ON. But I cannot be CRON like this, and I don't want anyone thinking I am under any illusions that the two can be mutually compatible as the situation stands now.

I still want to keep blogging. I've suffered from terrible writer's block for the last decade, indeed that is what brought my PhD to a crashing halt. This is such a tiny start, but it is writing; it is words starting to flow again, starting to take shape and form and feeling in my head and I really would feel a little bereft if I gave it up. Not least to say missing the feeling of virtual semi-community. Having people say "great post", or saying they enjoy my writing style, is so rewarding for me; I love to give the same back on other blogs. I care about this, about CRON, I really do. I am just not able, not ready or not willing to take the final step right now. Maybe that's being too hard on myself, maybe it's not, but... well, that's where I am.

So sorry guys, not a great post from me this time. Maybe next week, when maybe I will be feeling as though I am doing better.

Right now I have BBQ veggies to prepare. On the menu tonight: mushrooms baked in the oven with 1tsp olive oil, one dash red wine, garlic and rosemary; tomato salad; zucchini, peppers, sweet potato - either oven-baked or grilled, it depends how much meat is on the BBQ and how tainted the grill is with that; green bean salad from a friend (dressed to the nines). I pray no one brings halloumi. I will probably have to eat some olive bread and maybe a small piece of goat's cheese tart. Strawberries. Melon.

God I am so grumpy. I am going to sit in the last of the sun with the papers.

For the hell of it, here is where I am right now with food today. We were so late at the Show that I had to eat a couple of pieces of said olive bread to keep me from falling over, or becoming even more grumpy. I've guessed the amounts on that, and the nearest CoM equivalent. Aside from that I've had yoghurt with blackberries and greengages (recorded as plums), almonds and seeds and gojis, and a lunch salad of lettuce, tomato, steamed broccoli and zucchini with LLBY, and a pear with 20g sheep's cheese (recorded as goat's cheese and it is SO UNFAIR that 20g of that comes up as 90 calories - how is that even possible? Grumpity-grump).

===========================================
Nutrition Summary for 08 September 2007
===========================================

General (65%)
===========================================
Energy | 799.6 kcal 67%
Protein | 38.5 g 43%
Carbs | 126.9 g 106%
Fiber | 28.9 g 96%
Fat | 20.8 g 52%
Water | 941.1 g 35%

Vitamins (83%)
===========================================
Vitamin A | 24242.1 IU 1039%
Folate | 440.9 µg 110%
B1 (Thiamine) | 1.2 mg 109%
B2 (Riboflavin) | 1.6 mg 146%
B3 (Niacin) | 11.4 mg 81%
B5 (Pantothenic Acid)| 2.4 mg 48%
B6 (Pyridoxine) | 1.2 mg 95%
B12 (Cyanocobalamin) | 0.4 µg 15%
Vitamin C | 193.3 mg 258%
Vitamin D | 406.9 IU 203%
Vitamin E | 7.9 mg 53%
Vitamin K | 616.1 µg 685%

Minerals (77%)
===========================================
Calcium | 809.8 mg 81%
Copper | 1.5 mg 168%
Iron | 12.8 mg 71%
Magnesium | 272.6 mg 85%
Manganese | 3.0 mg 165%
Phosphorus | 695.5 mg 99%
Potassium | 2590.6 mg 55%
Selenium | 37.5 µg 68%
Sodium | 689.2 mg 46%
Zinc | 4.8 mg 60%

Lipids (66%)
===========================================
Saturated | 6.6 g 66%
Omega-3 | 1.7 g 150%
Omega-6 | 3.9 g 90%
Cholesterol | 21.0 mg 7%

Eating, Drinking, Making Merry...

2007-09-07T02:16:00.000-07:00

So.. unfortunately this week has not seen the return to CRON discipline and the straight and narrow path of purity I was hoping for. Botheration. It's not the food, the food is fine - I had two really good days of using CoM at the beginning of this week, weighing and measuring, almost perfect nutrition, around about 1000 calories - lots of yummy rainbow chard (I am really, really craving dark green leafies and may have to go and worship at the Great Wall of Greens in Wholefoods later on today), and zucchini and green beans and broccoli. It is the demon drink. I just don't seem to be able to pass a day without a glass of something white and cold passing my lips. Such a lush I am, despite my best intentions.

Last Sunday I went blackberrying with a friend. It was a really disappointing haul in the end; tiny berries with hardly any taste. Last year there were so many heady perfumed berries that I was constantly bottling blackberry preserves and chutneys (that are still gathering dust in a cupboard somewhere, I think). This time I barely came away with enough for my breakfasts. But there is something just so wonderful about going out and foraging and coming back with free food. I really need to do it more often. We also picked lots of hazelnuts. I've never had a raw hazel straight from the tree before - definitely extremely yummy, and probably packed full of good stuff. I'll have to look out for more - we squirrelled that tree bare. In the evening I cooked for three of us - my usual sort of cooking, a green veggie gratin, a bean salad... and out came the fizz, and my willpower shot out of the window so fast I could almost see the smoke.

Monday and Tuesday were horrible, horrible days with work. I almost blogged about them a couple of times, about the wailing and the crying and the screams of frustration... God, I hate my job. And I really, really hate the way that I cannot see any way out of it - short of simply resigning and trusting fate to do the business. Needless to say, P is not keen on that idea. Hey ho. I guess something will happen in the end, but it's getting pretty intolerable. Both these days ended with the opening of a bottle.

I was hoping I could get out of coming to London this week, because there was a tube strike which would have made travelling awkward in the extreme. It was cut short though, and so I had no excuse not to pack my bags and head for town. I met P in an absolute dive of a bar where he was having farewell drinks with a colleague who was off for pastures new - oh, yuck yuck yuck. At the bar (sticky, stinky), a man next to me ordered tequila and Baileys on the rocks. The horror. As soon as I could drag P away, I did. Unfortunately he wanted to stay in town and eat out, so we ate in Chez Gerard in Covent Garden - our usuals there - oysters and steak tartare for him, steamed asparagus (dressing on the side) and mixed salad with chevre for me. The salad came not so much dressed as swathed in vinagrette, because I'd forgotten to ask for it naked. Damn. We drank pink fizz. Oh, calories calories calories...

Calories too last night, but these were planned for and I tried to budget during the day. Last week we made reservations to eat at 22 Great Queen Street, a bar-brasserie that has been open several months but is almost impossible to get into on the off-chance, and I have heard fabulous things about it. Simple British food, well-sourced, organic - all the things that hit all the right buttons for me. And it was just as good as I hoped it would be. Short menu, no fussing around with pretentious pointless descriptions - what you read, is what you get. I ate new season's borlotti beans (perfectly braised with garlic and herbs) and beautiful Romanesque cauliflower (pictured raw above - on my plate, steamed, and served with goat's curd) and (unfortunately buttered but delicious) savoy cabbage greens and (yes, I was hungry) runner beans cooked with tomatoes and more garlic. P had Cawl (a lamb soup) and Arbroath Smokies, and we shared a piece of blue ewe's milk cheese for dessert. Oh yum yum yum. It was all just very very good. Apart from the no doubt generous use of oil and butter, it was exactly the sort of food I cook for myself when I can be bothered to do more than just steam my veggies and whack some lemon on them. The place was packed. It gives me hope when I see that the sort of food I can cook and cook quite well obviously appeals - well, I can dream about having my own place like that one day... I'm very envious of the people who have set it up - yes, I'm sure it's horrifically hard work, but it would have to be so rewarding...

So, um yes, it's been a bit of a foodie week. But it's all good food. No junk, no gak. Just higher on the calories than I would like. My weight is yoyo-ing all over the place - down/up, up/down, it makes me dizzy. I just don't seem to have a chance to get into a proper routine for any more than two days in a row. And of course, the wine isn't helping. Must get a handle on that. If I'm drinking, I am not CRON-ing, no matter how much I kid myself.

Tonight I am on a late train home; tomorrow will see me in a field, in a tent, surrounded by aged dairy products; Sunday I am back in London again for an afternoon tea that a friend has arranged to celebrate his birthday. Routine?! Ha ha ha if only.

Oh yes - and welcome back, Joanna! So, what is a pluot? :-) And I meant to say thank you everybody for your comments on my last post.

Still on the primrose path

2007-08-31T06:45:00.000-07:00

This is the longest I have been continuously off-piste all year, without CoM, and knowing I'm not getting my 100%s, and having no idea of my calorie intake. Does this bother me? Well, yes, in that it's constantly nagging at the back of my mind that I am not being as disciplined as I might be and therefore there will be a price to be paid (or rather, being paid - I can see/feel already I am somewhat more padded than I was six weeks ago!); in another way, no, in that off piste for me means enjoying good food, mostly in the company of people I love, although sometimes alone, and that I have every intention of getting back onto the straight and narrow after this weekend - not much point in even attempting to do so with a friend's dinner party tonight, and dinner with the neighbours tomorrow.

It has, however, and in conjunction with April's post about lapsing and making excuses to oneself for that, whether I have the discipline to CRON long-term for longevity. Do I believe, I guess is the question. Do I believe that CRON will extend my lifespan? Do I believe that even if it does, that I will have access to advances in medical care that will extend it even further? Do I believe that CRON will take me to 120 (for want of a better lifespan to use) and keep me in the kind of physical condition that makes life worth living? And I don't know.

My concept of mortality is, to put it frankly, f*cked. Ever since I watched my father die, and indeed tacitly encouraged the doctors to prevent him suffering more than he needed to, I've felt every single day that I will be taken as quickly and without warning or chance for farewells and in complete and utter helplessness in the end as he was. In the beginning I tried to get counselling for this; now I accept it as part of my life and I live with it, although I hate feeling like it. So really, I should be grasping at the chance CRON offers (because I have no reason to doubt that the chance is there, even if I don't and never will understand the science behind it). I should be taking every single care in the world of my health and my body. I should be constantly vigilant, as Robin has it. And yes, this is why initially CRON appealed - that and, of course, consuming loads of veggies and monitoring calorie intake fits perfectly with a pattern of eating I've had for - well, over fifteen years now, perhaps longer.

But I am not constantly vigilant. I am not careful. I doubt. Alongside the fear of dying is the fear of not living. And that fear brings with it the f*ck it mentality that I was talking about in my previous post. This is what I need to get a handle on. I do not believe that, to use the analogy someone posited on April's blog, that my life will be whittled away french fry by french fry or, more appropriately for me (since I don't eat fries), sip of red wine by sip of red wine. In moderation, I believe everything is fine. But recently I've not been moderate in my sipping, and that is starting to worry me greatly. I need to find the will to tackle this. It should be so easy (so just stop) but it's not. There is always one more excuse.

I'm not sure where this post is going... :-) I guess we all have to live our lives in a way that suits us. Often this is going to include bad habits and all we can do is try and minimise the damage. There are too many variables, too much uncertainty, to place all ones eggs into a basket. I am 100% behind the principles of eating according to a CRON diet - I can't imagine not eating my piles of veggies every day, and I won't compromise on that and take the easier, more convenient options - not unless I am backed into a corner with hunger pangs akin to snarling wolves (ironic, isn't it, that even then I have to have P almost threatening divorce before I will eat some bread but when I am not hungry, a slice of toasted rye bread is almost irresistable?). But am I ever going to be a hard-core paragon of CR virtue? Am I ever going to do everything possible to maintain my health? No. I should, of course I should, because it is so foolish not to when the price to be paid is inevitable and it's only a question of when, not if, but I am too human. I cannot take the steep and thorny path. I just... don't want to, not all the time. And so be it, if this is weak.

Mary wrote in her blog that she wishes April a long, healthy, human life. And so do I, with all my heart. I wish it for all of us. And I wish for all of us to enjoy it for as long as we can enjoy it in ways that are particular and peculiar to each of us, without fear, or anxiety, or guilt.

And now I am really not sure what I've been blathering on about, but I'm going to hit publish post anyway. And then I am off to dally with a group of friends for dinner via a long walk along the Thames to break in my new and vertiginous shoes. There will be pain. :-)

Veggies for tea, salad for lunch

2007-08-29T06:13:00.000-07:00

I had a terribly un-CRON pub lunch yesterday; I was on my own, I could have gone home and made a big salad or steamed some chard, but... no. I was in a bit of a f*ck it mood; I wanted something yummy and prepared by someone else for me. Gluttony left over from the bank holiday weekend, I guess. It's so easy to slip back into habits that aren't as good as they could be.

So I ate my little pot of chilli hummus, my 4 or so olives, my 3 tiny quail's eggs, my half apple, and my cheese and my (white! French!) bread in the sunshine and I enjoyed every bite, more or less. But I did keep thinking, I really shouldn't be doing this...

Last night I cooked for friends; we got the BBQ out again, and we grilled sweetcorn, and halloumi, and huge field mushrooms. I made a tomato salad with cinnamon basil, and a runner bean and leek salad with non-fat yoghurt and mint dressing, and picked lots of leaves from the allotment. Someone bought over a veggie pizza but it was easy enough to get away with just eating a small slice and it was thin-crusted, and I didn't eat any of the bread that the others were eating with their burgers - no burger either, obviously. One piece of halloumi, one mushroom, a whole ear of corn, and a lot of the salad for me. So a healthy veggie meal, if not CRON. And one with a very small footprint in terms of food miles, from metres (end of the garden) to one mile (the local farm shop) - oh, via Cyprus for the halloumi, I guess. Shame having the BBQ sort of cancelled out the eco-purity, but...

This morning I drove up to London and stopped off to fill P's fridge with veggies. I've had salad for lunch with cottage cheese, and lots of leaves, and tomatoes, and beetroot and lots of veggie goodness. I was still really craving bread to go with it though. :-(

Now I have to spend this afternoon writing the tasting list for tonight's wine tasting and drag 12 bottles of rose wine in a suitcase from East London to West. I'm not really looking forward to that bit. :-( At the tasting I will attempt to eat as little of the cheese I have instructed P to buy from Neal's Yard as I can, and hold out for steamed chard and broccoli when we get home. Unfortunately a bit of the f*ck it mentality is still lingering... if I can't CRON seriously, it does feel like deprivation (we all know how many piles of veggies it takes) and I think this has been my problem recently - not enough time to sit down and do it properly, so I have a bite of something here, a bite of something there, and before I know it I want a plate of cheese and bread for dinner and not my steamed greens and brewer's yeast.

EDIT. Oh bloody hell and buggeration. There is artisan cheese in P's fridge and I just absent-mindedly ate a (small) piece with the rest of the lunchtime salad greens. Dammit!

Carby Carby

2007-08-25T23:24:00.000-07:00

P is with me for the long weekend so there is bread in the house and guess what I just ate for breakfast? Yup, lovely healthy CR strawberries... and 2 slices of decidedly non-CR seedy bread with manuka honey. I'm hopeless! :-)

It was a stunning day here yesterday. A summer day at last! Clear blue skies, hot sun... Mmmm. P and I took a picnic up to White Sheet Hill (spinach salad, sundried tomatoes, fresh tomatoes, celery... er, goat's cheese and bread and some Corsican rose wine) and sat in the sunshine reading the papers and watching a farmer harvest hay in the fields below us. Then we did a mini-tour of some local vineyards before returning to sit in my garden for more paper reading, and a late supper of local roasted veggies and leaves picked from the allotment patch when it got too dark to read.

P is here until tomorrow, and then a friend and her son arrive for a visit, and then I have a wine-tasting and a couple of dinner parties in London. I'm taking the last of this year's leave from work (fortunately my leave year runs September-September) and I really would have loved to have gotten away somewhere completely different, but I will have to make do with being a tourist in town, or maybe driving myself somewhere for a day trip or two. Ooh, I just thought - if the weather remains fair, I could take myself to Brighton for the day. It's been ages since I've seen the sea... Ah, a plan. :-)

So it's likely to be a DTBIC week with CR at the very least. I've decided that discipline will return in full in September. New month, new start. I want to get my weight back down to 110-111lbs (currently a couple of lbs above that), and be very strict about knocking the bread and the non-low-fat dairy on the head. A nibble here and a mouthful there mounts up, and results in the lack of willpower that in turn results in a breakfast like this mornings. I'm also going to get back to the gym because this still hasn't happened, and while the light is still good in the evenings I am going to try to get at least one if not two long walks in a day when I am at home. All good intentions. Now let's see if I can get them to fruition, and not too too much damage in the meantime.

Smoked Tofu and A Cup Of Coffee

2007-08-23T05:42:00.000-07:00

Mmmmm, I think I am becoming addicted to smoked tofu. This has to be wrong somehow, but my is it delicious. I had approx 100g of it with my lunchtime salad today, and yum yum yum. My salad was also full of delicious vegetables courtesy of P and an evening spent in Wholefoods last night - I had yellow rainbow chard, and vine tomatoes, and mushrooms, and artichokes, and some olives, a scattering of pumpkin seeds and all dressed with lemon and black pepper. And then I ate a completely unnecessary fat-free vanilla yoghurt and two Victoria plums for dessert. Yes, it's a London day and I can't weigh or measure - hey ho.

Yesterday I was a complete and shameful carb fiend. When I left home I was on 830 calories courtesy of a craving for toasted pitta bread with honey, twice. And then I ate a slice of walnut and blue cheese bread for dinner. I just cannot have bread near me. I just eat it if it's there; it drains my willpower. :-) In my defence, I was very hungry; I had spent the evening watching P eat a platter of fruits de mer in the Wholefoods Food Hall, refusing to eat myself because for all the foodie deliciousness up there, there was actually nothing suitable for veggie CRON. In the end, alongside the piece of bread, my dinner when we got back home was a plate of steamed kale and chard, two heirloom tomatoes of the grown-in-gold-dust-by-rare-and-special-pixies variety (judging on price), and some slivers of cheese.

There was no excuse apart from gluttony for having a slice this morning as well though.

I've just bought a fabulous dress in H&M, the one on the right of this picture. It's so grey and miserable today in town that I felt in urgent need of retail therapy. Isn't it bright and cheerful? :-) I've also just had a very strong cup of coffee, so this post is brought to you courtesy of procrastination and caffeine.

On motivation, or lack thereof, and not about CRON

2007-08-21T01:27:00.000-07:00

I commented on April's "5am Club" post yesterday to the effect that if I don't get up and go to the gym first thing in the morning, I never make it there. I missed it yesterday, and missed it again today despite being awake and breakfasted by 7am; I went back and hid in bed instead. Meh.

I've had real problems with motivating myself to get to the gym all this year. I should go each morning that I am at home - I can't afford to belong to a London gym as well - so I should be going at least 3 mornings a week if not 5. First it was balancing CRON and energy levels; I kept falling off the treadmill back in January as my body adjusted to fewer calories per day. But that quickly passed. Then I made the mistake of running in new trainers on the treadmill and being heavy-footed-stompy-me, I hurt my feet... and so gave it a miss for a few days. Then I think I got sick. And then, oh yes - the gym was closed for a few weeks with rain leaking through the roof (this still happens but now we all work out around buckets and dripping water and saturated towels). And then... well, it was more likely something else. Suffice it to say that my attendance this year has been abysmal and since the wedding, it's got even worse!

I really believe that getting to the gym is very important. CRON is all very well for keeping the weight down, but it does absolutely nothing for a girl's abs. I noticed this particularly last night when lying in bed; the muscle tone on my stomach is all but gone and (excuse me here), I could feel my digestive system working with the palm of my hand - urgh, and urgh. I've never felt that before (I assume) because there has been a layer of abdominal muscle there - I mean, I've never had rock-hard abs, but they were noticable. Now the mirror tells me they are not. Oh My God I am 35 and starting to sag. :-)

So, is this motivation enough to get me back to the gym tomorrow? Unfortunately I suspect not... the little demon voice in my head says to me, one day won't make any more difference and then you're back to London, so best start at the weekend... or maybe even the weekend after because then you've got a week off and can do a full five days and that will be so much better, so why bother with it now... If only my little demon voice would work to my good and say, Get up woman and shift your backside for 60 minutes; you know it will make you feel so much better in the end, and wouldn't it be nice to fit into the jeans you bought a couple of months ago but haven't yet worn because they are a very optimistic size with a nice flat belly?.

I find so many excuses to wallow, I really do. It's the same with the job. I spent a large part of yesterday in floods of tears of frustration (the indulgence of working at home) because I was attempting to do something I knew was incredibly simple (I mean, literally as simple as coding an xml declaration at the top of an SQLXML generated nodelist - and this is simple), and only managed it after several hours and then immediately hit yet another brick wall which I will have to break down today. That's the reason I wanted to go straight back to hide in bed this morning rather than facing the day bright and breezy with a run and some weights. But I can do something about this. I can find another job, something far more suited to me and my skills... But I have no idea what that might be.

Or I can work on swinging my mindset around and appreciating what I have now. I am so lucky. Why do I constantly carp and pine and want this nebulous more when really I have everything? Do I really want an easy nine-to-five job in an office? No. God, no. But I do need to get out of my current position - or change it.

I simply must get motivated to do things. It's scary.

One idea I have, that won't get me out of the job I'm in, but might open some doors, is to use all the vintage crockery I got from the wedding and set up a small company catering for tea parties - the whole works, cucumber sandwiches, fairy cakes, scones with jam and cream, slices of Victoria sponge (ok, so not CRON but I'm never going to be an ambassador for that), tea, champagne. Or at least hiring the stuff out. That is a small, achievable step and I Need To Do It. Maybe in conjunction with a friend who does reflexology. Girlie Pamper Parties, with tea and cake and fizz and foot massage. A niche, I wonder...

Er, yes. So this is really a post for me to read when I need a kick up the arse, or several kicks. No one is going to change my life for me. I need to motivate myself.

And I can start by getting to the gym tomorrow morning. :-)

Two Posts in One Day, no less

2007-08-16T04:57:00.000-07:00

Finally, finally, I have hit upon a perfect lunch combination for my London days that I probably won't get tired of eating, and is just perfect for CRON.

With WholeFoods just down the street from the office I have felt sort of obliged to buy my lunch there, even though it's fearfully expensive and I always come out with my salad box overloaded with treaty veggies (roasted asparagus, grilled artichokes, roasted peppers) and not enough leafy greens and then have to go to M&S to top up with spinach. More often than not I'd have grabbed something else I didn't need as well, such as this little bag of deliciousness, and I'd wander round in a daze hypnotised by the breads and cheeses and other gourmet delights, with a security guard in my wake, suspicious that I was a shoplifter. Sometimes Wholefoods is just too yummy for my peace of mind, and sanity. :-)

So... my new and perfect lunch which is not stocked by Wholefoods, more fool them, but by the small organic deli at the other end of the High, is a marinated tofu and raw energy salad - for 150 cals, I get 11g of protein, 6g of carb, and 9g of fat (which might be a bit high but I am pretty fat free elsewhere in my life) from Nigari Tofu, Chinese Leaf, Broccoli, Spinach, Green Peppers, Celery, Cherry Tomatoes, Radishes, Mung Sprouts, Pumpkin Seeds, Olive Oil, Orange Juice, Lemon Juice, Tamari, Garlic, Ginger, Mustard, Sage. It's not the first time I've eaten this, but I thought it was far more high calorie than it apparently is! I bought a 100g bag of spinach and tipped the lot on top of that and shook it up a bit (so that's 175 cal). And a 150g pot of plain, fat-free yoghurt, which wasn't necessary and has left me slightly stuffed but at least I shouldn't be hungry and wobbling at P later. I hope not, anyway.

The rest of my food on what is becoming a very long day indeed has been 71 cals of fat-free rhubarb flavoured yoghurt, 10g grapenuts, 5g pumpkin seeds, 5g gojis, 10g almonds at 2am; half a galia melon when I got to P's, and those steamed green beans and zucchini earlier.

A long day, but a good CRON day - and it really does lift my mood.

Shame about the work.

Seven Days Later

2007-08-16T02:13:00.000-07:00

Well, I am fretting less. And there have been a couple of good CRON days recently - assisted by having to eat my way through the glut of green beans and zucchini from my veggie patch, my neighbour's veggie patch, my friend's garden and my mother's allotment. (In fact I am munching on cold steamed beans and zucchini with lemon juice and mint right now - given that I was up at 2.15 this morning to drive to London in time for a 9am start in the office this isn't so bizarre because my body thinks it's lunchtime.) I've also been eating piles of fresh spinach and some really delicious and tender rainbow chard, and despite one moment of gluttony when I ate a whole 200g pack of smoked tofu in one sitting, my weight is back down to 112lbs again, and I feel less bloated from bready carbs and teenage angst.

I always find the weeks between my birthday and the 13th of August tough to deal with - the 13th is the day my dad died suddenly five years ago, and my 30th birthday was the day he told me he suspected he was ill. Those days took on a nightmare quality then, and continue to do so now. I always feel as though I am waiting for something until the day is past. This might have been another reason why I felt so blah and angry with myself last week.

My mother and brother and I try to meet on the day to celebrate Dad's life and we usually do this with food, by eating out somewhere special and remembering him. Dad loved food; he was just learning to love good food, as opposed to commercial gak - he loved fish in particular. Unfortuately I am veggie and my mother loathes the stuff, so we never get to do the full on seafood fest I know Dad would have loved. I'll never forget him and P ordering a seafood platter in a pub one lunchtime to share, and being utterly defeated by it, yet ploughing on regardless - each one considering it somehow unmanly to give in before the other. :-)

But we always try to go somewhere he would have liked to go, and this time it was Michael Caines at The Royal Clarence in Exeter. (Actually this time I'm not sure he would have liked it; the service was simultaneously overly fussy and offhand, which would have wound him up, and the food, while delicious, was over-priced for what it was). But still, the thought was there, and spending time with my mother and brother was precious. Which is, after all, what it's all about.

So, another new start now. Less beating myself up this time. There are too many zucchini and beans to get through for that! And life to get on with. Yes, Miss M is completely right in her comment on my previous post.

Dying in the valley of the immortals

2007-08-09T05:42:00.000-07:00

An interesting and quite sad article.

Still not doing quite so good as I was pre-wedding, I am afraid to report. Not eating badly, as usual, but just have an overwhelming sense of lack of balance and feelings of anxiety around all kinds of foodie issues and am beating myself up about it. I just wrote a huge long post on it all and then deleted it because really, musings on my disordered thinking have nothing to do with CRON at all... quite the reverse actually, as we all know. So I'm here, I'm reading blogs, I've linked back to some of the blogs I'd lost track of (hello Christina, Nenette!) but until I have a damn good CRON week and stop fretting, I think I'll be pretty quiet here.

With luck, that won't be too long...

Gastro-p0rn

2007-08-03T05:22:00.000-07:00

I still don't feel as though I have my CRON-groove back. Not that I am eating badly in any way at all, still lots and lots of veggies and green leafies and fruit and nuts and seeds and low-fat dairy, the usual Sara foods, but something feels a little off. I don't know what it is. Perhaps that I haven't really had a full week of measured CRON for a while now. Hmm.

After a rare flurry of activity at work the last couple of days (Fix this production problem Sara! On a system you've never seen before! Without the software you need to do it! Now!), it's all gone quiet in the office again so I've been spending some time browsing around blogs... mostly foodie blogs. It's fascinating how many interconnecting virtual communities there are - from CRON to raw to vegan to just pure gastronomic musings. And oh, the photos! Beautifully plated and presented meals; glossy veggies; such enthusiasm and passion for good food... Perhaps that's something I need to work on again, making my meals look attractive to me, rather than eating my spinach out of the bag or hastily shaken up in a tupperware. :-)

It's an incredibly gorgeous day today in London, so P and I are going to have a picnic before we get our train back home later on this evening. I'll be going to WholeFoods after work and bankrupting myself. I've already done a couple of reconnaisance trips while getting my morning pear-apple-cucumber-kiwi-spinach smoothie and my lunchtime salad... So I think I will be buying large tomatoes on the vine, flat peaches, buffalo mozzarella, good bread, salad leaves, grilled peppers, maybe some grilled artichokes, olives... The foodie p0rn on the various blogs I've been browsing has seeped into my head; I want a simple mediterranean-type feast in the evening sunshine... and leaves, leaves, leaves...

2007-07-31T01:03:00.000-07:00

I've had what feel like a few none-too-good CRON days in a row. I've lost my focus a little since the wedding - I think because I am still living amid the chaos of the aftermath, trying to get the house back into some sort of order, finding places for all the wonderful gifts... and staring the leftover wine in the face all the time. Whatever the reason is, I am finding it difficult to settle down; people have talked about the zen of CRON and I've always been thinking what's that? I've never had that! What am I missing? and of course now I know what I'm missing - you don't know what you've had till it's gone! :-)

Yesterday I made a good effort on getting things tidy, and took a lot of stuff to the dump, and have more packed up to take to charity shops just to get it out of my way. I have a couple of wine cubes due to be delivered today, which will mean I can get the final boxes of wine out from under my feet and into something resembling storage, which should be an immense help. And the last of the bread I bought last week has gone - I need to say farewell to that for a while too; I can never stick with just one slice, it's always two - and if the calories for rye bread in CoM are to be believed, that's a lot of calorie buck for very little bang - and I don't think the extra carbs are doing much for my stability of mind either.

So hopefully things should be better for today. It's just a little trickier getting my discipline back when the focus is no longer on the immediate or short-term (ie, losing weight while maintaining optimum nutrition to get into my dress), but on the long term (increased longevity, decreased risk of disease). I've never been great at thinking long-term; it's a shift in mind-set I really do have to achieve or I will continue to drift along, dissatisfied with my eating habits and with my job, indefinitely. This must not happen.

On the literal bright side, there is sun today! It's fantastic.

The Rain It Raineth Every Bloody Day

2007-07-26T05:11:00.000-07:00

... except this last Tuesday, when the sun shone and the air was balmy and warm and I gave myself heatstroke by sitting in my courtyard reading "Sideways" and drinking several bottles of San Pellegrino. By 5pm I was stumbling around, slurring incoherently like Miles and Jack, and ne'er a drop of alcohol had touched my lips. This is a regular occurrence whenever P and I go abroad, because I adore the heat and the sun and forget totally, every time, that the heat and the sun do not adore me. But this is the first time it's happened on my home ground, while large parts of the UK lie under swathes of flood waters, suffering from cuts in power and rationing of drinking water.

Today it's back to the wind and the rain, and the rain and the wind, and the cold cold cold. Even the ducks are looking less than amused now, and I (frankly) am fed up with it along with the rest of the country, no doubt.

Am easing myself back into CRON with my usual foods - lots and lots and lots of veggies, low fat dairy, and the occassional few eggwhites or tofu. I've been drinking miso soup (26 cals the bowl) and adding spring onion and cubed Mori-Nu as a snack. Mmmm... sodium, but mmmmm. I've also been upping my calories over the last few days with toasted organic light rye bread. The sunstroke seemed to demand it, and breaking the bread habit is always hard for me to do... there's no real need for me to cut it out entirely, after all, as long as its unprocessed and wholegrain and organic. Still around 1200 cals a day (when I'm not eating out) and back to 110.4lbs on the scales this morning.

Picture Post

2007-07-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

The Venue

Mother and Daughter

Bride and Groom simultaneously forget their lines

First Kiss

Garden party

Feed me!

Wedding dessert - CRON style, complete with kale garnish I notice! I didn't get to eat any though! :-)

Back to life, back to reality

2007-07-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

Back home and alone again... no, the marriage hasn't failed! P and I will continue to maintain our separate houses in city and country for a few years yet. It works well for us, and I'm very pleased (of course) that it does. Our ceremony has changed a balance in our relationship - as I knew it would. There is something about openly committing to someone that opens new doors and closes others, and forces readjustment and reassessment. After eight years together, P seems to have discovered a new seam of romantic impulses buried within his usual cynicism - and that is fantastic, and I am enjoying being openly loved. :-)

I turned 35 yesterday and when I woke up in the morning, there on my bedside table next to me was the new Harry Potter. He had gone out while I was sleeping and taken a cab to the nearest supermarket (sensibly not walking at midnight after having been mugged several yeards from his front door a few years back) and grabbed one of the last copies. Yay P. :-) Of course, this meant that he had at least 3 hours reprieve in which to sleep before I bounced at him demanding birthday treats during the day (our waking and sleeping hours do not coincide!) - and then that I spent most of the day stumbling around in a post-Potter haze. Fortunately I had little more planned for my day than a rare and precious visit to Borough Market, some lunchtime deliciousness, and cooking of huge plates of vegetables in the evening. I have so missed my veggies this week. I have, I suppose I have to admit, not been as CR'd as I would have liked to have been - and there has been bread and cheese and copious amounts of leftover wedding booze. We, er, seriously overcatered in that capacity and I still have crates of the stuff at my place and so does P. It's quality stuff though, so I am not too distressed. :-)

One slight hiccup over this week has been that P has become convinced that my CR pratice equates to an eating disorder. Oh dear. Yes, I have pointed him at the CR Society and shown him CoM which, as a software developer I expected him to respect and see as what it is - a nutritional tracking tool, not one for encouraging and maintaining obsession. But because I weigh my food when I can, and require a lot of veggies and leaves, and refrain from bread and pasta when I can and make an effort to monitor my nutrition, he sees this as obsessional behaviour. Oh dear. He promises to reserve his full judgement until reading and researching fully though.

I appreciate where he is coming from, I appreciate he sees my ribs and my hipbones and worries (somehow he didn't notice until this week!), I appreciate I have a past where I have not eaten as well or as much as I should have done - and I am suffering the physical consequences of that every month, apparently - and sometimes I wonder myself if I have slipped back into a mindset that is overly orthorexic and tending towards anorectic thinking... but then I think, no I have NOT. I eat huge amounts of healthy food, I want to eat huge amounts of healthy food, and when I eat too much of food that is healthy but not so in quantity (the bread, the cheese), I feel it horribly and so I restrain from it when I can. Is that wrong? No. Well, I think not. But poor P sees this as increasingly awkward eating behaviour for our lifestyle - and he is right, because we eat out loads and as a CRON-ing veggie it's not easy to find suitable meals in a restaurant that are veggie based and not carb-laden. I admit I won't eat a risotto, gnocchi, pasta, goat's cheese tart, if there is an option of double or triple salad, or the opportunity to order several side dishes. And of course pizza is out, and take-away... and ad-lib eating, grabbing a sandwich on the run, snacking on easily available snacks, that sort of thing. And when I get overly hungry, I get incredibly irritable almost beyond rational thought - and that is a problem and pisses me off as much as it does him.

So I am awkward. But I am not anorexic. And somehow I need to convince him of this, and soon. It must not become a conflict.

So. My first new challenge in this new life. There will be lots more. :-)

I might post some more wedding pics if anyone is interested? (*hears mutters of enough already*!)

Very Quickly...

2007-07-19T00:22:00.001-07:00

Saturday was perfect. As perfect as I wished it to be. Just... perfect. :-)

I will be back posting properly next week. Lots of things to blog about... and I have also told P about CRON. He is more than dubious, so I need to point him at lots of the research and to the science behind this practice, and be more rigorous myself. Some of the point I've lost with the weight, and I've promised him I will get that back. Married life! :-)

The Calm Before The Storm

2007-07-10T23:33:00.000-07:00

Well, CR could have been better the last few days but at least I am trying to keep on an even keel while I can. Over the weekend I ate far too much bread and cheese with neighbours, but I still managed to compensate overall and end most days under 1100 calories (in food, obviously) with almost full nutrition - shoving a bag of spinach in the microwave does wonders. On Monday I drove up to Cheltenham Spa to have dinner with a friend - we ended up in a pizza place and while I really wanted pizza (for the first time in an age), I had a spinach salad instead - it came dressed despite me asking for the dressing on the side (and then they brought extra dressing) and had mozzarella in it. Oh well. Yesterday morning I had to grab breakfast on the motorway - cereal, yoghurt and a banana. For half the price I could have had a "low carb" special - fried eggs, fried bacon, limp sausages, mushrooms. Um, no. So anyway, yesterday was a bit of a mixed bag for CRON as well. Still got good nutrition overall, but I am definitely feeling a lack of balance right now.

I've been reading a lot around raw food diets recently, and after the wedding I am wondering if I can manage to combine CRON and at least 75% raw. Shouldn't be too hard, but I need to do a bit more research. I think this all stems from having juices and veggie smoothies last week in London. They felt very pure to my system and I've even brought a smoothie maker so I can try to make my own green smoothies (heavy on the veggies, lighter on the fruit). My first experiment will be melon, kiwi, cucumber, spinach and celery. Once, that is, I actually remove the smoothie maker from its box. Currently it is buried under wedding cake.

So, P arrives today and all the organising I have to do for Saturday begins in earnest. We have to get everything to the venue - the wine, the linens, the crockery, the silverware, the flowers - and collect most of that from various outlying locations anyway. We are still missing deliveries of cider and perry and some beer glasses that P has had engraved with our names and the date and a picture of Tigsy - a sweet thought, if not entirely to my taste! :-) Oh yes, and we still need to finish off the vows and then have a run through with our friend J who has agreed to speak and tie the whole thing together.

Saturday I had my hair coloured (properly blonde again now, rather than parti-coloured) and was really pleased with it. While I was in the salon I tried once more to get the final price for the styling on the day that I had previously discussed with another stylist - one week before the day he decided to quote me one hundred and seventy pounds - so that's around, what, three hundred and forty dollars. For an updo. Needless to say I won't be paying that! So I still need to work out what to do with my hair on the day. But really, that's no big problem.

I am doing much better at chilling out and not obsessing on the small stuff, Robin! :-)

So. Well, apologies for this blog having gone all Bridezilla recently. It will be back on CRON and maybe some raw green smoothie experimentation soon enough. I'm not giving up on this, but I do need to get some more balance back and pay more attention to what I'm doing with it.

For now, I'll leave you with a picture of one of my table centrepieces (because of course you are all so interested! *grin*)... made by my good friend Pxxxx from flowers and foliage and herbs grown in our gardens and scavenged from hedgerows. I think it looks fantastic. Well done Pxxxxx!

Today's Dose of Gratuitous Romance

2007-07-06T05:50:00.000-07:00

It's all I have to bring today –
This, and my heart beside –
This, and my heart, and all the fields –
And all the meadows wide –
Be sure you count – should I forget
Some one the sum could tell –
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.

Emily Dickinson.

Isn't that just so pretty?

But alas, no space for it. A couple of good friends of mine have agreed to read the ee cummings as a "two parter", and it should be fabulous and will make me cry. P and I are also midway through creating our vows. Wonders will never cease!

Needless to say I am a completely stressed bunny, even for me. I set myself impossibly high expectations of how I want things to be, and always set myself up for a fall. It being mid-July, I had had (too optimistic) dreams of an outdoor wedding, balmy sunshine, gentle breeze, croquet on the lawn, afternoon tea served, gentle laughter, string quartet followed by soft jazz, rural bliss, and then a gentle amble (or stagger) off to the local public house where we could collapse into sofas and generally continue chilling out. Unfortunately the British weather, always (I admit) unreliable, has dashed all those dreams and I am now hurriedly trying to rethink housing and entertaining 100+ people in a tent in a field in the pouring rain with, potentially, gale force winds, thunder and temperatures more akin to March on a bad day. I'm not dealing well with the disappointment. In fact, I am being a ridiculously sulky child.

Still, deep breaths, get a grip and all that... Show will go on. :-)

CR is good. On is good, now I'm home. Wine consumption... hmm, could be better. As for the caffeine!

Oh dear

2007-07-03T05:45:00.000-07:00

The CRON fairies are not with me today.

Still no batteries for my scales in London, and not much CRON friendly food in P's fridge. In fact, last week's leftovers are still in there, and making a break for freedom. I shut the door quite hurriedly after opening it this morning, and I'm trying not to think about it.

So I've been a bit lax so far. Breakfast was 3 fresh apricots with pumpkin seeds, gojis, cacao nibs, a brazil nut, 4 almonds and a dessert spoon of oats. And a bit of bread and honey. :-( I snacked on more almonds and gojis on the way into the office, and then stopped off at Whole Foods for a veggie juice which was a mistake - more fruit than veggies, unfortunately...

I'm getting really into the idea of veggie juices but not with a fruit base. I had a wonderful Green juice last week which had a cucumber base, and fennel and spinach in it. Mmmm. This morning's "Detox Delight" (because I might have been a little over-enthusiastic last night) had spinach and celery in it, but also pear and kiwi, and it was too sweet. I still drank the whole thing though.

Lunch was over-priced and over-sauteed broccoli with some other salad veggies, some hard-boiled egg white, and some strawberries and non-fat yoghurt. P just tells me we are going out to dinner again later on. Meh.

I'm trying not to let my mindset slip but it's tricky at the moment. I'm also constantly being told by people that I have got too thin, so part of me (in defiance) is thinking that being more undisciplined is ok. Of course it's not. If I *have* got too skinny (and I can't tell!), then I need to be more disciplined and pay more attention to my diet to keep it healthy and focused on the good things. Grabbing samples of yummy cheese is not going to help! :-)

In other news, I think I am in love with ee cummings...

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
not fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Quick Post

2007-07-01T12:42:00.001-07:00

You know what? I'd nothing better than for our little world wide clique of Cronies to converge chez Sara for a Cronie mezze as per previous post. :-) You'd be very welcome.

I'm very stressed and simulataneously busy and not as busy as I'd like to be. I can't organise much more for The Day now until the end of week after next, when it will be two days of endless chaos. Well, there is the small matter of writing the script for the ceremony but, hey - picking the words to bind you to your life's partner in front of your family and best friends is a breeze, right? Er, yes. Argh.

More in a couple of days. No chance of any more foodie writing for quite a time, Illiah! :-)

DBTIC II (Quite Well Actually)

2007-06-28T12:23:00.000-07:00

Tonight P went for a fitting of his wedding jacket, so I have had the opportunity to cook dinner for us both. A rare one, since P prefers to cook at home himself, hating the whole "meal on the table when I get home" concept, and when I cook for myself alone I just steam a plate of veggies and eat them plain, or maybe with some black pepper and lemon.

I have made far too much, as usual, as I seem unable to cook for company in anything but industrial quantities, and I have used the whole double organic veggie delivery but it should also provide lunch for me for tomorrow. P and I also are very fond of eating mezze style, lots of little dishes, lots of varying tastes. We'll eat everything at room temp, and he can add oil as he chooses. I've already had my flax on an emergency damn-I'm-hungry salad.

So on tonight's menu is:

Mixed mushrooms (the usual white, and some very weird knobbly ones from the veggie delivery, and some portabella, and some shitake) baked in a foil parcel in the oven with quartered unwaxed lemons, lots of garlic, fresh tarragon, rosemary and bay, and a slosh of rose wine (plus one for the cook). It looked great going into the oven, less great coming out, but it smells divine.

Rainbow chard steamed with chilli and garlic and served with fresh tomato sauce (a little more rose, some more chilli and garlic). It looked so lovely raw but there was no way I could serve P that amount of greenery without huge protests! :-)

Fresh broad beans (I think in the US these are fava? I hope so, because that's what I've been entering into CoM), shelled and podded, with steamed zucchini and asparagus in a very low cal, low fat yoghurt dressing with TONS of fresh mint.

P gets new potatoes. And his homemade pie.

It's been just what I needed, some time to myself. Last night we had a wine tasting and in the heat of many bottles a close friend of ours and P fell out, and I caught the brunt of it as well. As a result I've felt really upset and fragile most of the day, and this has given me some chill out space that was very much required.

Of course I haven't been able to weigh or measure any of this but... it doesn't matter. NBD. :-)

Now I just need to wait for him to get home!

A DTBIC Day

2007-06-28T02:08:00.000-07:00

Thanks for Robin for the invention of an incredibly useful acronym.

I'm back in London now after a couple of good CRON days at home - low calories (possibly too low, maybe) and good nutrition reports from CoM. Back to 110lbs yesterday as well - which again, might be too low, but I can't worry about sorting that out now. Losing or gaining weight at this point seems to be a cause of stress for me! Honestly, I despair; there always has to be something for me to fret about.

Anyway, today will be a Doing The Best I Can day, not least because the batteries on my digital scales at P's have run out, coinciding nicely with the same happening to my scales at home! Hopefully they won't be difficult to replace but really, I would have expected them to last more than 6 months and 3 months respectively. I guess they weren't stress tested by a CRON practitioner! :-)

I've had a good start with blueberries, strawberries, 0% yoghurt (no Skyr in WholeFoods this morning, a disappointment!), pumpkin seeds, almonds, gojis, cacao nibs and flaxseeds. Not all at once, and I don't think I over-estimated the quantities. I picked up the flaxseeds at WholeFoods this morning because I've run out at P's. I think they've got their pricing slightly wrong on that one - 100g of them cost me 9p! Still, I'm not complaining. Everything else in there really is Whole Paycheck!

Later... Lunch - 4 spears of grilled asparagus (oiled), 3 florets of raw broccoli, a spoonful of peas, a spoonful of lentils, and some tofu in honey glaze from the WholeFoods salad bar. My check is well and truly gone.

Complete Gak Fest

2007-06-25T00:31:00.000-07:00

Urgh. I've just had several days of pretty horrible nutrition - lovely company and I did a lot of nice things but as far as CRON goes, it was pretty poor. How it is possible to put 5lbs on in as many days I do not know, but I've managed to do it and I am feeling quite bad about it. *sigh* I hope most of it is water weight and it will be gone soon. :-(

I did try my best up to a point, but I was very lazy about stuff yesterday in particular.... I ate so much bread, and hardly any veggies at all, and drank way too much. Yes, I am beating myself up about it so I won't elaborate but suffice it to say, I wish I had more time at home alone to get things under control this week before I have to head back to London again. What with being sick, and carb-craving, and then running around all over the place, and socialising, and not having access to my staple foods, I've lost the plot somewhat. Unfortunately I only have a couple of days to get it back. I will be doing all I can to make those days count 100% towards nutrition and keeping as low as possible on the calorie front though. Bring on that spinach.

My CRON experiment

Letting It All Go

Summer Holidays

Feeling Blue

Cholesterol Test Results

May Morning

Ever Contrary

Au Revoir

Green Smoothie Fail

Winter Wonderland

Green

*expletive of your choice* the Credit Crunch

Back To The Land

Broccoli Kitten

The New Start (# 1)

The Fall

The Dragon

The Cold

The Hunger

Bright Side

"Post" (Haste)

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

On the menu tonight

Fall

Just say the word

Another Year Older

BabaGOODoosh!

Things you don't want to see in your veg patch

Washing My Dirty Brassicas In Public

Farewell Thunderchild

Thanksgiving

May Day

Foodie Weekend

Blank

Time

Still here

Insomnia

The Inspiration of the Long Distance Runner

Cautiously Optimistic

Update

I am still here...

So that's how it works!

I never learn!

Hello World

A stuttering start

Very, very, very quickly indeed...

Aftermath

Twas the Night Before Christmas

Season of Good Will

My Delicious Lunchtime Salad

Letting It All Slide. And Some Festive Plans.

Shutting Up The Head-Pigeons

Wassup Doc?

Still here

The Bell, It Tolls For Me

Technical Woe

Meeces in Pieces

Wet

GM Omega-3?

Oooh, good mood!

When Life Gives You Lemons...

Go Read

The Long Road

A Red and Gold Day

Late to the Party - 8 Things

Update From Springfield

Cabbage Soup, Water and Weirdness

Reset

Keep Away From Our Kale!

Never the twain shall meet

More Cravings

When Nothing Else Will Do

Monday

Veg-out

Abergavenny Food Festival

To Everything A Season

Bad Mood, Bad Post

Eating, Drinking, Making Merry...

Still on the primrose path

Veggies for tea, salad for lunch

expletive of your choice the Credit Crunch