The Cold

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

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

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)

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.

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

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

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.