Thai red curry for a fast day :-)

At the start of last week I had started to see some serious results again, including for the first time noticing clothes getting baggier. These clothes (of course) include the jodhpurs that I delightedly bought in Australia over Christmas because they’re so much cheaper than here; this is my new definition of not being able to have everything! 

Unfortunately I feel off the wagon in a big way over the weekend and am being forced to take today off too; to quote Bridget Jones talking about New Year's Day “[…]you can't eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover.” To look on the bright side. I’m properly looking forward to this week’s fast days and that’s the first time that’s happened, so a silver lining of sorts.

Below are my fast day and definitely-not-fast-day meals, I failed a bit on photos, I'm invariably so ravenous by the time it comes to cooking dinner on a fast day that photographing it is the last thing on my mind, and a roast is just super complicated to coordinate so photography drops by the wayside.

Chicken Thai red curry with cauliflower rice (servers 3 – 327 calories pp)

• 2 tbsp coconut oil
• 1 tbsp red curry paste
• 1 large onion sliced
• 150g chicken breast chopped
• 1.5 cups of pineapple chinks
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 1 cup coconut milk (light)
• 2 tbsp fish sauce
• 6 cups cauliflower

1. Heat 1 tbsp of the coconut oil in a wok or large frying pan and fry the red curry paste for a couple of minutes
2. Add the sliced onion and chopped chicken breast and cook until the chicken is nearly done, adding the chicken stock bit by bit (note: I would consider using less chicken stock and more red curry paste the next time I make this, it was very mild and possibly a bit too liquid)
3. Add the pineapple chunks and coconut milk and cook until the chicken is completely cooked and the curry is warm
4. Take off the heat and add the fish sauce

SIMULTANEOUSLY prepare the cauliflower rice

1. Cut the cauliflower off the stalk and process in food processor until in small rice/quinoa sized pieces. Heat the coconut oil in a frying pan, add the cauliflower and stir until covered in the oil
2. Cover and leave on the heat for three minutes
3. Uncover and cook, stirring occasionally, for a further six minutes

Saturday beef and Yorkshire pudding lunch (902 calories)

• The beef recipe is from here: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2875673/potroast-beef-with-french-onion-gravy?IGNORE_GEO_REDIRECT_ONCE=true (666 calories per person for four, but this served 6 comfortably (there were leftovers for the dogs) making it only 444 calories)
• For the roast potatoes I used 3 tbsp. duck fat, 3 cloves of garlic and 1.5 small potatoes per person for six people (223 calories)
• For the Yorkshire puddings I used 100g flour, 250ml skimmed milk and two eggs for six, I failed to count (or measure) the oil used for cooking them as the weekend was already a shambles by this point! (94 calories, plus the oil)
• The parsnips were 800g of parsnips cooked in 50g of butter and 2tbsp of honey, but I calculated that this made about ten portions and truly there are masses of leftover parsnips (118 calories)
• I’ve also added in a tbsp of creamy horseradish sauce per person (23 calories)

Slow cooker coq au vin (and a fast day meal!)

It’s been a while between posts as I wanted to make this the first of what I hope will become the standard format for this blog which will feature one fast day and one non-fast day meal each week.

I began writing this with Dido’s ‘Sand in my Shoes’ stuck in my head last Monday, extremely grumpy about finding myself not in a tropical paradise where the most challenging decision of the day is ‘beach or pool’ but back in Dubai, in my office, on a fast day and facing the necessity of going for a run. It was perfect to be able to focus on blogging about two recipes for the week, as being back in my own kitchen is my major consolation whenever I find myself home from a holiday :-). The meals (and thus the blog post) spanned the whole week so I wasn’t able to share it until now.

The fast meal is the baked spaghetti squash with goats cheese and pesto which I have talked about before (it’s rapidly becoming a fast day favourite to be honest and you’ll see why as it’s so delicious and so easy!). The non-fast meal is a slow cooker coq au vin which I found here: http://www.blog.thezenofslowcooking.com/slow-cooker-coq-au-vin-a-la-julia-child-2/ best name for a blog ever!

Baked spaghetti squash with goats cheese and pesto (serves 1 – 300 calories pp)

• Two cups of spaghetti squash (62 calories)
• 50g goats cheese (121 calories)
• 1.5 tbsp pesto (112 calories)
• Dash balsamic vinegar (5 calories) (there's also a splash of white wine shown in the picture which is a bit of a cheat, as I didn't add those calories in)

1. Preheat the oven, pierce the spaghetti squash skin several times and bake for 1 hour
2. Cut open the spaghetti squash scrape out the seeds and tease the strands of flesh out with a fork*
3. Measure out the amount of spaghetti squash and mix with the other ingredients until combined

* You can either do this whilst it’s hot (though burnt fingers can result) or wait until it has cooled. If you wait until it’s cooled put the measured out squash and the other ingredients in a pan on the heat to combine, stirring constantly

Slow cooker coq au vin (serves 6 – 446 calories pp)

• 1 kg skinless chicken thighs
• 1/3 cup flour
• salt & pepper 3 tbsp olive oil
• 200g lardons
• 12 baby onions, (24 pearl) peeled and left whole
• ¼ cup cognac
• 1 3/4  cup red wine
• 1 tbsp tomato paste
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 large sprig thyme (or a generous 1/2 tsp dried)
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 bay leaf

1. Add the flour, salt and pepper and chicken thighs to a large Ziploc bag and shake to coat the chicken
2. Heat 2tbsp of the olive oil in a frying pan, and fry the chicken two minutes on each site to brown. Once browned stir in any remaining flour and put the chicken in the slow cooker
3. Heat the final tbsp. of oil and fry the lardons and onions (also mushrooms if using, I didn’t because I hate mushrooms) until the lardons are cooked. Add the lardons and onions to the slow cooker
4. Add the rest of the ingredients to the slow cooker and cook on high for 4 hours (the original recipe gives an option for cooking on low too, but I didn’t try it)

Pancake day; how do you top yours?

So an extra mini-post this week, just because my normal late-in-the-second-day-of-my-fast obsessing about what I’m going to eat tomorrow is particularly focused today, because it is Shrove Tuesday tomorrow.

I think the British Shrove Tuesday tradition says something profound about us. In Brazil there are the enormous samba parades, in New Orleans the parades with the costumes and the music and the beads, in German and Holland they have fancy dress and decorated floats, in Venice fancy dress and masked balls etc, etc… and all of these traditions are accompanied by drinking, a sense of licentiousness and general merry making. In the UK we make pancakes.

Nope, we don’t also have a tradition of holding heavily alcoholic pancake parties, or eating the pancakes off each others naked bodies, we just make pancakes. Normally for tea (I’m not sure pancakes can be described as dinner), and we generally eat them with lemon and sugar, which is frankly the most boring topping that our continental cousins offer at any time, let alone during the last hooray before Lent starts.

I haven’t figured out yet what this says about us but it’s probably the same thing Bill Bryson identified when he talked about British people looking at a digestive biscuit (undoubtedly the biscuity cousin to a lemon and sugar pancake topping)and going “Oooh, lovely”.

In any case I must be terribly British, as, particularly in my fasted-state, I’m supper excited about a pancake supper tomorrow. Despite my disparagement above, I really like sugar and lemon, but I am going to do something a bit more exciting this year and after much thought the pancake toppings tomorrow will be:

• Shredded rotisserie chicken and Philadelphia
• Crispy bacon and maple syrup
• Dulce de leche and banana (thankfully I made an extra can of dulce de leche when I attempted a s’mores cake late last year)

I have counted the calories and reckon that these toppings add up to 500 calories before you factor in the pancakes (British style 250 for three or four). But I can at least console myself that it’s less calorific than beignets and daiquiris orqueijo coalhos and caipirinhas :-)

Results from a month of the 5:2 diet

So today is a slightly tricky fast day. I’ve just looked at the inspirational message on my cup of herbal tea (Yogi Tahitian vanilla hazelnut, delicious and normally I love the little messages) and read:

‘Open up to infinity and bacon infinity’… which quite frankly sounds freaking delicious.

If you are both au fait with these new age type messages and not sub-consciously obsessing over a bacon buttie (on white bread, with ketchup – mmmm) then you have probably gathered that it reads ‘open up to infinity and become infinity’, but right now I’d probably take the bacon :-).

So why is today so tricky?

Well first up I did the Wadi Bih race yesterday. This is a team relay race going 31km up and then 31 km down a mountain in Mussandam. All the legs are quite short, the longest is 4.2km and team members who aren’t running drive from checkpoint to checkpoint. At the start you’re running in the dark (we started at 0600 yesterday), at the top one has the altitude to deal with (you’re at 1,000 metres having started at sea level) and at the bottom you’re in the blazing sun. In addition the time you spend in the car between legs allows all your muscles to seize up, my team lost a member and ran as a four rather than the normal five and I hadn’t really trained for it, not at all in fact. It was a wonderful weekend, we’d camped and barbequed the night before and the race was really good fun with gorgeous scenery but I ran 19km and am extremely stiff today* which makes me feel like indulging myself rather than fasting.

The second reason is that my body fat percentage went up last week, which I find terribly dispiriting, and I’m starting to realise that although you may not have to diet on the non-fast days, you do have to keep your calories within your daily limit. Mine is 1,700, slightly reduced (on the basis that I’m a bit older and not exercising as much) from the 1,800 that my Aeroscan testing from a few years ago recommended. Although you’re not going to go hungry on 1,700, you can’t scarf down a pizza (even a small one)and then eat chocolate either. I had a few days last week where I did take on too many calories and I saw the results on the scales this morning.

Having said all that, the diet is working overall and today I’ll share the results:

                         05/01/2016       07/02/2016

Weight:                    58.2             55.9

Body fat %:                32.1             30.4

BMI:                       22.7             21.8

Having done the maths** this means I’ve lost 1.69 kg of fat; that’s more than a large bag of flour, that’s amazing! With a bit of renewed dedication to controlling my non-fast days I’m pretty sure that operation skinny-in-a-bridesmaid’s-dress is a go and I’m sure I can convince myself that that’s better than a bacon buttie.

So on this week’s fast days I will be having:

Today: Breakfast is two medium eggs scrambled with 2 tbsp of cottage cheese and some garlic salt (200). Dinner, in honour of Chinese New Year, is Asian (I think it's Japanese but I'm trying okay?) spaghetti squash(153) with steamed beef dumplings (182). Recipies taken from here: http://sybaritica.me/2012/03/20/experiment-steamed-beef-ball-dim-sum/ and here: http://www.pickledplum.com/yakisoba-spaghetti-squash-recipe/ my mum’s staying so I’ll also be making some mushroom and water chestnut dumplings to accommodate her vegetarianism. (I’ll be slightly over today as I made and ate breakfast before working out that I wasn’t going to be able to go to personal training tonight (too stiff) so I should probably make the more complex of the fast night suppers).

Tomorrow: Breakfast is two medium eggs scrambled with 2 tbsp of cottage cheese and some garlic salt (200); I really like this way of doing my eggs, so much so that I’m having them like this on non-fast days too. Dinner is the spaghetti squash with goats cheese and pesto that I wrote about a few weeks ago (300).

*This is insanely understated. I can’t walk is less of an overstatement than ‘I am extremely stiff' is an understatement. I can walk, it’s just more like the rolling gait of a sailor on shore leave particularly when I first stand up and every step is painful. If being on the flat is painful then changes of gradients are ridiculous, it took me maybe five minutes to get down the stairs in the metro today and if there is a fire alarm I’m quite seriously going to have to be carried (we’re on the 26^th floor). Oh, and in addition to my legs, my hips, back and upper arms also ache.

**((58.2/100)*32.1)-((55.9/100)*30.4)