Cauliflower Couscous

Another new year, another round of self-flagellation in the Recipe Junkie household... And when you're making cauliflower couscous, you know it's got to be bad...

The age crisis that I blithely ignored as I turned 40, feeling full of the joys, life beginning and all that. Well it all came crashing down around me in the car the other day on my way to Carmarthen. I was heading for an appointment to see an absolutely gorgeous and lovely practitioner of the Bowen technique in a bid to sort out my ever problematic back. If you're in the area and need sorting out, I recommend her. But I digress.

As I avoided the floods and negotiated the broken roads (where the floods had receded) a voice echoed around my head: 

"This year you will be 44". 

44

I have no idea where the voice came from, and there's no good reason why 44 should be any different to 40 - but then it's only 6 years to being 50 and where does that leave me?!

Being the person that I am, I have given myself several good talkings to since, and thought I'd got over it. But no! Another 'old' moment befell me at the optician when, during a routine eye check, the young whippersnapper (who tried to sympathise with me by telling me that he'd be turning 30 this year - I had to stop myself for trotting out all the trite guff about how great being 30 is...) advised me that "Not this time, but probably in a couple of years we're going to have to think about varifocals!".

VARIFOCALS!!

I might as well just go out and shoot myself now...

Then I found my copy of "When I am old I will wear purple" and decided that it wouldn't be all bad, as long as I don't just let old happen to me. I know people who have done this - become old, adopted an old mindset, determined that they couldn't do anything to improve the situation, and metaphorically, if not actually, walked themselves to the old people's home and bolted the door behind them.

This of course will not happen to me. I cannot do anything about the numbers (or, perhaps the varifocals) but I can prevent the 'old'. 

Being the new year and all that, in a bid to stave off being old as long as possible. I have taken the opportunity to once again resolve to eat better, make sure I get enough exercise - drink 8 glasses of water a day. I am even doing Dry January - but that has as much to do with an ill-judged strawberry daiquiri on New Year's Eve as anything else (there are some parts of my life where, it seems, I will forever be 17).

I am currently contemplating A Modern Way to Cook by Anna Jones and Diana Henry's A Change of Appetite. Interesting reading. I even have a jar of coconut oil in the cupboard - and yes, I have been using it to bake with. (Incidentally it's also fab as handcream - I have some lush stuff fragranced with lemon balm. Heaven).

And as always the case, there are pounds that absolutely MUST be shed. Not many, but I am conscious of them creeping back on and being harder to shift when they do. Not doing much for my self image, and I can't afford a new wardrobe. So back to my old favourites - spinach soups fragrant with lemon grass, ginger, chilli and not much else; carefully measured portions of porridge, making sure I scrape away any leftovers fom the kids plates IMMEDIATELY. In a bid to livening things up (!) I have even stooped to making couscous out of cauliflower. Not adding deliciously roasted florets to a chunky couscous rich in good things like chorizo, olive oil and the like. Not that at all. Rather, that thing that was all the rage with the 5:2ers (oh yes, that was me, briefly, wasn't it...) where you whizz up cauliflower and pretend its carbs. Cauliflower couscous. And surprisingly, it was very tasty.

I can't promise that I won't be reaching for Chef Fatboy's 'Cooking with cream, cheese and extra butter' shortly (you mean you haven't got that one? It's very good). But for now, a bit of restraint and plenty of chilli and lime is doing wonders for me!

********

Cauliflower Couscous

This is based on a recipe from the Abel & Cole Veg Box Companion by Keith Abel.

Serves 2-4 depending on whether you're eating it on its own - I ate about half of it with some cooked mushrooms for my supper and will have the rest for lunch tomorrow...

100g sunflower seeds

1 reasonably large cauliflower

1 fat garlic clove

1 red chilli

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground coriander

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp cinammon

Zest & juice of a lime

Seeds from a pomegranate

A good handful of parsley

Toast the sunflower seeds in a pan until golden and nutty then set aside (remember that if the pan is too hot, they might burn even off the heat, so tip into a bowl if necessary)

Trim the leaves from the cauliflower and roughly chop into florets. Peel the garlic and deseed the chilli.

Chuck the florets, garlic and chilli into a food processor and whizz up till it looks like couscous, then tip into a big bowl.

Sprinkle over the ground spices and stir through the cauliflower along with the sunflower seeds.

Stir in the lime zest and juice, the pomegranate seeds and finally chop up the parsley and add that.

Leave it for a few minutes - I was worried that the ground spices would taste a little 'raw' but they mellowed for being left to marinate - and then eat!

More soup - this time spicy spinach & coconut - suitable for 5:2, too!

As well as the parsnips, we also said goodbye to the last of our over-wintered spinach at the weekend. This meant that I had 250g (leaf & stalks) to turn into something delicious.

Now, I absolutely LOVE spinach - it is one of my most favourite things. I love it steamed, on toast, topped with a poached egg, may be some bacon. I also love it creamed, or in a gratin with anchovies, or just steamed with a grating of nutmeg. It's super healthy too. Unfortunately, the kids are not so keen, though, so rather than either concealing it in something else, or subjecting myself to the grimaces and whinging that tends to accompany a brazen appearance of the stuff, unadulterated on their plates (somethimes, you just have to take the path of least resistance) I thought I'd see if I could enhance my 5:2 fast days by creating this batch into some tasty soup.

Turns out that I could. I have worked out as accurately as I can that 400ml of this will work out at a smidge over 119 calories. 400ml might actually fill me up, which is a huge bonus. I was going to have a  fast day today, but then I remembered that I was going out to night, so it will have to be tomorrow. I had some of the soup for lunch today anyway, and it's very tasty. The chilli and ginger give it a little something extra which makes me feel like I've eaten more than I actually have - always a bonus, even when it's not a fast day, if it will stop me reaching for the bread...

250g spinach - leaves and stalks (doesn't need to be baby spinach or anything), thoroughly washed
2 shallots, roughly chopped
1 clove of garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon grated ginger
1 Kallo organic chicken stock cube made up with 500ml boiling water
1 can light coconut milk
1 dried chilli

Put the shallot, garlic and ginger into a pan that will eventually take all the liquid, and which has a lid, and just cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer till softened and the water is all but gone - it won't take too long and if everything looks softened before the water has all evaporated don't worry too much, but do keep an eye on it to avoid it boiliong dry. Sprinkle in the dried chilli, pour in the stock and coconut milk and bring back to a simmer. Add in the spinach and cook for 5 mins or so till the spinach is wilted, then blitz.

Tomatoes on toast

Did I mention that we are going away for a week? 

I'd like to say I'm being ever so casual about it, that it's no biggie, but who am I kidding? 

We are going to ITALY. To Rome, then to Naples.

I am very, VERY excited. 

Of course, in the run up to any holiday there is the finishing up of work. 

There is the 'weather checking and clothes washing' to be taken care of (you might not like me to mention that it's currently getting up to 28C in Rome - now where did I put my sandals?)



There is the consideration and purchasing of useful literature (I am very pleased with my 'overlay' book of ancient Roman sites (which has photos of the current ruins, with artists impressions of how they used to look which you can overlay onto the photos), purchased on Amazon for a mere 1p as opposed to the 10 Euros I am informed it will cost us in Rome)

There is the finding of the passports and the checking of the tickets. 

There is the daydreaming of how perfect it will all be as long as we don't try to do too much and wear the kids out on day 1 (actually unlikely as we are staying with friends just outside Rome first and we have been promised a relaxing day on Sunday revolving around lunch somewhere very lovely.)

And then there is 'Operation Fridge Run Down'. Easier said than done when the courgettes are still coming, as are the tomatoes.

I managed to get a whole yellow ball courgette into a quiche the other day - grated and squeezed out before I cooked it up with 3 thinly sliced onions. It made a delicious supper, and the courgette went completely undetected by those who did not know it was in there.

I could have cried when the next day, the Husband brought 2 more green courgettes in from the garden...

Tomatoes, on the other hand, are something I never tire of. The kids eat them raw and cooked, and it's very easy to turn them into soup, passata, anything really. Proper tomatoes, grown with some love, just smell delicious - of sunshine, of warmth, of halcyon days. If I had nothing else to do, I'd quite happily sit in a greenhouse of tomatoes and smell the smell all day. A bit like Ferdinand the bull smelling the flowers all day - but he was in Spain, and not many people know that story these days...





If you've never smelt a freshly picked gorgeously ripe tomato, you might think this all sounds a bit wierd, but I'm betting I'm not the only one who feels like this...

Tomatoes, of course, remind me of Italian food - the classic insalata tricolore with mozarella and basil, all that pasta sauce flavoured with basil, with chilli, with all sorts of things, brushcetta... I'm anticipating more than the odd stop during our sightseeing to partake of all things gorgeous, Italian and tomatoey - plus the odd glass of chilled white wine, of course.

For now, though, something much more English. I could have gone the bruschetta route for lunches the last few days, but these are English tomatoes, and oddly, bruschetta never occurred to me until just now when I sat down and started writing this. So I've been eating tomatoes on toast - inspired by a friend who's on the 5:2 diet and who advises me that if you use Nimble or Weightwatchers bread, 2 pieces come in at around 132 calories - including a dollop of Lidl's lowest fat mayo. Now I am no longer following the 5:2 diet. I'll tell you about it sometime, so my tomatoes were sliced and arranged on slices of homemade bread, drizzled with some (Italian) olive oil, sprinkled with some sea salt and pepper and served with some delicious Hampshire watercress. I decided to pass on the mayo...

Tomatoes on Toast (serves 1)

2 reasonably thick slices of good bread
tomatoes (the exact number will depend on the size of your tomatoes, how thickly you slice them, also the size of your slices of bread - may be 3-4 small to medium sized tomatoes as a guide)
Olive oil, seasalt and fresh ground pepper
Watercress to serve

Toast the bread lightly on one side under the grill. Flip the bread over and cover the uncooked side as much as possible with slices of tomato, drizzle with a little olive oil, sprinkle on some salt and pepper, then pop back under the grill for a few minutes till the tomatoes are starting to soften. Alternatively, you could sprinkle a little sugar on the tomatoes for a more caramelised effect.

Serve on a plate with some watercress.

Ciao!

5:2 Friday #4

My last weekend was full of wine, cake and delicious things culminating in more cake and wine on Monday - my birthday. I nearly decided to just chuck in the diet towel - for the week at least, but fortunately, I got a grip of myself and resolved to make up for all the indulgence. It's one thing fasting on 2 days and eating 'sensibly' on 5, quite another to engage in the gratuitous scoffing that went on...



So yes, where was I? Skinny food. Definitely not cake.

Fast Day 1

Breakfast: 1 Sainsburys whole wheat biscuit (a Weetabix, if you prefer) with 100 ml milk and 50g grated apple (you don't really need to see a picture of that, do you?) 140 cals

Lunch: Roasted butternut squash and blue cheese salad - much more exciting:

Served with some green salad including the fruits of our watercress growing experiment.
Approx 160 calories

Home grown watercress!!

Dinner: A mushroom omelette made with a small finely chopped onion, 100g sliced mushrooms and 2 large eggs. I ate it with a pile of rocket - I love veg box delivery days - and soem more watercress. Approx 200 calories.

Total for the day - about 500 calories

Fast Day 2

For reasons that I may or may not get round to telling you about (it's nothing mysterious) my second fast day went from 2 p.m. Thursday to 2 p.m. Friday (basically so I could eat cake on a course on Thursday, and have wine on Friday night).

Dinner (on Thursday evening) Cod grilled with a tomato and olive sauce which is something I tweaked from a Good Food favourite, plus a big green salad. Approximately 200 calories

Breakfast: A weetabix and 100ml semi-skimmed milk 116 calories

Post dog walk: black coffee and a banana. 95 calories. 

Lunch: 2 slices of prosciutto and a bowl of rocket. 86 calories

Total for the Day: 497 calories


If you're interested in some of the other meals I've eaten on my fast days, you can see previous posts here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3.

5:2 Friday#3

So this is a STOP PRESS moment. After I wrote last week's post and claimed I was stuck at a weight loss hump, I got on the scales and realised that I had somehow managed to lose about 6 pounds somewhere - and had pretty much dropped a stone since I started trying to sort my weight out. So technically, I'm was where I wanted to get to, give or take.The scales confirmed this a couple of days later, but then bounced up (not massively so, but enough) again, which does leave me wondering just how sustainable this is - I mean it's getting weight off, short term, but I'm not sure I'm really tackling the day to day habits that lead to me putting it all on in the first place. I need to think this out a little more, so for now I'll keep on going.

Here's what I ate on my fast days this week.

Day 1 - Monday

Breakfast: A pink grapefruit and a kiwi.

Trying to make it look artful doesn't make it any more filling

This was a rash idea - by the time I'd dropped the kids at school and walked the dog, I was completely ravenous and had to have a coffee with milk, and a banana for fear of going into some kind of hunger melt down. I had work to do, after all. It could have been worse - there was chocolate cake knocking around - but this demonstrated that I really do need something more then just fruit inside me first thing. I'd kind of hoped to get away with a smaller breakfast and make up for it with some Ryvita at lunch time as well as some Greek yoghurt in my soup (living on the edge), but it was not to be. Ho hum. The grapefruit & kiwi was a mere 81 cals, but the coffee and banana bumped my morning intake up to 183 cals in total.

Lunch: my surprisingly delicious swede soup. 71 calories. I would have had some Greek yoghurt in it (0% fat of course) and possibly thrown on some toasted cumin seeds, but I'd over caloried topping up my breakfast. May be next time.

Tea: I'd intended to make a rather sophisticated shredded red cabbage and orange salad, but when I cut in to the cabbage it was clear that it had been in the veg basket too long... I was trying to work out what to have bearing in mind the contents of the cupboard and fridge, and was reaching for the noodles, when I realised that I could continue the 'vegetables as carbohydrate' theme and make leek and carrot 'noodles' by thinly slicing them lengthways and quickly cooking them in boiling water. I used 2 leeks and a carrot, and then dry fried about 8 mushrooms (sliced) with a squeeze of lemon juice, salt and pepper, and topped my 'noodles' with this and a drained 105g can of salmon. I LOVE tinned salmon. More salt, pepper and lemon juice (I'd have used some soy sauce if I'd had any) and it was a pretty tasty meal - and all for just over 200 calories. I had a passion fruit too, bringing the total to 218 calories.

Total: 472 calories

Day 2

Breakfast: Bearing in mind the disaster on Monday, I had a shredded wheat with 100ml milk - 121 calories.

I suppose I also need to count the fizzy Vitamin C tablet I had in the vain hope of stopping a cold in its tracks, and the milk I had in my post-dogwalk coffee - about 150 calories all in, then.

Lunch: Mmm this is starting to look a little uninspired, isn't it 

3 slices of Ryvita, 2 with salt beef, one with a scrape of marmite, and a sliced tomato, followed by a passion fruit - coming in at 154 calories. May be the novelty is starting to wear off...

Tea: Everyone else was having egg, chips and salad, because the chickens are now in overdrive, so it was easy to fit in when the other 3 wanted their eggs cooked differently. The Husband had poached, Blue wanted soft boiled and Pink an omelette. I am nothing if not accomodating. Having cooked to order, I made myself a spinach omelette and had a big plate of salad which included 40g of broad beans. The eggs and broad beans amounted to 178 calories. I had a handful of spinach and the salad won't have amounted to much calorie wise so I'm saying that it most likely came in at around about or less than what I had left for the day - no more than 196 calories

Other than the white coffee I had in the morning, I drank mainly hot water with slices of lemon and black lapsang souchong (I know, so refined) tea.

'Souper' swede

Swede gets a bit of a bad deal really, I think.

Relegated to being confused with turnips, lumped into that class of 'root veg' that no none really knows what to do with, not the most attractive vegetable on the block.

I'm as guilty as anyone else of this, but this last winter, it's been apparent that the kids really like it - when they have turned their noses up at other 'sweet' veg like sweet potato and butternut squash, they somehow seem to really like the taste of swede, which I think is also quite sweet. They have enjoyed it mashed with haggis and in pasties.

I got a swede in my veg box last week, and was thinking of other possibilities to make a star of it. Nothing inspirational came to mind, but based on on a recipe I saw in Rose Elliot's rather fabulous 30 Minute Vegetarian book, I made this soup.

 

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much (why do you think I put it in a pretty mug for the photo?) but adding cinammon and cumin really makes this into quite delicious soup. Even I was surprised by how tasty it was - almost like chestnut in its velvetiness, and very comforting. The Husband was very rude on Twitter about how excited I got with the results, and had the temerity to talk about turnip soup as if I was recreating something from the gulag, but believe me, not him (and anyway, he's away for a week so I can eat it to my heart's content).

And yes, it's 5:2 friendly. 425ml of this rocks up at a mere 71 calories.

Cinammon Swede Soup

500g swede (peeled weight)
1 large onion, peeled and chopped
2 celery sticks, chopped
5ml olive oil
2 kallo organic veg stock cubes made up with 1.5 litres boiling water
a sprinkling each of ground cinammon and cumin

Gently heat the oil in a large pan, then add the swede, onion and celery and sweat gently for 5-10 minutes, stirring every now and then. Sprinkle in the cinammon and cumin, stir and cook for a couple of minutes then add in the stock, some salt and pepper, bring tot he boil and simmer for 15-20 minutes till the swede is cooked.

Blitz.

You could serve with some Greek yoghurt in it, or some toasted cumin seeds - or even both. Rose Elliot fries onions and cumin seed to garnish hers with, and I bet that would be delicious too.

5:2 Friday #2

Another 2 fasting days under my belt, this week although I'm thinking of trying 3 for the next couple of weeks just to get me over a hump. The same hump I hit the last time I had weight to lose. Whether I do or don't try and get over this hump, though, I'm definitely feeling much better about myself and my clothes fit again.

Fast Day 1

Breakfast: 162g stewed apple (stewed with a sprinkle of cinammon and an empty vanilla pod to mellow the sharpness of the apple), 100g 0% fat Greek yoghurt and 10g pumpkin seeds - 195 calories

Lunch: 400ml of the lovely spinach and coconut soup that I made with the last of the spinach from the garden, with some chopped coriander and a squeeze of lime juice added. 119 cals

Dinner: A chunky red and yellow pepper pasta sauce served on a mound of spaghetti err cabbage. Thinly sliced and steamed, I was never going to be fooled into thinking it was actually pasta, but this meal was brilliant - the sauce was so low in calories that I could have quite a lot, and even some grated parmesan on top. Happy days.

The sauce was made by de-seeding 2 peppers (one red, one yellow), peeling two shallots and 2 cloves of garlic and slicing them all up - shallots and onions thinner than the peppers - covering with water in a pan and simmering till soft and most of the water had gone - took about 15 mins. Added a tin of chopped tomatoes, a little water (to swill out the tin mainly) salt and pepper, bubbled up a little more and then served.  1 serving of this sauce is about 58 calories. Yes really. Unless my maths is completely rubbish.

The cabbage thing is a tip I took from Steph at I'm Counting UFOs, whose 5:2 Friday I'm linking up to with this post. 150g steamed cabbage contains a mere 34 calories. That's quite a lot of cabbage for not many calories - and as long as you don't over cook it, it's quite nice.

It even looks a little like pasta - if you don't look too closely

I had 186 calories available for dinner after the other 2 meals, and the cabbage and sauce only amounted to 92 calories, so I pushed the boat out and added some capers (a dessert spoonful had about 4 calories in it) and 10g of grated parmesan (40 calories). Then I went wild and ate a passion fruit, pushing my daily total to 507 calories.

Fast Day 2:

Breakfast: As before, although I reduced the yoghurt by half to give me more flexibility later in the day: 163 calories

Lunch: Tomato and lentil soup. My starting point for this is this recipe in the London Unattached blog which is a good resource of 5:2 recipes. My version had smoked paprika rather than chilli in it as I wanted the kids to eat the soup too. Time was tight at lunchtime, so I ended up frying 2 chopped shallots and a clove of garlic in a teaspoon of rapeseed oil rather than simmering them in a covering of water. I used 2 carrots, peeled and chopped and a good sprinkle of smoked paprika. I used a Kallo organic chicken stock cube diluted in 1 litre of water, and added 70g lentils before simmering for 20 minutes then blitzing. I also served it with a 20g blob of 0% fat yoghurt but it still came in at 133 calories for a substantial 325 ml portion.

I made flatbreads for the kids to have with it, and they really enjoyed it. Worth putting the extra lentils in I think, as it kept me going for longer. That said, although it felt like a decent lunch, I was ravenous around 4.30, so I had 10g of miso paste in a mug of hot water which was around 12 calories, and the rest of the day I drank my new favourite tea - Clipper white tea with vanilla. It's pretty good if you like that sort of thing.

Dinner: A poached egg served on 150g steamed purple sprouting broccoli and 100g steamed spinach, with salt and pepper: 126 calories

I make that 434 calories for the day. Rock & roll.

5:2 Friday

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I need to lose some weight and to do this I have embraced the 5:2 approach. I won't bore you with the details of this diet - you're either interested and therefore know all about it already, or you're not and will shortly be off looking for some of my more calorific posts (there are plenty here). What I will say is that it's working, and I have managed to shift at least half a stone since the middle of February. And you know, the fasting days haven't been so bad. Yes, I am hungry, but I've found that drinking a lot of water or green tea can help. And it's made me think a lot more about what I'm eating on non-fasting days. It's not that I'm not eating cake any more (don't be utterly ridiculous - I would rather die) - but I'm better about portion control, and not finishing up what the kids leave on the name of 'not wasting food' (!). That sort of thing.

 

Up until now, I haven't really blogged about the food I have been eating on my fast days (the days when I am only supposed to eat 500 calories), other than to make throwaway comments about mushroom omlettes. I wasn't reallyintending to either, but then I came across a post on another blog that I follow sporadically, I'm Counting UFOs, where she has started to do a regular 5:2 Friday post, documenting what she ate for her fast days, and I think this is quite a good idea, as it will give me (a) something to aim for (no fast days, no post) and (b) some inspiration. Up until now, I have pretty much been eating the same meals, adapted from a newspaper magazine supplement that I nicked from my mum when we were staying at half term, and the only adventurous meal I have worked out for myself is a small baked potato, with the insides mashed with lemon juice, salt and pepper, and a massive plate of salad.

The hardest thing has been fitting it in with the rest of the family so I'm not cooking different things all the time. While the kids have been at school ithasn't been so hard - we don't eat the same for breakfast anyway, and I can do what I like for lunch. The evening meal has been harder, partly because by 4 o'clock, when I'm starting to cook for the kids, I am ALWAYS hungry, and temptation is strong. I've found that if I can prepare the meal for everyone else early in the day, when my resolve is strong - something like pasta bake - I can avoid the 'little tastes' here and there that would inevitably slip in if I were making it later in the day. I can also just cook less and do extra veg for me - you can eat almost limitless steamed veg, I think - well, may be not quite but you'd get full before you hit your allotted calorie limit. This week was extra hard. After eating a disgusting amount of chocolate on Easter Sunday, I decided I'd have a fast day on Bank Holiday Monday - with the scent of chocolate still lingering in the air, cake in the tin, and everyone at home. Breakfast and lunch weren't too bad, but dinner was tricky - roast chicken for everyone else, and for me, well - see for yourself. Needless to say, I didn't make pudding. It was also hard because Thursday, my second fast day was a cold day even by recent standards. It snowed most of the day, it was bitterly cold, and all I wanted to do was sit in a corner with the jar of peanut butter and a spoon. But I managed to stay strong.

Monday 1st April (and yes, it did feel a little like a joke)

Breakfast: grated apple, 100g 0% fat Total Greek yoghurt, 10g chopped walnuts - 168 calories; Green tea with lemon
 

Lunch: smoked mackerel salad - just less than 50g smoked mackerel broken into pieces, watercrss, salad and spinach salad, 30g cucumber, diced, 1 spring onion, chopped and 2 small pickled shallots, lemon juice squeezed over, salt & pepper - approx 175 calories (I couldn't be bothered to weigh the pickled shallots or the spring onion, but really, I think the amount I had equated to minimal calories).

 
Tea: Roast chicken, broad bean & pea salad with mushrooms & parsley - 52g roast chicken breast (don't laugh!), 50g frozen broad beans, 40g frozen peas, 56g (4) mushrooms and a load of chopped parsley. I cooked the beans and peas as usual, the mushrooms were dry fried ( I have a pan which will tolerate this) and I mixed the whole lot together and squeezed over some lemon juice, and then some salt and pepper. Not a roast dinner, certainly, but not bad. What I counted was  grand total of 160 calories - but iIdidn't include the handful of parsley because by then I was too darn hungry to weigh it...

Thursday 4th April

Breakfast: 1 medium banana, sliced into 170g 0% fat Greek yoghurt, with 1 tablespoon (10 g) chopped walnuts sprinkled on top and a teaspoon of honey drizzled over it - 150 cals

Green tea

Lunch: Skinny Thai vegetable soup. I made a big vat of this the other week and froze portions of it. It's basically veg stock which you flavour with lemon grass, garlic, ginger and lime juice, and then cook sliced mushrooms, frozen peas and broad beans, and sliced chilli in the stock. The flavours are lovely and zingy which makes up for the fact that it's basically flavoured water with some beans in it... I did take a photo of it, but it really didn't look that appetising - probably because having been inthe freezer, some of the fresh colour had disappeared. if i make it again I'll take a nice pretty photo, I promise. It was 150 cals anyway.

Tea: Mushroom omelette - 64g sliced field mushroom dry fried, then omelette'd with 2 large eggs, beaten and poured over the mushrooms, sprinkled with chopped parsely, some salt & pepper. Eaten with loads of watercress, and coming in at about 200 cals.

Yes, I know. It's not pretty, but I was hoping for peanut butter

So there you have it - my fast days this week. Not sure it's going to be particularly inspiring for anyone else, but especially on Thursday, in the freezing cold, the thought that I was going to have to post something today about it definitely kept my resolve firm.
 And now, I can concentrate on the weekend. Hooray!

So how many calories are there in a mushroom?

There's been a lot of cake recently. Red Nose Day brought it all on with it a cake decorating competition at school:

He did it all himself - results out on Monday!

Cakes for the cake sale in return for wearing mufti (so not only do you buy the ingredients and make cakes, you then give your darling children money to buy more cakes. Not that I mind really, but let's just think about the logic of that for a moment...)

Cherry & coconut? or chocolate & blackcurrant?

Cakes for the Rainbows cake sale and family quiz.

And no, I didn't bake them all...

This is all very well, except that I am on a diet. Yup. The time has come, as it inevitably would, to talk about skinny food.

I'm trying really hard to think of skinny food as exciting. You see, I am not a skinny person - never have been, never will be. Generally, though, I am happy (ish) with my size (12-14) and shape (pear). Well, I always was until about 5 years ago when I woke up one morning and realised that I was size 18 pushing a 20 and needed to do something fast. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with being that size if that's the size you are, but for me and my build, it wasn't right.

Of course, I can absolutely attribute the weight gain then to a whole host of factors: 2 pregnancies, spending huge amounts of time in hospital with my poorly Blue and comfort eating like crazy. I sometimes wish I was one of those people who starve when stressed, but no. I did try it, not eating under pressure, but headed back to the Norwegian cinammon bun page in How to be a Domestic Goddess (it's page 322 in my copy - make a note of that) before you could say 'celery stick'. Not only that, but when Blue started to lose weight about 9 months into chemotherapy, looked like some malnourished shadow of the boy he was, and I had to start talking feeding tubes with the doctors treating him, I threw myself wholeheartedly into cooking with cream. And cheese. All full fat. And then, when he didn't fancy it, I threw myself wholeheartedly into eating it. As Billy Connolly once said (and I paraphrase) "I wasn't retaining water, I was retaining chips!" (to be spat out in a strong Glaswegian accent). Not just chips but cheese, and brownies, custard, mash, fishpie all made with double cream in an attempt to get Blue to eat and put on weight. Of course, we managed to avoid feeding tubes, and I will always be thankful for that, as I am for his continued good health, but it didn't do me much good.

And I know it sounds bizarre, but I really had no insight into the fact that I was getting bigger. I just carried on wearing my maternity clothes after Pink was born and never really got out of them. After all, I was either at home or at hospital - I had a small child with a life threatening illness and a new baby. Did it really matter? And then one day, I saw a picture of myself helping Pink on a slide and I had a crashing reality check. I was fat.

I know 'fat' is a sensitive issue, and when I write this, please know that I make no judgements about anyone else here. I am simply saying that for me, I was too big, and I needed to do something about it. I lost 3 stone following a Slimming World type regime (I borrowed a couple of books from a friend). 3 stone. It was a lot that I'd put on.

To be honest (and this may sound a little bonkers)I probably lost a little too much, and after a brief spell as a size 10, I settled back comfortably into a 12. But the last year or so, it's been creeping ever so slowly back up. Not 3 stone up, but definitely a dress size. Fortunately, the realisation came sooner rather than later, so skinny food it is.

It's not just about what I'm eating, though, it's also about resetting my attitude to food, which is what I had to do the last time. I like my food a lot (you migh thave noticed). I am also incapable of leaving food on my plate. I was brought up to eat every last morsel - and I find it impossible to break this. So portion control is important, and self restraint not to take seconds.

So in the midst of all this cake, I am rocking a combination of what I remember about Slimming World (red days and green days, quite good fun. Really. It is) and also, just to bring in a little bit of a frisson, some 5:2 fasting days. I quite like the challenge of this, although I have never before paid any heed whatsoever to the calorie content of food - I tend to look more for fat & sugar content.

I'm probably the last person in the world to try this. I became aware of the 5:2 diet last year - there are lots of people doing it. the premise is that you eat normally for 5 days a week, and then fast - having only 500 calories (600 for men) on the other 2 days. There appears to be lots of good science behind it, and even Hugh F-W is a fan.

My breakfasts have been looking a lot like this:

Banana, yoghurt, walnuts & honey?

and this

or does madam prefer stewed apple, yoghurt and dates?

and there's been some rather interesting soups going on for lunches.

I must confess to only having done one proper fast day so far - I've been working my way up to it, but it was OK. Banana, 0% fat Greek yoghurt, some chopped walnuts and a teaspoon (sob) of honey, a Thai type soup with peas, broad beans and chilli for lunch, and a mushroom souffle omelette for supper.

get me with my mushroom souffle omelettes

I was madly busy that day anyway.

But consider the irony of restraining myself as I baked a cake for Blue to decorate (the amount of notice we had for the competition meant that I had to bake the cake or we wouldn't have had time, but he decorated it all himself.) No bowl licking for me. In fact, I was so restrained that I did what I mocked Jane Asher for doing once - as soon as I had finished scraping the mixture out, I squirted washing up liquid into the bowl and filled it with water.

All that lovely mixture - unlicked :-(

The following day was cherry & coconut cupcakes and some chocolate/blackcurrant cupcakes. I managed to resist the cherry & coconut, but cracked totally at the chocolate cake mix. Still - it wasn't a fast day...

And is it working? Well, yes it is. I am losing weight and despite the chocolate cupcake bowl licking frenzy on Thursday (and an accident with a pack of oatcakes and the peanut butter and an unfortunate incident with a bar of Green & Blacks Maya Gold - but over the last couple of weeks - so not so bad), I am doing pretty well. I may even let you have some skinny recipes soon. I haven't had much variety yet so as/if (it's early days!) I get more into this, I'll be on the look out for lots of interesting 5:2 recipes - because I think trying to work out how many calories there are in a mushroom for myself may just prove too much like hard work.