Dear Friday

Photo from splitshire.com – and yes, we are still having lemon water in the morning

Dear, dear Friday, so thankful that you are here! What a week! Cutting out dairy from our diet really hit us this week. We were (are) so tired – whole30-10th day hang-over-kind-of-thing. So far, the hazelnut-date-vanilla concoction wins in the category ‘best milk replacement’. The need to have milk seems to have diminished, though the need to have something is still there. We definitely feel less full – less bloated as well (hmm, might be a reason for feeling less full….), and apparently facial skin cleared up, but not so much the skin on my hands which is really playing up. Did anyone else experience this? Lots of headaches, but that could be because I pushed myself way over the edge (yep, still doing that) and with G doing 2 jobs until next week, it’s not been a walk in the park for her either. This would also be the reason why there was no Dog Tuesday – although I had planned it to be every 2 weeks (or every fortnight as they say here – took me the longest time to figure out what that meant!). We did a ‘Are you ready for a dog checklist’ – which was great fun designing and you will be able to download next Tuesday. Lists with ‘what do I need for a new dog’ and a budget planner are in the works –  exciting things ahead 🙂

But enough about us, how was your week? Are you looking forward to your Friday evening? Do you have a Friday ritual?

Do you have a food/drink ritual? This winter we have tried warm orange juice with ginger and it worked really well. Here are a couple of ideas.

My friend A has donor kidneys – he suffered from graduate kidney failure, which eventually made it necessary for his survival to be put on the list for new kidneys. It also forced him to change career paths from an active musician to becoming a great recording engineer. We talked about how it feels to live with other people’s organs -even though I found the subject difficult to approach. So, I know about a lot of the pitfalls, and this story is very unusual, but watching it will make you smile.

I got really excited when I read this article about twice baked potatoes (and the possibility to freeze them!!) Even though I can’t have them myself, they’ll make a nice meal for our guests. Y, this one is especially for you!

We knew it all along: women do more housework than men – since the Neanderthal!

And I leave you with the timeless Kathleen Battle and ‘Where’re you walk’ – Micro loves it, he ‘sings’ with it. It also brings some peace into our flat, especially when they are using the power-drill next door, like they are now…. Have a happy weekend!

Dear Friday

First time: home made almond milk

How was your week? Is it just me or do the weeks feel twice as long lately. G and I have started on the whole30 for lent (which is not this year’s motto of the Protestant Church in Germany, which I used to take as an example; they go with ‘you are beautiful’ instead..hmm, at a stretch this might still work.). The main change for us was leaving  out all dairy . One could say we went a bit overboard with dairy once we decided we would be without it for lent… we slowly came off it, not wanting to throw anything away. Thus, Monday (and not Ash Wednesday) was actually our first day without. Curiously enough, cutting out grains from my diet two years ago didn’t nearly give me the cravings I now have for milk, especially in the morning with my coffee. It only started to fade a bit yesterday – let’s see what happens in week 2, then.

G accepted a new job (yes, I know, that was fast – long story though) and found this to solve her shoe problems. Have you tried it?

Slightly late for us, but here is the how to catch a mouse video in case you have this problem. Don’t forget to stay away from sticky traps whatever you do – the mouse is definitely not going to quietly wait on it until you release her/him!

This is going to make you breathe.

Have you cleaned your Mac/PC lately? If not, have a look at this for some tips – and if you have f.lux enabled, don’t disable it in your login items (like yours truly) and wonder why the display still has a yellow tint in the morning…

Are you a highly sensitive person? Then, you probably need to arrange your space differently – do the test.

Do you have anything nice planned for the weekend? We’re going to meet up with our friend J and her little daughter for brunch and we will spend some time on meal planning, because with that sort of choice for food, you need to be prepared. Whatever you do I hope you have a great weekend!!

Two minutes

enseimadas – on the list for the weekend maybe – but what do you do mid-week?

Wednesday evening, you come home from work, it’s cold outside, still 2 days to go until the weekend, it’s been a long day and you improvise your dinner, but there is this craving for something sweet… preferably something quick – because who has the time and energy left? And there came the solution: the-2-minute-french-toast-in-a-cup! It was already too late yesterday to give this a try, but we most definitely will try this one out. Our banana-bread-replacement will do nicely for this, too. Will you give it a try?

PFD again

It seems like it’s summer! We had two (that’s 2!) lunches in the park – on this note we might add that some people who’re trying to get a tan, give you (way) too much — ehm, of an inside view…. 🙂 obviously this is nothing to Stephi (who had the idea for Photo-Friday), who is currently enjoying the sun on an island – sigh..

Welche Überschrift trägt Deine Woche? What’s the heading for your week?

Holiday tickets are booked – time to dream now! Best of all: NO WORK  on holiday like last year! This time, it’ll be: reading, talking, walking, swimming, eating, some sightseeing (optional) and seeing family and friends. Some good old hanging out!

Wo isst Du im Augenblick am liebsten? What’s your favourite spot to eat at the moment?

Our kitchen restaurant – at our Norden table from the blue-yellow shop – due to trying out new diet things eating out is a bit problematic. This doesn’t matter as we love to cook and to try out new things.

In Deinem Bad? In your bathroom?

One of our few indulgences – the Glossybox, which came yesterday, with fake eyelashes – which will be worn next month, let me tell you… sounds like fun!

Dein Ohrwurm? Your Earworm?

The word ‘earworm’ doesn’t really exist in English, but German perseverance has started to introduce it into the English language… on this matter: you can read what the guys at Goldsmiths have found out about earworms.

Was machst Du Pfingsten? What are your plans for Pentecost?

Work…. actually not on Sunday, but on Monday. We don’t have a bank holiday this week, but we have two (2!!) the week after – thanks to the Diamond Jubilee – one has to have an advantage at some point from living in a monarchy. I’ll have a look what you guys have planned later, I need to unlock my Mom’s phone over the telephone… done! Happy mother with new phone. Happy weekend everyone.

Everybody can make perfect ones

Waffles that is. G’s pancakes are legendary – ask former house mates and house guests (this inspired a pancake competition), but we haven’t made waffles in a long time. Despite the fact that I know where the waffle iron is. Since we are not using it on a regular basis, it needs to be stored – in a safe place – always a tricky thing… Anyway, on the hunt for our food list for the week, we watched the little film on roostblog and it literally made us want to eat waffles (watch it and see what I mean). So (in the course of changing food habits) we tried her recipe. I don’t know where it went funny, maybe because we can’t have honey, but the waffles didn’t want to stick together (although they very happily stuck to the waffle iron) and fell into crumbles… but they tasted great! A wonderful Sunday morning breakfast. Sigh.

After the battle

Next weekend we might try this again…. happy Monday everyone!

Food… weeks 4-7

Weeks 4, 5, 6, 7 in pictures

Finally a weekend with some breathing space. The sun is shining and it feels more like early August than October with 27 degrees celsius.

I’m listening to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald duets and am happy to be alive – a lazy Sunday afternoon (the first really lazy Sunday since March it seems….)

On the weight loss front it’s not going so well: despite meticulously calculating WW points and stepping up the exercise (I’ve been biking to work as well as keeping up the 30 mins of morning exercise… still don’t like getting up at 6am), weight’s going up not down. Grrmpff!

Never mind – here are the long overdue food pictures from the last few weeks. I’ve really enjoyed all the beautiful colours, flavours, aromas, textures, and generally the cooking challenge. A few of them are repeat favourites, but there is a number of new mezze (tried out for M’s birthday) that I simply love. Favourites: Seared peach and speck salad and focaccia, and the pecan and cherry granary bread (Ottolenghi cookbook). Yum! Best quick fix for lunch: take corn on the cob (leaves and all still attached), put in the oven for 15-20 mins, peal out of its leaves and cut off the cob, add some green salad leaves, lemon or grapefruit juice, salt, pepper, onion, tomatoes (or whatever else you fancy adding) – et voilà 🙂 The carrot, apple and pecan cake doubles up as a breakfast muffin, and the leek & yoghurt and verduras de murcia mezze (on the mezze plate) were great as well.
1. Seared-peach-and-speck-salad, 2. Sweet-potatoe-gratin, 3. Focaccia, 4. Pecan-and-cherry-bread-in-the-making, 5. Pecan-and-sour-cherries-bread, 6. Sourdough-Bread, 7. Apples for apple sauce, 8. Seared-tuna-with-pistachio-crust, 9. Tuna, 10. Corn-salad, 11. Pumpkin-salad-in-the-making, 12. Warm-pumpkin-and-chickpea-salad, 13. Marinated-aubergines, 14. Carrot,-apple-&-pecan-cake, 15. Poached-chicken-in-the-making, 16. Poached-chicken-with-spelt-and-veg, 17. Bean-and-hazelnuta-salad, 18. Mezze, 19. Mexican wrap, 20. Carrots-and-hummus, 21. Asian-veg-stir-fry-with-chicken, 22. Pasta-with-beans, tomatoes and goats’ cheese, 23. Roasted Sweet potatoes, 24. Home-made-granola

Diet… week 3

Week 3

Really quickly before I get back to proof reading: 2 pounds lost this week, worked out by carrying 20 litres of water back from the store (as well as the rest of the shopping), since no streetcar was available when I needed it for the weekly shopping (grrmpff). Oh well, who else can say they used their weekly shopping to work up a sweat and earn WeightWatchers activity points? I think I carried about 60 pounds altogether… Anyway, what you see above is:

1. Manti (self-made pasta, filled with a lamb-onion-parsley filling, cooked in broth and covered with yoghurt sauce: to be found in the Moro cookbook. Yum!!)

2. Self-baked foccacia with parsley and garlic topping (Ottolenghi, the cookbook)

3. Spiced beef and hummus salad (Moro)

4. The cooking aftermath

5. Mortar and pestle, ready to grind the spices for this week’s edition of self-made granola

6. Split red lentil and cabbage soup

7. Self-baked foccacia with red onion and goat’s cheese topping (Ottolenghi, the cookbook)

8. Roasted potatoes with sage, tomatoes and olives

9. Cooked apples, ready to be made into apple sauce to keep M. eating something while I am at work

Diet… week 2

The cooking spree continues….

More gorgeous food… this week’s favourite was definitely – and quite unexpectedly – leek and yoghurt soup with mint from the Moro cookbook. I would suggest going a bit easier on the butter than suggested, and maybe find a slightly less fat yoghurt than the greek yoghurt listed, but it’s really a great easy recipe, and since leeks are in season just now, this is the perfect comfort food. I didn’t think my diet would survive the churros and hot (sugar free) chocolate. However, both M and I could only eat 2.5 churros each for breakfast, and then didn’t touch any food until after 2pm. Quite a treat!! We then proceeded to walk off the calories by hunting for balcony brackets for one of our planters. Even lost some weight again this week… lets see if this continues.

By the way, I find it quite funny that aside from our (almost) daily early morning yoga, all the activities I seem to enter into my WeightWatchers activity points tracker are something like: “energetic gardening” or “stringent house work”… (I did work up a sweat, though… really!) Any suggestions for future work-outs? I downloaded a free pedometer app onto my iPhone, and found out that I walk at an average speed of 5.4km/h on my way to work – things you always wanted to know and never dared to ask.

One such work-out was last week’s re-potting event (25 litres of new compost are now sitting in the pots and planters on our balcony). The plants on our tiny balcony look ever so much happier, and the rosmary and thyme you can see on this week’s food mosaic are from our own plants (beam).

Our little balcony garden

It was a lovely week in many ways, although M is engaged in an ongoing daily duel with her MSc dissertation (and winning, I might add!!). Our (English) friend and former house mate H visited from Germany for a couple of days, and it was just like old times. Long conversations in the evening, and fighting ever so hard to get out of bed in the morning.

By the way, if you would like to have a look at the original food pictures on flickr, you can follow the links below:

1. Marinated-Aubergines, 2. Carrots-and-hummus, 3. Churros-and-hot-chocolate,4. Warm-pumpkin-and-chickpea-salad-with-tahini2, 5. Tomato-sauce, 6. Leek-and-yoghurt-soup, 7. Preserved-lemons, 8. Chopping-carrots-2, 9. Green-bean-pilaf,10. chickpeas-and-spinach-with-honeyed-sweet-potatoes, 11. Herbs-from-the-balcony,12. Chicken-fattee-with-rice,-crispbread-and-yoghurt


Gourmet diet.. week 1

1 week and lots of wonderful food later, and so far so good.  Although I did lose a little over 2 pounds (yey!), it really has mostly been an “eat-all-your-favourite-foods-and-discover-some-new-ones” extravaganza. I had so much fun making – and eating – all this beautiful food, and M has announced she will take care that I stay on this diet for the rest of our house-sharing lives (completely selfless, I’m sure…). She has also been such a good trooper and got up with me just after 6am every morning to do 20 minutes of yoga exercises, apart from one morning when we both felt rather dire. Thanks to Chaz for his great yogamazing podcasts! 🙂 The only thing I found really hard was to stay away from the goodies cupboard at work. Even when work is quite intense, and I am busy (and at the moment I am busy but it’s super-quiet due to so many people being away on summer holidays), I am a boredom and stress eater. In fact, my mind even wonders to food when I am most distinctly full. Eating fruit (surprisingly the Weight Watchers point system doesn’t allocate points to any fresh fruit, even bananas!) has helped me to get past this. And drinking many pots of Mint, Lemongrass or Jasmine green tea.

(Mostly) New foods this week, as in the pictures above:

1. Ratatouille’s Ratatouille (as envisioned by Smitten Kitchen) – ok, we’ve made this one a couple of times already. Still great!!

2. No-knead bread (a fresh batch)

3. Blanched almonds for Casa Moro pistachio and almond tart

4. Moroccan Eggs (Casa Moro)

5. A fresh batch of home-made granola: this time I included jumbo oats, macadamia and cashew nuts, almonds, dried apples, dried berry mix, allspice, cinnamon, aniseed, and a little fruit-juice sweetened jam.  I am completely addicted to making our own granola – the entire flat smells beautiful and welcoming. If you are making your own granola for the first time, try Chocolate & Zucchini’s Basic Granola Formula!

6. Green Tahini Sauce (Ottolenghi, the Cookbook)

7. Sopa de Guisantes (Moro, Pea Soup with Jamon and Mint)

8. Sunday splurge: Pistachio and Almond Tart (Casa Moro) – beautiful tart. Almost like orange-pistachio marzipan (sweetened with some of the grape juice sweetened jam. I would use either one of the St. Dalfour ones, or SuperJam), but would love to learn more about other brands that don’t use sugar, agave syrup, or artificial sweeteners, since neither M’s nor my system can cope with them.

9 & 10. Kosheri with Tomato Sauce (Ottolenghi, the Cookbook) – YUM!!! What can I say…

Bring it on, week 2!

A new project…. and lots of new recipes

Before and after.... via pinterest

So – I’ve reached the point of having to change something in order to go forward. I can’t really look at myself in the mirror without a degree of horror, don’t even want to start thinking about what to wear at my friend’s wedding in September, and generally think my fitness level sucks. Really time for some drastic measures.

It might seem like a bit of overkill, but then one should never do things with half measures. Low and behold, I am starting on a diet. In order to get myself into the mood, I borrowed some inspiration from Sheryl Yvette. And here are the things I had on my list to get started:

√     get some inspirational books on nutrition, attitude, etc, etc. (the first one I’m reading is Skinny Bitch by Rory
Freedman and Kim Barnouin”…. hilarious so far)

√     get some inspirational cook books (this girl isn’t doing a diet on tasteless, boring, food!!!) – luckily Amazon had
the three cook books on sale, that I have been eying for ages: Moro, Casa Moro, and Ottolenghi – the Cookbook. I
thought I might share some of the ideas here…

√    get a new pair of trainers, and get walking, stair climbing, biking, etc. (again, lucky me: a sale of Rockport shoes…)

√    sign up to WeightWatchers – yes, I finally did it. I am trying the online programme (although I have to say I find it
rather scary just how much food the programme seems to think I consume daily. There is no way I could eat as
much as they suggest. I have an inkling the programme calculated daily amounts from my current weight and
decided I am eating about twice as much as I really am. Hmm. Wait and see, I guess)

My new trainers

Today’s menu was:

Breakfast: 1/2 grapefruit (v. yummy red grapefruit), bread (self-made no-knead bread – sourdough version), 1 boiled egg, tea

Lunch: well… sort of worked through lunch and had some bread and hummus around 5pm… must work on this

Dinner: Courgette-wrapped lamb kebabs (Ottolenghi – The Cookbook) and Ratatouille’s Ratatouille – great recipe by Smitten Kitchen (and genius idea to serve it with goats cheese – yum!!)

…. and a piece of Valor sugar-free chocolate (yey!). Something we brought back from Spain. Long may it last!!!

So far, so good. If I get to cook and eat gorgeous food like this, I might just stick with it….