Maintenance Week Twenty

I feasted this week!  On Thursday evening my lovely friend Emma came found for tea - and insisted on bringing a pressie, wine and the most divine pudding I've ever tasted - and we had North African Butternut Squash and Chickpea Stew from the River Cottage Veg Every Day cookbook, plus Spiced Chickpea Pita Breads cous cous and salad.  And of course the aforementioned wine and pudding - pudding was just out of this world - almond pastry (made by substituting some of the flour for ground almonds) topped with delicious custardy almondy squidginess, apricots soaked in cognac, raspberries and flaked almonds.  Oh.  My.  God.  I ate four slices.

One Sunday - havng barely recovered from the delights of Thursday- I had a fantastic meal with Dad in Rustique in York.  A proper old-school French restaurant (frogs legs and snails were both on the specials board!), I heartily recommend this restaurant if you're ever in York and you want a really good, unpretentious French meal.  I had Chicken Liver Pate with onion marmalade...

...Steak Frites (what else!) with French beans...

...and lemon cheesecake, which came with ice-cream!

And much wine, of course.  A rather lovely Chardonnay for aperitif, which went down gloriously, and the house red , which was lovey and full-bodied, with the meal.  It's so rare these days to get red wine served at the correct temperature that I don't often drink it in pubs - you've got a better chance of getting it warm enough in restaurants, but don't always - this was perfect.

On the exercise front I have been rather busy, as well as cycling to work every day and doing circuits I did a run on Monday lunchtime - it was lovely getting out at lunchtime actually, I felt great all afternoon - and spent a couple of hours on Monday evening emptying the contents of a friend's shed into a skip and then helping Alastair to demolish said skip.  Unsurprisingly I've been really tired this weekend!  What was surprising was that when I weighed in on Wednesday evening I was 8st 9lbs (55.1kgs), BMI 21, body fat percentage 28.7%.  I'd made a real effort to eat all of my weekly and activity points too.  I can only presume that it's because I'm doing so much exercise at the moment, and that I'll probably put a few pounds back on in the Autumn and Winter when I'm not doing as much.  I'm just going to enjoy eating enough to stay at the same weight while it lasts!

Maintenance Weeks Eighteen and Nineteen

Two pleasant but largely unremarkable weeks to report...I wasn't trying to be particularly abstemious last week, but didn't eat all of my weekly points or activity points and weighed in at 8st 10lbs last Wednesday evening(BMI 21.2, body fat 29.5%).  I was on a mission to build myself up this week (made a good start on Thursday lunchtime by having the chocolate and toffee tart for pudding when I met a friend in La Tasca!) but still weighed in at 8st 10lbs this evening (BMI 21.1, body fat 26.4%).  I am actually trying to put weight on in the form of muscle but on the grounds that I only strengh train once a week it's not really happening...I am starting to look more muscly to myself though which is good (not too muscly though, I don't want to look like a body-builder!). 

I've had a couple of good runs in the past couple of weeks - I did a gloriously sunny 5-miler after work last Tuesday, followed by a gorgeous sit in the evening sun on the village green - it was bliss.

In other news we looked after a neighbour's hens and had the most amazing fresh eggs all week.  I made a truly magnificent frittata.  Loosely adapted from a BBC Good Food recipe, it had six fresh eggs, new potatoes, smoked bacon lardons, cherry tomatoes, peas, parsley and chives from the garden, Cheddar...and it was fried in 20g of salted Normandy butter!  Heaven on a plate!

Kitchen Creations!

I have cooked so much over the past few weeks - and eaten some delicious food cooked by other people - that I haven't been able to blog about each recipe individually.  Here are some highlights.

Chocolate Brazil Nut Cake

From my favourite baking book, this is an amazing recipe.  It's flourless, with ground brazil nuts replacing the flour, and made with whipped egg whites.  It's as light as a feather more like a giant squidgy chocolate brownie than a cake (in fact you could bake it in a square tin and cut it up into brownies). 

Lemon Drizzle Cake

This one is a BBC Good Food recipe, and it's an absolute classic.  Unbelievably easy to make (especially if you have an electric whisk), it's deliciously fresh and zingy-tasting and really moist from the lemon and sugar syrup.  It keeps well too because of the syrup.  I've made this several times, twice for Alastair and once for the office and it's been received rapturously every time.

Vanilla Slices

Another BBC Good Food recipe.  Divinely decadent, especially the sweet almond-flaked pastry - and ignore what the recipe says, it's not tricky at all.  I used half of the custard mixture to make slices and the other half to make little ramekins of stewed rhubarb topped with custard.  Rhubarb and custard - a match made in heaven!

Cream Slices

A variation!  Pastry made as above, with jam and whipped cream sweetened with icing sugar and vanilla essence (Chantilly cream to use its proper name) in the middle. 

Pavlova

My fan oven is very fierce, and I'd never made a decent meringue prior to some serious practice the other weekend - I always cooked the meringue for the length of time and at the temperature it said in the recipe, and the outside would brown but the inside remained foamy (yuk).  I finally conquered my culinary nemisis the other weekend by cooking the beastie for about twice as long as it said in the recipe (with a tin-foil hat on from when it started to brown) on the very lowest heat, and letting it dry out in the oven overnight.  It went all crispy on the outside and toffee-y in the middle - bliss.  And, even better I picked up a tip from my favourite baking book that means I never actually need to use a recipe for meringue ever again - all you do is weigh your egg whites and use exactly the same amount of caster sugar!

Chocolate Fudge Cake

I made this for a friend and never even tasted it - how's that for willpower (although it wouldn't have been quite as good a gift with a slice taken out!).

Focaccia

I have ventured into the world of bread-making!  I'd never baked with yeast before - if you haven't either then flatbreads are the place to start, as you don't need to worry about it rising.  I made this for Alastair and it was absolutely delicious (from The Book).

And finally...I have to show you this.

Not pretty, but man did it taste good!  I did a beast of a run on Sunday morning and rewarded myself with this - it was divine!  Pancake recipe from The Book - I need to practice my pancake presentation skills.  It'll be a hardship....

On the subject of food cooked by other people, I have to tell you about an amazing meal I had a couple of weekends ago.  I went to see my godson William and his mummy and daddy over in Manchester.  Sarah is a brilliant cook and created us the most incredible Moroccan feast on Saturday night.  The first course was green lentil soup which was spicy and delicious and which was served with wedges of fresh lime which lifted the whole dish and really made all the flavours zing.  The main course was lamb and olive tagine which was rich, slightly and perfectly salty from the olives and preserved lemons, cous cous and a delicious sticky-sweet aubergine jam.  The absolute highlight was the pudding though - M'hanncha or The Snake as we called it, it was basically a long sausage of home-made marzipan flavoured with rose-water and cinammon, wrapped in filo pastry and coiled in a circle.  It is traditionally placed in the middle of the table so that the diners can help themselves.  Which we did, many many times!  It was one of the most delicious desserts I've ever tasted, and I'm currently officially obsessed with Moroccan food.  All the recipes were from this book which went straight on my Amazon wish list!

Maintenance Week Seventeen

Not much to report this week.  Immediate post-lunch weigh-in on Thursday was 8st 13lbs, not sure what the BMI was as I've lost the print-out, and the body fat percentage was about 25%.  Much as I'd like to think that the extra two pounds is pure muscle from strength training, I think it's more likely to be due to going to my friend's house on Wednesday after work and eating my entire weekly points in one evening! 

Excercise has been great, cycling to work, a 10k run on Saturday (still grinning at the thought!) and a good circuit training session on Thursday evening.  I have also discovered that kneading bread is a good total-body workout!  It's a grey, drizzly day today so a rest day exercise-wise (apart from the afore-mentioned kneading of bread!), which I need before my weekly run tomorrow.  My mood today matches the grey, drizzly day - I'm tired and grizzly - so I'm off to do what everyone should do when they're feeling tired and grizzly...bake a cake!  Immediate happiness!