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!