Cookfest

7 days into the new year and I have lost 2 pounds!  Woohoo! Not sure how I achieved that because I fell off the wagon rather a lot in the second half of the week when I found a huge bag of Christmas spiced biscuits in the cupboard that were too delicious not to eat and of course once the bag was open it had to be finished off before the biscuits went soggy, right? And I kind of accidentally ate a few other things that were a bit naughty too BUT overall there was a lot less junk than I have been inhaling the last few months, so YAY.  I actually did pretty well with meals and MOST of what I ate was healthy food from the Happy Herbivore plan.

Today I spent a lot of time cooking. 5 hours cooking! I think I racked up a week's worth of Fitbit steps just walking between the cooker and the fridge. It wouldn't normally take so long (the HH recipes are generally quick and easy) but I was being good and inputting every ingredient and weight into MyFitnessPal which made it take quite a lot longer, but it's OK. It kept me off social media at least ;-p

I cooked up 12 meals, 6 lunches and 6 dinners. I also ate one of them - 'Oh My Greens! noodles' and had it with a cup of Lady Grey tea.

Maybe I'm just being a bit British but the only thing I don't like about the HH meals is the overly amusing names.  I'm sure it's probably necessary as a selling point to make things more fun but ugh. The food is usually decent and tasty but I like a name to describe what I'm eating, not make me laugh. Mr O asks me what I'm eating and when I say 'Bodacious Butteritos' or 'Broccoli Poppers' I just get laughed at and asked 'yeah but what the hell is that?') Anyway, I digress. Amusing name aside,The noodle soup was massively filling and tasted really nice. So filling, I didn't want my dinner until really late in the evening: Taco Poppers.

They're meant to be eaten with Queso Sauce, which I don't like - not any fault of the recipe, but it's basically a type of vegan cheese sauce, and I never liked cheese sauce even when I did eat cheese. So I made vegan ranch dressing instead. There's not much food that doesn't taste better with a drizzle of some sort of cool yoghurty thing on top.

In other news: the No Buy continues. I have been very good with money the last 7 days and not spent anything I didn't absolutely have to spend. I kept in budget for the weekly grocery shop for the first time in a bazillion years. And I somehow resisted buying anything in the January sales even when people all around me are squealing about how they bought some shoes for £4 or some such amazing price. 7 days down, 93 to go...

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! 

Hopefully you all had a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year. Mine was actually really laid back and chilled out, spent playing computer games with the family. 

Now it's the 1st Jan and I am putting those resolutions into action. I'm not back at work until the 4th and I'm not really going anywhere until then but this morning I got up and put some make up on even though nobody will see me but my husband and son (and they couldn't care less what I look like). Nothing special just some concealer and mascara plus a bit of lip balm, and some Body Shop coconut body spray, but I felt nice. I also put on a bracelet because I'm trying to get used to wearing more jewellery.

I also weighed myself. Once the scales had finished shrieking in alarm and I'd got over the shock I recorded it on my apps - I'm going to be using the Fitbit app and MyFitnessPal. I weigh 9 stone and 12 pounds. This isn't a whole lot considering there's people on the TV who weigh over 600 pounds and can't even get out of bed, whereas here I am still technically within the normal BMI range, but it's quite a lot for me as my best healthy weight is 8 stone and 7 pounds and my current weight is the heaviest I've been in years. 8 stone 7 is the weight where my joints stop playing me up so that's what I will be aiming for: a loss of 19 pounds. I've also taken my measurements and recorded those on another app; this is the first time I've done this so it will be interesting to see how my measurements change as I get healthier.

Luckily one side effect of all the junk I've been eating over the festive season is that I'm actually pretty sick of junk and my body is craving something healthier, so today was day 1 of eating decent food.

I started by having this for lunch:

'Mediterranean Quinoa' from Aldi, with some tomatoes and cucumber.

I've decided to start using the Happy Herbivore plant based meal plans again; I've used them a few times in the past and always found them pretty easy and tasty, filling enough that I'm not left feeling deprived, and, importantly, not expensive!! They work really well for me because I'm the only plant based eater in our family and it takes all the thought and most of the effort out of what to cook for myself, and all the meals can be cooked in advance at the weekend and just reheated later. Normally by the time I've cooked other stuff for the other 3 people I can't be bothered to do something fancy for myself so I usually end up getting a sandwich or some quick oven-junk food instead, but this way if I batch cook at the weekend I can guarantee a zero effort meal for myself all week long. You can get them in a 4 person menu, or a smaller 2 person version which is ideal for me as I can use one portion for dinner and use the second portion for lunch the next day. This is a 'Buffalodilla' which I had for dinner today and it was delicious. Excuse the presentation, I was starving and couldn't wait to eat!

In addition to quinoa it contains wheatberries, olives and some other stuff and because it cooks in the microwave in 1 minute it's my usual fallback for 'quick and easy whilst still reasonably healthy' lunch food. I often have this for work lunches but I am going to try and start having something a bit cheaper and home made. This was just to tide me over a bit whilst I got cooking on the other things I had planned...

Diet Coke Quorn

Another food post for you today!

Something I cook quite often is Diet Coke Quorn. The first time I heard about cooking with Diet Coke, I thought it sounded a) gross and b) insane. Coke's a drink, right? Why would you put it in your food? But I was intrigued enough to try it, and surprised when it tasted amazing. It's kind of like sweet and sour.

 This dish is vegetarian. It's not technically vegan since Quorn contains a small amount of egg white, but I'm putting it up anyway because the Quorn could easily be replaced with tofu, extra vegetables, soya pieces, tempeh, chick peas/garbanzo beans, chunks of vegan sausage, or whatever else you fancy. (It could also be replaced with chicken).

It's also probably not the most attractive thing to look at, but trust me. It tastes awesome and is stupidly easy to cook.

Recipe:
Throw one large, chopped up onion into a pan with 1tsp oil, or if you're low fat, a few sprays of Frylight and a splash of water. Fry for a minute or two until soft.
Dump 225g of rice into the pan (I used long grain, brown basmati, but it doesn't really matter what you use). Add one can of diet cola (I am far too cheap to buy actual Coke - I use cheapie own brand supermarket stuff and it works just fine), and watch the cool fizzing effect.
Add 240ml of water and a vegetable stock cube. Toss in some Quorn pieces (or whatever you want to use instead) and some vegetables (whatever you have hanging around is fine. I used carrots and red peppers here).
Simmer until the rice is cooked (time will vary depending on the type of rice you chose but it'll be somewhere between 10 and 25 minutes) and has absorbed all the liquid. You will need to keep an eye on it, stir it every so often, and probably top up the pan with a bit of extra water here and there, unless you really want half cooked rice welded to the bottom of the pan.
Eat. This made enough for three very filling portions, and cost very little. My husband (meat eater) ate two out of those three portions. He is always happy to eat vegetarian food as long as it fills him up and tastes good, so that's a great recommendation right there. Oh, and if you follow the Slimming World Green/EE Plan and use FryLight instead of oil, this dish is Syn Free!

Super Soup!

Everybody loves a bargain, and I have a great one for you today!

Browsing the shelves at Asda last weekend I came across these little treasures: ready prepared bags of ingredients for making soup. 

I don't normally buy many ready-prepared vegetables (except frozen or tinned ones), because it's nearly always cheaper to buy the unprepared veggies and peel and chop them myself. But seriously. Look how cheap these are! Normally just £1, I got them on special offer for 85p a bag. Each one contains almost everything you need to make a litre of soup, no chopping or peeling required. All you need to add is water and two stock cubes. Bargain!

Here's Leek and Potato (which also contains onion and parsley), all ready for cooking. The instructions say you can whizz this soup up in a saucepan in about half an hour, so it already ticks the 'quick' box as well as 'easy' and 'cheap'. However, I was feeling especially lazy today, so I slung the whole lot in the slow cooker (which took all of 10 seconds - that's my kinda cooking, y'all) and left it for 8 hours while I went to work. 

Here's the end result, after a quick blitz with a stick blender. My 85p packet made enough soup for four people. It was also delicious and full of win. 

Next up was carrot and coriander (again there is onion in this too). I was feeling a bit experimental by this point, so I only added half a litre of water, so it would be super thick and chunky.

Another quick blast with the stick blender, and presto! Chunky carrot and coriander goodness that tasted every bit as delicious as the leek and potato, and so thick it was practically a stew. 

I was already feeling smug about the yumminess I'd created, so imagine my delight when I totted up the overall cost. I made 6 bowls of delicious and healthy soup for £1.70 (large ones, mind - I don't do small portions. I was stuffed after one bowl and two slices of bread) That's less than 30p a bowl. There was no added fat whatsoever, and if you're following the Slimming World green plan, you'll be pleased to learn that this is completely syn free. Even better, I spent less than 5 minutes actually making it all. Cheap AND lazy :)

New Year's Resolutions: Update 1

So as part of my new year's resolutions this year, I resolved to try and lose somewhere between a stone and a stone and a half. So far I have been doing pretty well!

I've been eating 1200 calories a day (and recording it with the aid of myfitnesspal.com's fantastic online calorie counter (and the equally brilliant phone app, which even has a barcode scanner so you can just zap whatever you're about to eat and up pops all the nutritional info you'll ever need).

I also took up jogging; I have a treadmill at home and, instead of hanging clothes on it, I've actually been using the thing. I've done half an hour a day of fast walking - and some jogging, a little more each day as I get used to it - most days since the 2nd January. This has been a mixed blessing, since I am definitely getting fitter - I can now jog for 15 minutes; when I started I couldn't even manage 5 - but it has also slowed my weight loss. I'm told that this is because I'm building muscle, and also because muscles that aren't used to regular exercise will try and hold on to glycogen and water (so I'm retaining water now?? OH JOY). So every day that I exercise, the scales creep up a bit, and every day that I don't, they go back down. I've been reassured that this is just temporary, though, and that it will stabilise after a bit; plus since I am definitely burning more calories than I am eating, there is no way it's fat, so I'm persevering.

When I weighed in on Sunday I'd lost about 3 pounds, which is an average of 1.5 per week and apparently this is a healthy rate at which to lose. I forgot to take starting measurements, but the podgy bits around my belly and hips already feel smaller - I suspect I've actually lost more than 3 pounds in fat, and the muscle-y -water-y thing is just hiding the rest :-p

Monday night was where it all started to go a bit wrong, though. I came down with the stomach flu!! Norovirus has been going round the area and I guess it was my turn. Between Monday night and Friday morning I ate hardly anything at all. This morning I weighed myself and I'd lost another 5 pounds in only 3 days: rather an extreme way to diet!!! I expect most of it was dehydration so probably a lot of it will come back soon, but hopefully a bit of it will stay away!

How are you doing with your new year's resolutions, if you've made any?

Happy New Year!

So it's a new year and I thought I'd start off with one of those new year's resolution type posts that people seem to do about this time. Let's see what 2013 brings!

1. Blogging

I've been a bad blogger in recent times. Life just got in the way, plus lack of equipment, time, motivation and all that blah. But I got some awesome new lighting for Christmas, which fixes the equipment problem (yay) and that in turn helps my motivation since the main reason I never felt like blogging was because my pictures always needed so much work to make them even halfway useful. So I can finally get back to blogging and I am excited!!
Things are going to be a little different around here. My main focus will still be on nails but there are going to be more non-nail related posts too. Most of them will still be beauty-focused, but there might just be the occasional other subject popping up here and there (like this one!)

2. Health and fitness/weight loss

Like a zillion other people, it's no surprise that one of my resolutions is to lose a few pounds this year. While I am no means a heffalump, I have recently become dissatisfied with my body for the simple fact I haven't been looking after it the right way. I am still within what the GP would say is a healthy weight range for my age and height, but only just. I weigh at least a stone more than my 'comfortable weight', more like a stone and a half, and my clothes don't fit so nicely as they used to. This year I'm going to focus on taking care of myself better. No, I won't look like the girl in the picture above (miracles take longer) but hopefully this time next year I will have lost the extra pounds I've packed on over the last 12 months or so!

3. Food

Closely linked to health and fitness, but important enough in its own right to deserve a separate mention on the list, is my diet. Due in part to stress and a busy lifestyle, I have slipped into appalling habits with food. Chocolate bars, crisps, and other convenient junk food have been WAY too high on the list, while anything that takes more than about 5 seconds to prepare has fallen by the wayside. And what happens when I eat rubbish? I feel like rubbish. And I look like rubbish. I can't be healthy on a diet like this. This has to stop. There will be vegetables!!

4. FLYing.

I've always been a terrible hoarder, clutter magnet and generally fail at being neat and tidy. I've tried again and again to do something about this and the only thing that has ever really helped was the FLYLady program. You can learn all about it at www.flylady.net , but in brief, FLY stands for 'Finally Loving Yourself'. The program (which is aimed at Americans, but can be easily adapted for us non US types) is about learning to get rid of all the clutter and junk that you don't need, but not beating yourself up or getting overwhelmed along the way. I've been FLYing on and off for years now and it's made an amazing difference to my life, but sadly since having my son I have mostly fallen off the FLYing wagon and gone back to my old habits. Earlier this year I started FLYing again and it has already started to make a difference, so my fourth resolution this year is to continue FLYing!

So there you are, my four main resolutions for 2013. There's a few more minor ones, like making more effort with my skincare routine, and making more effort with my clothes instead of living in the same few old uninspiring outfits again and again, but that'll do for now... don't want to have a list so long it's impossible to achieve!

What are your resolutions for 2013? Will you be making any changes this year?