We will eat more veg, dammit!

The other evening, freshly back from a merry holiday in the UK, my DB and I watched a documentary on trendy Arte about the production of meat and the effect of said production on both the animals concerned and the planet.

I know that eating too much meat is not good either for our health or the planet, and I have tried to cut down our intake before, an effort which was met with some dismay by my carnivorous sons. But after watching the documentary, I thought I'd have another go, and make an effort to buy more humanely-produced meat when I do buy it (where from however is another matter!).

Then I thought about the practicalities and what my boys will eat, refuse to touch with a bargepole, and are merely highly unenthusiastic about eating. The first list is quite short, the second pretty long, and the third limited to a short list of carrots, spinach, squash, and leek.

On the first list are: tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, onion, potato, broccoli, peas, beans, corn, asparagus, parsnip (my youngest), beetroot (I think, but I don't like it), bean-sprouts.

On the second list are:  mushrooms, courgettes, aubergines, peppers of all colours, celery, cabbage, swede, turnip, avocado, cauliflower, celeriac, fennel, parsnip (my eldest), sweet potato, chicory, okra.

They won't eat cheese either. You can see my problem. Recipes on local cuisine are full of aubergine, peppers and courgettes. I like Mediterranean food but I eat it alone which is not really the point. Luckily they will eat pulses of all sorts so all is not lost, but it would be a boring diet if we stuck to a boy-friendly list of veg.

I also eat French-produced veg in season as much as possible which adds to the fun of limiting the selection. Bugger it, just pass me a chop...

Cooking Free Zone

This month of August sees me in a most unusual frame of mind. Usually you can rely on me to eat properly, have stuff in the house to knock up something tasty, and not stoop to industrial muck under any circumstances (except nuclear war).

This month though, the boys are with their dad and I've totally lost interest in preparing anything at all. And I mean anything. If I can't open a packet and it eat - if it needs something else doing to it - I'm not interested. Bizarre.

So I've been eating organic rice or corn cakes (open packet, eat), with cheese (open packet, eat), plus a tomato or two that's braved the odds to grow in my garden, or roll mops (open jar, eat), jambon sec (open packet, eat), smoked trout (organic natch, open packet, eat), or chevre Boursin (open pot, eat). Sometimes I get as far as cutting up plums into natural yoghurt (open pot, eat), and then spoil it all by stuffing crisps. Actually, crisps are the only thing I eat with any joy at the moment (apart from someone else's cooking). With some nicely chilled rosé - yum. I have to limit myself severely or they are all I'd eat! And all in front of the tele which is mine all mine while the boys are away!

I suppose when the boys come back I'll have to buck my ideas up and get into sensible eating habits again, but I've taken the month off from cooking. Only two exceptions have got me to turn on the cooker - my TWDB's return from 3 weeks trail biking in the US, and a supper with his sister. I had to make a huge effort in each case to drag myself out of my lethargy.

I'm perfectly happy to eat other people's cooking or go out for dinner, but put hand to pan I will not. Yet.

So it was with only vague interest that I read an old article in The Telegraph today about Italian chefs telling the world how to make a correct spag bol. There are many abominations out there apparently such as using turkey mince or meatballs and the chefs had had enough.

As I make a mean spag bol I thought I'd just check how authentic mine is, you know, by way of research. Happily, it stands up to scrutiny pretty well. I didn't know you should use 6 rashers of bacon or pancetta to 1kg of mince, so I'll have to try that. It also has a stick of celery but the boys flatly refuse to eat celery or anything that's been within 100yds of it, so that's out. As I can never afford the best mince I tend to chuck in an organic beef cube, but that's the only sacrilege.

Authentic spag bol should be served with tagliatelli according to the purists, but that's just a pasta detail. I'm not yet inspired to rustle up a batch, but I'll bear all this in mind when I should next be grabbed by the urge.

I'm no longer on holiday, but I'm on a cooking holiday, c'est à dire, a no-cooking holiday, a 'show me a pan and I'll puke' holiday. And it's bloody marvellous, I can tell you!

So you wanna lose weight?

I have blogged before about extreme methods of losing weight - can't find where though; it must have been in the pre-tagging days. It had something to do with getting divorced. At the height of my personal trauma, the good news was that I looked lovely and svelte... (There's always a bright side...)

Well, I've recently lost two kilos and I attribute that to two fairly drastic reasons:
1) no man
2) writing

As you may remember, if you are a fidèle reader of this blog, I got the old boot in the butt in July which meant I was free as of August when I came back from holiday having left the boys with their father to do as I liked. I thus cut down on aperitifs, aperitif snacks, wine with meals and food in general, being too lazy to cook full meals. One thing about guys is that they need feeding properly and since the food is there on the table, or already served onto your plate without so much as a by your leave re quantity, one tends to eat it. This means that you are probably consuming way more than you would usually, and unless you get off your backside big time and rush out to jog/cycle/exercise it all off, you're likely to see a surreptitious piling on of the pounds.

Writing is a time-consuming exercise and tends to absorb one's attention totally. With me, this meant being completely distracted and generally hopeless about everything to do with daily life, which made it even more difficult buying Rentrée stuff than usual because I was simply not concentrating!

Wishing to have as much time to write as possible made me cut down on pointless food preparation. The boys are generally happy with trashy food, the trashier the better on the whole, although there are limits... so they've been eating a lot of fresh ravioli and tomato sauce (previously homemade from garden toms), even peanut butter sarnies (!!) and omelettes. I console myself with the knowledge that they are eating a full meal at lunch time at school and don't really need the whole caboodle at supper. I certainly can not be bothered to spend hours not writing on preparing a scrumptious dinner only to be told that they are not hungry, don't like whatever meat it is, whatever veg it is, whatever whatever it is, and would rather have a peanut butter sarnie or a hot dog. Recently they've been getting the sarnie or the hot dog!

As for me, after the boys have finished (I sit and join them so we can chat - I'm not that neglectful!) I stuff a Ryvita or two with tomatoes in front of the computer and get to work.

The result is two whole kilos off - the ones I had put on over the past year, so I'm dead pleased and feeling very perky about slinking around again.

However, I'm sure there must be easier ways!

Science Diet

While Creationists might reject science as a basis for understanding how the earth was created, they might be interested to know that science can help us with dieting and eating to stay slim. Personally, I don't have a problem with my size, have never dieted but eat healthily and don't give way to snacking. However, understanding, scientifically, how the body deals with food is useful for all of us who wish to stay slim and not sink into middle-aged spread.

If you have been watching the BBC series 'The Truth about Food', you may be as amazed as I was last night at some of the revelations. If there is one thing I hate, it's fads, and this programme dispelled all the myths about those crappy, boring diets which involve so much will-power and fail as soon as the dieter is back to normal food.

The essential information from the programme is this:

1. Metabolic rate is not responsible for weight gain. Eating is.
2. Eating low-fat dairy products will enable your body to purge out more fat than if you eat no dairy products at all. Eat low-fat products to avoid adding to your calorie intake and thus adding fat.
3. If you have evidence of how much you've eaten, as in a plate of bones, you'll eat less.
   
4. If you take a larger portion of food, you will eat more. Supersizing distorts your perception of what is a reasonable amount to eat.
5. The most filling foods are proteins, so to keep you feeling full for longer, make sure you eat a protein-rich meal.
6. Eating soup is the best way to ward off hunger. The water and solids mixed together fill the stomach and pass through your intestines more slowly than a meal of separate water and solids so you feel satiated for longer.

I would also add that eating in front of the television distracts you and you end up eating more because you are not paying attention to how much you are eating.

All the information was researched and tested scientifically. No fads, no get-rich-quick quacks bossing you about, no starvation. You can lose weight and stay slim by eating wisely and getting your heart rate bopping.

Isn't that good news?