My single biggest impediment to dieting successfully is my sleep pattern. Getting up in the afternoon is diet kryptonite. You end up with no breakfast or a meaninglessly late one which throws off the schedule for the rest of your meals and in the dark of the night you seldom want a proper meal so it leads to snacking etc. It also tends to sap my willpower and lead to “dark thoughts”. An obvious example would be the fact that last week when I was getting up (roughly) normally I was cooking every day, posting to the blog, etc. This week? Nothing on either front.
The rot set in last Friday, well Thursday I suppose. I was up late and when I got up I had to finish editing some stuff for a deadline (and learned more about DOTA2 then I ever wanted to know). This pushed my breakfast back a bit, but worse, I forgot to take out mince to defrost which in turn messed up dinner. But the real dolorous blow was delivered when I ended up staying up till ten or eleven the next morning. When I eventually got up it was a white bread carnival with a Subway for lunch/breakfast and a big chunk of Parisienne for lunch/dinner. Sunday was my mother’s birthday so that didn’t help. Went shopping Sunday evening (yet again Tesco had no sprouts, or mince, or low-fat bagels, DISASTER). I had a meal plan done out for this week but I honestly havent followed it that much. Actually I don’t really know what I did this week, apart from not sleep much. I did try one or two new things, with mixed success. I also, in a move of unparalleled genius, forgot to weigh myself on Monday. Bad times.
Still, havent really fallen of the wagon yet (just clinging onto the tailgate) as I didn’t indulge in anything particularly “bad”. So should be back on track today and sort my sleep pattern out with an early morning unavoidable wake up call tomorrow.
Found some reduced price steak while shopping Sunday night and as I’d been re-reading Shokugeki no Souma earlier in the day decided to try a Chaliapan steak. Unfortunately as its unique to a certain hotel it’s not easy to find a definitive version of the recipe. I found a few in English and a few more in Japanese. Unfortunately the best Japanese one was done as an image so could even machine translate it.
It actually turned out really nice, though grating onions is a pain in the arse I might use the food processor next time as hand gratings a pain. The best thing about cooking steak for oneself is that I dont have to put up with any revolting pinkness on the inside. The sweet potato “chips” were delicious as always. Been a while since I made some but I think they’ll be returning to heavy rotation
Monday I got up particularly late and was feeling particularly out of it so I went with something handy for dinner. Pan fried potatoes and two gammon steaks. Surprisingly low in “points”, the gammon steaks are free if you trim all the fat and you can fry the potatoes with the free lo cal spray (though I used a point and added some oil). Fried spuds were basically this weeks dinner MVP as I had them again on Wednesday and Thursday.
The ingredients for this weeks big experiment, coconut cauliflower curry. How could that not be delicious? I’m actually not the biggest fan of curry but I fancied it this week so decided to give this a go.
Various stages of completion
This was not a success. I forgot I was using organic wholemeal rice and undercooked it so that was the rice part fucked. The cauliflower curry wasnt terrible but it had some problems. The first being I expected it to have a much stronger coconut flavour which it did not. I suppose you could add desiccated coconut but it’s so high in points it ruins the “low fat-ness” of the dish. The second problem was that I cut the cauliflower too big, I’d say you want it the same size you would cube chicken for curry. The cauliflower was also a bit tough. There seemed to be two approaches to this recipe, one involving roasting first the other using the more traditional reducing on the hob approach. I went with roasting but I’d go the other way the next time. I’d also probably add more turmeric and some cumin. So it wasnt a disaster but it certainly wasnt a success. Mixing in some chicken might be the way to go. I decided that I’d blend it all down, add chicken and reduce it for dinner the next day. I did blend it, but then I just couldn’t face it and ended up dumping the remainder. A sweet euro’s worth of cauliflower wasted.
Wednesday and Thursday I made the same thing twice, something I want to avoid as falling into a rut leads to one straying from the same slimming confines of ones diet in my experience. Fried spuds and fried chicken with the addition of this ridiculously delicious teriyaki seasoning I came across, the stuff is like fucking crack.
