A little experimentation

Morning my lovelies!  I am currently sat on my sofa basking in the sun pouring in through my living room window as I write this post, and I feel pretty happy.  It’s a lazy Sunday morning, the sun’s out, I’ve just had a really nice breakfast, and one of my best friends is arriving in the hour for an afternoon of catching up.  The sun is definitely shining in my life today.

So, I’ve made it my target for this week to try and eat a little more adventurously.  I’m a little bit guilty of tending to eat the same things over and over again, which is a bit silly when there’s a whole world of healthy loveliness out there to eat.  After I escaped the office yesterday, I needed to do a food shop (and you can tell my fridge was near bare as it cost me a small fortune to restock!), so I made it my mission to try and get some new things to try and mix things up a bit.  I did some mental planning as I was wandering the aisles, of what I needed for the week and came up with the following:

• salmon with portobello mushrooms, couscous and broccoli.  I don’t eat anywhere near enough fish, especially seeing that I love it, and oily fish is very good for you.  I had this last night, just oven-cooked in a foil parcel with some seasoning and fresh lemon juice, and it was sooooo tasty.  The portobello mushrooms were new for me too; I adore mushrooms but usually just get the boring closed cup, button or chestnut ones.  I had half the pack last night, which was one and a half mushrooms, and just sautéed them very quickly in the pan with some seasoning, and they were amazing – really meaty texture and good flavour.  The couscous was also a bit of an experimentation for me, as although I have previously eaten couscous, it’s always the pre-flavoured stuff.  This was plain couscous, and it has been sat in my cupboard unopened for ages!  I just did it with a vegetable stock cube and some dried tarragon, and it was lovely – really tasty.  All round verdict – success.  And I get leftovers for dinner tonight – winner!
• Beef stir-fry.  I’m a stir-fry addict, and absolutely love it, but I’m very boring and always have the same variants – chicken or prawns and fairly straightforward veg combinations.  So this time I’ve gone for lean beef strips and an edamame bean stir-fry selection – tasty!  And I’ll be more careful with which noodles I’m using this time.
• Lamb steaks and roasted root vegetables.  Again – I loves me some roast vegetables, but I always have the same ones.  And usually with chicken.  Last Monday, I had dinner at Hannah’s and we had fennel, celeriac, swede, and roasted onion quarters and it was amazing.  I like all those veg, but don’t often think to buy them myself to play with.  I couldn’t find fennel (I guess I might need a greengrocers for that?), but I did get celeriac, half a swede, carrots, onion and a small butternut squash.  Likewise, the lamb steaks are a lean cut, and I thought it would be nice to be a bit different.  And although lamb is more points on Weightwatchers, most of the veg are zero points, so it will totally balance out.
• Carrot and celery soup – as anyone who’s read this for a while knows, I love some homemade soup.  I still have a fairly narrow repertoire at the moment, so this is a flavour I had at work the other week, which rocked, and I thought I’d try it for myself.
• Weightwatchers individual cheesecakes.  I’m addicted to dessert, but tend to avoid it when I’m head down and on plan.  But I thought it would be nice to have a back-up treat in the fridge.  So I’ve got two little lemon cheesecakes – I tried one last night, and it wasn’t bad at all – rather tasty.  It’s not real cheesecake of course, not full-fat stuff anyway, but it helps stop me feeling deprived.

The real thing that struck me about my shopping last night as I looked at it all stacked up on the conveyer belt, was how much “real” food I had, and how little snacks.  Kind of cool!

One thing that’s surprising me at the moment is how much food I’m actually eating.  When I was tracking yesterday’s food last night, I kept thinking I must have missed something off because I’d felt so full all day and felt like I’d had several treats, but in reality I’d only dipped into my flex points by a few.  I’d enjoyed a nice afternoon break of a chai latte from Starbucks on my way back from town, which I sat down and enjoyed at home with the rest of the Maltesers from Friday.  I’d had cheesecake, and all my lovely salmon.  It seems that my daily allowance can in fact be made to stretch rather a long way if I just think about it properly.  On a side-note though – I posted yesterday about my obsession with poached eggs and English muffins at the moment, and I have to confess I made a slight error.  I stopped to double-check the points on the muffin earlier, as I was surprised to see one muffin was 2 points in the tracker and another registered as 5.  I’ve been pointing the 2 point version, but when I actually looked more closely at the default portion sizes and double checked my muffin I had, I discovered that it should have been 5.  How annoying!!  5 points for a muffin seems steep, and puts my whole meal up to 9 rather than 6, but as much as I want to undo my knowledge of that and pretend ignorance, I’ve re-done my tracker to match.  I guess 9 points might seem a lot, but on the other hand that combo – muffin, mushroom and eggs – does keep you full for ages. 

Talking of breakfasts, I went old-school this morning.  I’d forgotten how damn good plain ol’ toast and jam can taste!  Decent granary bread, butter and proper jam – sooooooooooo tasty!!  It might be heavy on the points 8 but it was super nice – proper comfort food.  Sometimes it’s just nice to rediscover the simple things.