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Sod's Law of the Kitchen
Aug. 29th, 2012 02:06 pm...Or 'Why Everything Goes Right When I Have No Idea What I Did'.
So, I'm currently on a modified restricted calorie diet, which is supposed to do things like help you lose weight and increase life expectancy, without you having to spend your life living on lettuce leaves and green tea.
Instead, you spend two sevenths of your life living on lettuce leaves and green tea.
No, that's pretty much what it is. Eat normally for 5 days of the week. For the other 2, restrict yourself to 500 calories for the day (600 if you're lucky and a boy). Only restrictions are you can't have two 'fast' days consecutively, and avoid doing any heavy exercise on those days, unless you're keen on passing out on the cross trainer.
Sneakily, I have used my knowledge of my own body to take advantage of the appetite lull I get the day after a gym session, and thus my Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday of this week goes something like gym/fast/gym/fast. Therefore allowing me to get through the 2 days without (with any luck) being reduced to gnawing on imanimate objects or co-workers.
And, as it turns out, 500 calories can go quite far with the right stuff. I have a yoghurt for breakfast, fruit for snacks, and then sub-200 calorie meals for lunch and dinner. Yes, I'm hungry at the end of it, but I'm not starving by any means, and I only have a day to wait until I can scoff whatever the hell I like again - trying to keep it within reason that is. My fast days will do me no good if I decide my sandwiches on my off days can, in fact, be replaced by deep fried butter served between rashers of bacon and some sort of pork and lard combination as a side dish.
So, what I did last night was make my lunch for today and Friday, which is a thai style chicken and mushroom broth. A serving works out to something like 160 calories. Woohoo.
Unfortunately, I only remembered I'd be cooking this when I arrived home, and it was chucking it down, and could I be arsed to go out again, into the cold and the dark to track down the right ingrediants?
Bugger that.
Spring onions? Had those - well sort of, they're a bit wilted, so I can only use the white bits, but I had them.
Fash sauce? Check.
Mushrooms, and cooked chicken? Check and check, thanks to the left overs from roasting a chicken last weekend. Similarly, I have chicken stock cunningly secreted away for occasions such as this.
Thai curry paste? Er....
Brown sugar? Er.....
Whoops?
Thus became my casting around the kitchen. First I diced and shoved all the ingrediants I *had* into a pot.
Then came the 'oh, what the hell!' attitude.
Kaffir lime leaves? That'll work.
A couple of red chilli's? Yeah, sure.
Fresh ginger? Can't go wrong!
The recipe says a little fish sauce - fuck it, a good couple of glugs.
Hey, there's this sauce that came with that fish I bought, it's lime ginger and chilli, that would fit with a thai recipe, right? Throw it in!
Dried shitake mushrooms and a desicated lime, unearthed from questionable spots in the back of my pantry? The first can go in, the second can be zested (wow, I was feeling ambitious there) and then juiced with extreme prejudice.
Hey, chilled chicken stock from the back of the fridge? Why not!
Oooh, I have some fresh coriander I froze a couple of weeks back, let's dig that out of the freezer and dump it in!
You get the idea, right? I have little to no idea what I chucked at this damn pot, in what quantities, in what order. There is 0% chance I could ever remake this should I ever desire to.
Naturally, it came out perfect. Sour and sweet and tangy and hot enough it just makes your throat catch and your lips burn and gorgeous. Despite the truely remarkable amount of mushrooms floating in it, I even fed a mouthful to Doug, who went all wide eyed and declared it was wonderful enough that he didn't mind the mushrooms.
That's right folk, this fucking stuff is so good that the man who has a psychosomatic emetic reaction to nearly all veg and fungi was making appreciative noises.
And I have no idea how to reproduce it.
Arse.
So, I'm currently on a modified restricted calorie diet, which is supposed to do things like help you lose weight and increase life expectancy, without you having to spend your life living on lettuce leaves and green tea.
Instead, you spend two sevenths of your life living on lettuce leaves and green tea.
No, that's pretty much what it is. Eat normally for 5 days of the week. For the other 2, restrict yourself to 500 calories for the day (600 if you're lucky and a boy). Only restrictions are you can't have two 'fast' days consecutively, and avoid doing any heavy exercise on those days, unless you're keen on passing out on the cross trainer.
Sneakily, I have used my knowledge of my own body to take advantage of the appetite lull I get the day after a gym session, and thus my Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday of this week goes something like gym/fast/gym/fast. Therefore allowing me to get through the 2 days without (with any luck) being reduced to gnawing on imanimate objects or co-workers.
And, as it turns out, 500 calories can go quite far with the right stuff. I have a yoghurt for breakfast, fruit for snacks, and then sub-200 calorie meals for lunch and dinner. Yes, I'm hungry at the end of it, but I'm not starving by any means, and I only have a day to wait until I can scoff whatever the hell I like again - trying to keep it within reason that is. My fast days will do me no good if I decide my sandwiches on my off days can, in fact, be replaced by deep fried butter served between rashers of bacon and some sort of pork and lard combination as a side dish.
So, what I did last night was make my lunch for today and Friday, which is a thai style chicken and mushroom broth. A serving works out to something like 160 calories. Woohoo.
Unfortunately, I only remembered I'd be cooking this when I arrived home, and it was chucking it down, and could I be arsed to go out again, into the cold and the dark to track down the right ingrediants?
Bugger that.
Spring onions? Had those - well sort of, they're a bit wilted, so I can only use the white bits, but I had them.
Fash sauce? Check.
Mushrooms, and cooked chicken? Check and check, thanks to the left overs from roasting a chicken last weekend. Similarly, I have chicken stock cunningly secreted away for occasions such as this.
Thai curry paste? Er....
Brown sugar? Er.....
Whoops?
Thus became my casting around the kitchen. First I diced and shoved all the ingrediants I *had* into a pot.
Then came the 'oh, what the hell!' attitude.
Kaffir lime leaves? That'll work.
A couple of red chilli's? Yeah, sure.
Fresh ginger? Can't go wrong!
The recipe says a little fish sauce - fuck it, a good couple of glugs.
Hey, there's this sauce that came with that fish I bought, it's lime ginger and chilli, that would fit with a thai recipe, right? Throw it in!
Dried shitake mushrooms and a desicated lime, unearthed from questionable spots in the back of my pantry? The first can go in, the second can be zested (wow, I was feeling ambitious there) and then juiced with extreme prejudice.
Hey, chilled chicken stock from the back of the fridge? Why not!
Oooh, I have some fresh coriander I froze a couple of weeks back, let's dig that out of the freezer and dump it in!
You get the idea, right? I have little to no idea what I chucked at this damn pot, in what quantities, in what order. There is 0% chance I could ever remake this should I ever desire to.
Naturally, it came out perfect. Sour and sweet and tangy and hot enough it just makes your throat catch and your lips burn and gorgeous. Despite the truely remarkable amount of mushrooms floating in it, I even fed a mouthful to Doug, who went all wide eyed and declared it was wonderful enough that he didn't mind the mushrooms.
That's right folk, this fucking stuff is so good that the man who has a psychosomatic emetic reaction to nearly all veg and fungi was making appreciative noises.
And I have no idea how to reproduce it.
Arse.
