Tuesday 9 January 2007

Today started in similar fashion to yesterday, beetroot, apricots, lemon and ginger tea, porridge, espresso and an apple. Today's soup lucky dip was pasta, bean and vegetable soup from a batch I cooked up at the weekend. I found this soup a bit uninspiring to be honest, although I think it was because the stock I used wasn't great. I've not got to the stage of cooking up my own stock (although it's something I want to try at some point) and I'm still using powders and cubes. I find some of them too salty, and some a bit tasteless. I've yet to find the perfect stock, and this soup doesn't have any liquid other than the stock, and isn't blended, so the taste of the stock is pretty important I guess.

In the afternoon I had a bit of a treat in addition to my apple and apricot compote and apple, plus more fruit tea and espresso. Last night I prepared myself a pomegranate, so I had a little tub full of seeds to snack on to keep me going. It's fiddly, but I find that I can happily sit in front of the tv in the evening and take the seeds out without it feeling like too much of a chore, and it gives me something to look forward to the next day! This pomegranate was particularly seed filled and juicy, one of the best I've had in the UK (Canarian pomegranates are usually a class above). Mind you, given the price I paid for it, it should have been! (Oh, and there was another teeny tiny treat in the form of a Galaxy bar).

This evening is a non running evening, which means more potential for food preparation. Yes, it's the middle of winter, but I'm not letting that stop me eating salads. Call it a hangover from being in Spain over Christmas and getting back into the habit of eating cold food. Courgettes were on special offer at the supermarket on Sunday, so I bought a couple without really thinking about what I'd use them in. Having flicked through a few recipe books I came across a recipe for carrot and courgette salad which I had all the ingredients for, so I decided to eat that with some spinach and cheese filo parcels from the freezer, and some mixed salad leaves. I cooked the parcels up ages ago and can't remember what recipe I used, but they crisped back up OK in the oven despite their lengthy stay in the freezer. The leftover salad will go with me to work tomorrow for a change from soup.

I also decided to try the new blender on something more challenging than fruit juice, and tried to make some houmous. Being particularly well prepared yesterday evening, I even used dried (and soaked) chickpeas rather than the canned ones. My sister has the same blender and said that she uses it for houmous, so I assumed that the attachments I had would do the job OK. I usually eat the shop bought stuff, but thought I'd experiment a bit as part of the making as much as possible from scratch new year's plan. I'd find it hard to say exactly what my recipe was, I had about three in front of me and kept on adding things, tasting it and tweaking. I think there's too much tahini in this batch, but I'll definitely try again. Once I've eaten this lot, that is. I think I've created a houmous mountain!

The houmous is mainly for lunch tomorrow, but I had to try a bit didn't I, so I grabbed some celery and dipped away. I put a bit on some ryvita too. Quality control, obviously.