A slight case of overblogging

Item: Train tickets. Greater Anglia have sent me a voucher for £5 off train tickets - to refund my £1.20 and give me £3.80 extra for the inconvenience. I wonder if I should ask them how to use a voucher in the ticket machine :) Shelford station only has staff Monday-Friday 6am to 10:30am (I thought it closed much earlier than that actually, I'm pleasantly surprised!). They've confirmed the London Terminals ticket is OK for changing at Tottenham Hale, and said that basically if I have a similar problem again with the ticket machine there's no alternative but to pick the best ticket you can think of and then complain.

Item: Pregnancy. Still pregnant :) Definitely getting a visible bump now. Had my flu jab today, with no incident. Next appointment is my "foetal anomaly scan" at 20-weeks, aka 23rd October. Not quite definitely feeling the baby move yet - a couple of feelings that *might* be that or might just be tummy gurgles.

Item: Baking. After the success of last week's buns today I've baked cookies. Dairy-free chocolate cookies to be precise. They look rather good. Recipe.

Item: Books. I've finally finished cataloguing all the books and maps onto LibraryThing - though looking at Heather's I've been reminded there may be a knitting book lurking in a drawer with all the yarn which I've missed. There are 415 books in our catalog - and roughly 320 in the list to sell/giveaway. If you're interested there are still some books left here. At some point I shall give up and give the rest to charity though. I was particularly bemused to find there was one book which the internet entirely refused to believe exists, even though it has an ISBN, so I had to add it completely manually! This one! It feels good to be finished, but I keep wondering what to do next :)

Item: Slimming World USA. Slimming World are launching their site in the USA in earnest this month, with a "Lend a Hand" campaign which gives me the heebie-jeebies. It feels at best patronising and at worst downright insulting. However I do have to admit that Slimming World has in fact been a great plan for me in terms of losing weight, maintaining that weight loss, and even continuing to eat healthily while pregnant. I don't believe it's the *only* way to do so, or even necessarily the best. I don't believe that everyone who is overweight or obese should in fact want to or even need to lose weight. However, all that aside, if you're in the states and interested I have a referral link and you can go find out more here.

I think that's about it for now :)

I cooked this on Friday for me and Mike and Karen, and promised her the recipe, so may as well post it here.

Ingredients

• 1 large or 2 small onions
• 2-4 cloves garlic
• 3 small carrots
• 4 rashers of smoked bacon
• 1 cup of dried red lentils
• 400g tin tomatoes
• 1 teaspoon dried chilli flakes
• salt and pepper for seasoning
• oil or fry-light for frying
• 1/2 a glass red wine (optional)
• 100g chorizo - whole rather than sliced (optional)

(In this case I used 1 tsp olive oil, 75ml red wine and no chorizo, to serve 3)

Method

Peel and dice the onion, peel and finely chop the garlic, gently fry in the oil or fry-light until softening. Chop the bacon (remove fat if desired) and add to the frying pan and fry until cooked. Peel and dice the carrot into reasonably large pieces and add to the pan, along with the lentils and fry for 1-2 minutes, stirring constantly. If desired add the wine and the chorizo, chopped into large dice, at this point. Add the tomatoes, season with the chilli, salt and pepper, and slowly bring to the boil. Turn down low and simmer for around half an hour until the lentils have absorbed most of the liquid and it's thick and tasty.

Serve with crusty bread or garlicy mashed potatoes (just peel a couple of cloves of garlic and chop in half and add to the water while the potatoes are boiling, and they'll mash in once cooked). This quantity serves 2-3 people, and it is even better with the chorizo as well.

I'm not going to try and play catch-up, mostly because I simply can't remember anything particularly exciting of late. At least until this weekend. Emily and John have finished decorating their room, so the guest room is now available for the first time, and they invited me to stay, to coincide with my birthday, or at least the nearest weekend to it.

So we arrived on Friday night to find that Steph and Dave were also staying the night, though on the living room floor. A nice curry from the local takeaway and lots of chatting and drinking ensued, with children in need on the telly as background, and us getting to bed around 1:30am.

Saturday Emily had to work, and John had taekwondo, family and football, so Steph and Dave took us off to spend the day out and about, but not before we'd had danish pastries and crumpets for breakfast. Being in Hull, and Mike not having seen it before the first stop was... The Humber Bridge. We didn't go over it in the end, as I'd thought to toll might be a bit expensive for just driving across and back, but in retrospect maybe that was a mistake. However we did walk down from the visitor area under the bridge and down to the shore, which was briskly windy and rather cool, in both senses, especially impressive when the sun came out. Then we walked back up through the trees of the country park, which was rather lovely, and kept us nice and sheltered. Then we headed into Hull and spent 45 minutes trying to get parked. Here we had time for lunch and a bit of pottering, and looking at some historic ruins, before heading over to the shiny new St Stephens shopping centre to find Mum and Dad buying shoes in Em's shop. Well OK, mum buying shoes. Steph then joined in, while I popped into New Look to find a top - it's nice to be in one that actually stocks the Inspire plus-size range. Then the six of us headed over to a rather nice pub called the White Hart for nice beer, before heading back to Em's.

Mum, dad, Steph and Dave headed off to check into a hotel for the night, while Em and John tried not to panic about the oven not working. Thankfully it eventually got up to temperature, allowing us to have a lovely 3 course dinner. Steph and Dave provided a starter of cold meat and assorted anti-pasto with bread and salad, Em and John proceeded to stuff us with chicken and bacon cooked with cherry tomatoes, along with broccoli, spuds and butternut squash (hint, you can roast it with the skin on, and then either eat the skin or remove it while eating, which is much easier than trying to remove before cooking, and hadn't occurred to any of us but John). Then we needed something of a break before we cracked open the champagne and cerise liqueur and tucked into the tiramisu, all courtesy of mum and dad. It was another lovely evening sat around talking.

Sunday morning they all came back for a big cooked breakfast at about 11, leaving me just time to finish off my French Harry Potter before I had to get up, and then they insisted I open my presents a day early, since otherwise they wouldn't get to see what I thought. So now I have some lovely artwork on the wall in the living room (though I doubt that will be its final home), a gorgeous lamp sitting by the stereo, a fab clock made from a CD with a picture of a VW campervan, and a huge box of dark chocolates. We barely had time for all the food to go down before it was time to head out yet again to the Pipe and Glass pub in South Dalton (http://www.pipeandglass.co.uk/), for a 3 o'clock Sunday Lunch. The website has menus which are rather out of date but can give you an idea of just how good the food is. I had the hare, pork and fois gras terrine to start with, served with toast, pease pudding and a sail of air dried ham. Followed by a lamb casserole with rosemary dumplings and carrots cooked in local honey. And finished with a fabulous warm plum and almond tart with eggnog ice cream. And then they even brought us truffles with our coffee. We could barely move by the time we left at around 6, but it was utterly utterly wonderful. And just a shame they didn't have space for us to sit in the bar for a bit before we ate. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone.

When we got back to Em's again everyone else had to get off, to get home and get a reasonable night's sleep, but we sat up watching telly for a while, including Top Gear which had an item featuring not only the Humber Bridge but the Alfa Romeo 159, which happens to be my dad's shiny new car, in rather an impressive coincidence. It was strange seeing James May down on the beach in the exact spot we'd walked past only the previous day, in the car we'd just been driving in. We didn't have room for dinner, just a very large gin and some pringles, before we bid them goodnight and thanks for having us. Sadly while Emily had booked the week off work she ended up having to work on Monday after all, for the induction of a new team leader, which was definitely a shame.

So in the end my birthday itself featured a lie-in, a long journey, a lazy afternoon geeking, and a lazy evening watching TV and eating fish and chips. Very quiet, but lovely nonetheless. And today I got chocolates in the post from Janet, and couldn't be happier, noting it's also now 2 years since Mike and I went on our first date. Yay!

( Tuesday )

And that concludes a week of logging my food. This has been crossposted between lnr and incendiaryfood, although I've been cut tagging it on the former. I was particularly amused to be asked to make the cut text include the word "food" so some people could avoid reading it, when the whole point has been to be public about what I'm eating. This has not been a diet, it's been what I might eat on a fairly ordinary week (ok, including a birthday and an anniversary, but still, there are parties many other weeks). I still don't feel particularly militant about it.

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

( Food )

Friends round for dinner last night, it was a lovely evening. Food:

Mozzarella, Avocado and Tomato salad
. o O 0 O o .
Chicken breasts with Sage and Onion Stuffing, wrapped in Smoked Bacon, served with Roast Vegetables
. o O 0 O o .
Gin and Tonic Jelly, assorted Cake, After Eights

Tickets for Monday's gig arrived. They'd sent tickets for the balcony (seated) rather than for downstairs (standing). Not v impressed. However when I complained and said I'd be in the previous gig on Sunday they've actually arranged to meet me there and exchange tickets! V impressed indeed.

Driving theory test this morning. 35/35 on the multiple guess (for the third time running) - pass mark is 30. 64/75 on the hazard perception - pass mark is 44. You can score up to 5 points for each hazard, depending on how soon you spotted it developing. And there are 14 clips, one of which has 2 hazards in it instead of 1. I scored 9 on the clip with 2 hazards. Of the remaining clips I scored 5 on 5, 4 on 6 and 3 on 2. Pretty damned happy with that. Next step: leave it til next working day for number to be passed on to booking system, then organise myself an intensive practical course (prob 10-15 hours over a weekend) with the test at the end of it.

Now I just need to decide what I'm doing this evening. Want to help? [Poll #630236]

Toad in the hole, spinach, plus leftover new potatoes sliced and fried with garlic.

Cherries halved, stoned, stewed in orange juice, to be served with Clare's frozen gingery pudding and with amaretto over the top.

Any minute now it will be ready and hopefully very good. Getting hungry. Still, good to actually cook for a change.