SmarterFitter Blog Less diet, more brain

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Even though I work from home now, I still love Fridays! I started my day as I usually do: bright and early with a cup of lemon and honey tea. I am usually too tired and groggy to bother with a photo of my tea, but Friday I somehow had the will. I started drinking lemon and honey teas when I went off caffeine. I’ve discovered that I really like strong-flavoured honeys. This “Tasmanian Leatherwood Honey” is very earthy and aromatic. It wakes me up!

After tea and a bit of email catch-up, it was Bircher breakfast time (and some more Dickens, of course). Things felt a little rushed because Tim and I were signed up to take a “Becoming Self Employed” course at the Home Office. I almost left the house without flipping the No Knead Loaf that I had started the night before!

With the dough flipped we were off to learn about bookkeeping and taxes from 10am to 1pm. I had a few nuts and some water at about noon to tie me over til lunch. By the time we got home at 2ish, I was ravenous! Luckily, leftovers were close at hand. It took me about three minutes to assemble this salad of mixed leaves, blanched broccoli, leftover red rice salad and chickpeas.

All the while I baked a loaf of bread. This is our stock 100% Whole Wheat No Knead Bread with a seeded crust. I’ve been adding olive oil to the baking pot which results in a nice crispy crust. Inside, the crumb was moist and light. Another success!

I’m now seeing what a food-obsessed day Friday was. After lunch and bread, I took a quick trip to our local green grocer for part of our week’s groceries (the stuff we can’t get at the farmer’s market). This is about five day’s worth of food for two people - corn, tomatoes, bananas, cucumber, onions, broccoli, eggplant, peppers, lemons, kiwi, grapefruit, rocket/arugula, chilies. I will acquire all of my greens, salad leaves and apples at the farmer’s market. Yes, we eat a lot of veggies! (Life of a vegetarian!) For reference, this pile of food cost £15.

Shortly after 5pm we went to our local pub for a Friday pint before dinner. I had my usual, a half pint of Hoegaarden, while Tim had his usual, a pint of Staropramen. It felt like ages since we went out for a quiet beer together. It was nice!

We usually go out to dinner of Friday but I had sort of blown my eating out wad at Rasa on Wednesday, so I cooked The Roast Veggie Meal. Basically, eggplant, red romano peppers, garlic, chillies, green tomatoes, red cherry tomatoes, lots of olive oil and thyme, roasted for a good long time. We ate this with bread and rocket. And a little red wine. SO good.

How long before I tire of photographing my Bircher muesli every morning? The recipe is pretty much always the same: oats, raisins, apricots, almonds, apple a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkle of cinnamon. Sometimes I mix it up with a little prune or a few hazelnuts. But for the most part it’s the same.

I’ve been letting my reading material creep into the photos, as a sort of side-blog of the books I read. I’m a slow reader, though, so the books will only be slightly more changeable than the breakfasts. At the moment I’m reading my first Charles Dickens novel EVER: Great Expectations. I thought I’d struggle with the language, but it’s actually a very easy and enjoyable read. Funny! A large part of it is set in London, and reading about his characters running around places like Temple and Cheapside back in the days of the “Big Smoke” gives me a bit more insight into the “roots” of this neat old city that I live in.

But back to food. It was a fairly simple food day. My appetite wasn’t its usual ravenous self, thanks to my recent rest from exercise. I miss being constantly hungry, as distracting as it was. I can’t wait to get back into the game so I can eat as much as I want!

The Indian/beer bomb from the night before put me in the market for a bit of liquid comfort. So, in a rare turn of events, I had a cup of fully-loaded hot black tea with milk. This was my second caffeinated beverage since going caffeine free so many weeks ago. It didn’t give me the same buzz as the coffee, but I could still feel the caffeine coursing through my veins.

Lunch was a bit unusual, but satisfying. I sauteed some onion and celery with some leftover Camargue red rice
and pan-fried tofu. On the side, I had some chard with pine nuts and garlic, inspired by a recipe in the New York Times. This was a bit different from my usual lunches, and I think the unexpected nature of the meal is what prompted Tim to say “this is weird”. But he ate it really fast, and I thought it was very nice!

Dinnertime came but my appetite lagged behind. Tim cooked one of his famous “spag bowls“, a vegan version of spaghetti bolognaise made with TVP. I’m not sure what he does to it - something with bay leaves, garlic and onion - but it’s really yummy. A true comfort food. Since I wasn’t very hungry, I opted to fill up on greens - I LOVE broccoli - but they sure made the spag bowl part look a bit measly on my plate. That’s okay - it all ended up in my tummy soon enough.

Appetite or not I could not resist an after-dinner grapefruit, a bit of a ritual of mine. I’m a grapefruit addict! This one was fine - a bit sour, but refreshingly cold straight out of the fridge.

I’ve been fascinated by this idea of keeping a food photo diary for a while now. After keeping tabs on Jenna’s prolific diary of her eating habits Eat, Live, Run, I’ve been inspired to do the same. We’ll see how long I can keep this up! I’m already a day behind.

Here’s a run-down of what was on my plate yesterday. It was a very good food day overall, made awesome by a trip to my favorite Indian restaurant: Rasa!

Breakfast was the same as usual: Bircher muesli with a cup of rooibos and a bit of the Time Out guide on the side (for some reason I like to read about all the things going on in London - and then not do any of them).

I forgot to add my mid-morning snack until all that was left of it was an empty mug that used to hold decaf coffee and the nasty brown core of an egrement russet apple. Yum!

Lunch… I made Delia’s red rice salad, subbing pan-fried tofu for the feta, with a bit of rocket and broccoli on the side (gotta eat my greens!). I actually remembered to marinated the tofu the night before in a bit of Bragg’s liquid aminos diluted with some water. A simple marinate, but enough to make it yummy.

Dinner was a real treat. Our friend, Zoe, invited us to Rasa, one of the best Indian restaurants in the world! Their cookbook (The New Tastes of India: Over 100 Vibrant Vegetarian Recipes from Southern India
) is one of my favorites, and I frequently make their savoy cabbage and cucumber and coconut salad. Even though Rasa is right around the corner from our flat, we don’t eat there very often (ah, the life of a couple of poor freelancers - but thanks to the Rasa cookbook, I am learning to cook their special treats at home). There are some dishes that are best left to the pro’s, like a masala dosa, a must-have whenever we go to Rasa. It was as good as ever.

I ordered some black eyed peas - don’t know why but I’ve been in the mood for black eyed peas lately. Their version is pretty simple, but very nice! That creamy stuff in the background is eggplant in the most amazing garlic / cashew / coconut sauce I’ve ever eaten. SO good. And the dish next to it is a tomato curry. All of this was awesome with chapati. I was in heaven.

This is Rasa’s savoy cabbage thoran. What can I say? For a cabbage-lover like me, this stuff is like a drug. Lots of onion and mustard seeds. That’s coconut on top.

A picture of the whole feast, and lots of empty beer glasses. It was an awesome meal. There were moments of silence where we all just stunned by how good everything was.

I somehow managed to not eat too much… my prior experiences with Indian buffets taught me a good lesson.

Fungus would normally be the last thing I’d want to find in my apartment, but in this case, I don’t mind.

Tim and I recently bought a “Table Oyster Mushroom Medley Kit” so we can grow our own mushrooms at home. We found our kit at the local farmer’s market, where it cost £8 and claimed to produce about 1kg of mushrooms. This seemed like a pretty good deal, especially when it costs about £22 per kilo to buy oyster mushrooms on their own. Plus, growing mushrooms sounded like fun, and I was really excited to learn that they could be grown indoors.

The kit consists of two myceliated blocks of “mushroom substrate” made from beech sawdust. Setup is a no-brainer - just cut a diagonal “H” into the plastic of each block and place the blocks in a light, airy room away from drafts (or if growing outdoors, place in a sheltered spot protected from the wind and sun).

The mushrooms started out as little “pins” poking through the slits in the plastic after a day or two. It was only a few more days before one of our logs exploded with glorious fungal life. I couldn’t believe how fast they grew! I wish I had taken some time lapse photography to record the process.

The instructions say that the kit can produce about 1 kg of mushrooms over two crops and estimates the growth time to be about eight to ten days. Yesterday, we harvested our first lot of mushrooms from one of the logs (shown above), about seven days after slicing the plastic. It weighed in at 145g which was a little disappointing.

More disappointing is that the other log seems pretty dead. Or is it? I just gave it a closer look today and noticed the “pins” poking through, but this is way slower than the instructions let on. I’ll be super happy if they spring to life. So far, at £55 per kilo, these shrooms are proving to be an expensive experiment! But you can put a price on experience. It IS fun and unbelievably easy to do this. My hope is that the “dead” mushroom log is simply a late but ample bloomer, and that its lively brother will produce an impressive second harvest.

Of course, the best part about growing mushrooms is eating them! We decided to make something simple that would really let the mushrooms stand on their own. I bought a nice baguette while Tim fried up the mushrooms in olive oil with a little onion and garlic. Tim had his mushrooms in a baguette with parsley and parmesan. I put my mushrooms on little baguette slices, kind of like mushroom bruschetta. The mushrooms were delicious, and tasted even better knowing they were made in our flat and picked that day.

If you love mushrooms as much as I do, or even if you just kind of like them a little, I highly recommend growing your own. You can buy a Pearl Oyster Mushroom Patch for just $20 from Amazon and works indoors or outdoors. I’ve never used it but the girl in the picture looks pretty happy. I don’t blame her - growing your own stuff is fun and rewarding. Plus, the shrooms take up very little space, they don’t smell bad, and you don’t even need to water them. It’s the ultimate houseplant for the lazy gardener!

More fungal finds:

My Growing Mushrooms Flickr set

Shiitake Mushroom Indoor / Outdoor Growing Kit

Growing Mushrooms Guide on Channel 4

Autumn in London can seem a cold and dreary place, but there is sunshine in the vegetable aisle as some of my favorite vegetables are starting to come into season. Cabbage, cauliflower, kale, and butternut squash are slowly overtaking last month’s peppers and tomatoes, and I am armed with plenty of good reasons to warm up the house with a hot oven. Roasted winter vegetables are one of my favorite things. Winter blues be gone - bring on the comfort food.

Last night, I made my first foray into Morrocan cuisine with a tagine recipe I found on BBC Good Food. A tagine is a type of conical clay pot used in Moroccan cuisine to make slow-cooked stews. This particular stew consists of mixed vegetables, onions and prunes in a chermoula marinade consisting of onion, garlic, ginger, lemon juice and spices.

For lack of a traditional tagine pot, I made do with a Chasseur covered casserole which seemed to do the trick. The chermoula is amazing - I bet it would be a tasty marinade for tofu. The prunes were also a great addition, though other dried fruits like apricots or figs would probably work as well. I love that this tagine can pretty much be made with whatever vegetables are handy. The original recipe called for potatoes and parsnips, but I used cauliflower and butternut squash, in addition to carrots, leeks, and red onion.

I served this with almond and chickpea couscous. As far as “complete meals” go, this one’s pretty solid: beans, grains, and way more than your five-a-day. I bet this is the kind of dish that tastes even better the next day (I will find out tonight when I eat what little tagine is leftover).

Almond and Chickpea Couscous

175g couscous
1.5 tsp harissa
(Moroccan chilli paste)
400g can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
small handful toasted almonds

Pour 400ml boiling water over the couscous in a bowl, then stir in the harissa with 1/4 tsp salt. Add the chickpeas, then cover and leave for 5 mins. Fluff up with a fork and serve with the tagine, flaked almonds and extra mint.

Yesterday was a GORGEOUS day here in London - cloudless blue skies, cool autumn air, a mild breeze, PERFECT weather for a bike ride.

London may not seem like a great place for a leisurely bike ride, and for day-to-day practicalities, that’s pretty much true. London roads are riddled with traffic, pollution, potholes and a surprising lack of good views. Fortunately, there are plenty of great parks scattered about, including Hampstead Heath, London’s largest (791 acre) parkland. I decided that “the Heath” seemed like a great destination, but I wanted to to enjoy the journey, too. So I Googled for “Stoke Newington Hampstead Heath Bike Route” and that is how I discovered Bikely.com.

Bikely is basically a place for cyclists to share their bike routes. Anyone can create a route on a Google map, then tag that route with helpful terms like “hills”, “scenic”, “commute”, “offroad”, etc. You can also search for routes near a specific city.

What makes Bikely WORK is that a lot of people from all over the world actually seem to use it so there’s plenty to choose from.

The route I found was the Stoke Newington Hampstead Heath circuit, a 15mi loop tagged as “training”, “steep” and “scenic”. Steep and scenic it was. I had no idea such hills existed in London! But I’ve gotta give props to “happyhenry”, the route’s author - most of the ride was on VERY quiet streets and it took me to places in London I never new existed, such as Queen’s Wood, a 21-hectare patch of ancient oak-hornbeam woodland just a few miles from my house. How could I have missed that?

Hampstead Heath rocked my world - trees everywhere, leaves falling, ducks, ponds, woods, grassland. And glorious sunshine! As it was a Friday afternoon, it was very quiet except for a few rich people and their dogs, a small film crew, and a very happy runner taking a load off in the sun. Unfortunately, my camera ran out of juice so I couldn’t take any pictures. But by that point I was pretty pooped from the ride, and I still had to cycle back home. The whole trip took about 2.5 hours (an hour more than I estimated, no wonder I was so hungry when I got home).

I love cycling and shouldn’t let London limit my horizons. I’ll definitely be using Bikely again. There were a few longer loops from Stoke Newington that go beyond London and into the country. I can’t think of a cheaper, greener, or higher energy way to escape the big bad city!

I leave you with one of the few photos I took before the camera batteries died. This was taken atop of a hill in Crouch End. Behold the blue sky!

Bikely

Today’s Guardian warns that darkening dread is descending on the stockmarkets. While the economy’s upside down, the least we can do is keep our health in order. He’s a few articles to help get you there.

Staying Healthy in a Sick Economy [New York Times]
In this article, businesspeople wonder how a perilous financial climate will affect their physical fitness — and if exercise could help them weather hard times.

Eating on $25 a Week: The Experiment [Cheap Healthy Good]
Responding to a challenge posed by the Illinois Food Bank Association, Kris demonstrates just how hard it is for many citizens to live within their means while still eating nutritious meals.

The $20 Dinner Party [Bitten]
Don’t like a rotten economy get in the way of a stylish party. Mark Bittman says, “In this post, Daniel Meyer spends just $20 at the farmer’s market and creates an appealing dinner for four.”

Restaurants Face Lean Times in the Economic Downturn [Time Magazine]
A light at the end of the tunnel? Could the credit crunch mean the end of chain restaurants?

The Upside of an Economic Downturn? [Wise Bread]
Fred Lee argues that these difficult times “could go a long way in instilling us with a greater appreciation for the simpler things in life, like our famiy, friends, and health.”

Staying Healthy When The Economy Sucks [Cranky Fitness]
Crabby McSlacker writes about the economy’s effect on health and fitness and implores her readers for practical ways to stay healthy when the money’s tight.

I continue to be amazed, humbled, and inspired by all of the brave people out there blogging about their journeys, struggles and triumphs.

Today, two separate bloggers have written about their own issues with weight, obsession and fear. Both posts gave me a lot to think about and I encourage you to check them out.

First, Kelly at Grounded Fitness has written candidly about her struggles with bulimia and how she “broke the addiction.” Please do read her story; I know it gave me a lot to think about. Here is a snippet:

I wasted so many years obsessing about calories and food and my body, that I don’t have the energy to do it anymore. I don’t have the mental energy to plan out every meal and workout constantly. Health is an amazing thing, it saved my life and brought me to where I am today, but I will not let another thing take over my life. To be healthy, you don’t have to obsess or count or make rules. I will not let one more thing cause me to feel guilty, cause me to feel like I’m not good enough or that I have failed.

At the end of the post she asks a great question: can something be an addiction, even if its technically good for you? Can something that is good for your physical health, negatively effect your mental and emotional health?

It’s an important question and one that all of us aspiring rock stars should stop to consider on our path to awesomeness. My short answer is YES, it’s very possible for something physically good to be emotionally bad. It’s all too easy to get lost along the way to our initial goals and let the details consume us. I’m forever grateful that people like Kelly take the time to share their stories so we can learn from them and remember a.) why we chose this healthy path in the first place, and 2.) that we’re not alone! Thank you, Kelly!

The second post comes from Lynn C who is guest-posting at MizFit. Lynn writes about her own effort to avoid scale-obsession and why she doesn’t keep a scale in the house.

I would probably step on that damn thing more than once a day. I’d probably step on it every single time I went to the bathroom. I would get obsessed at the difference between first-thing-in-the-morning, naked weight and after-five-pm-fully-dressed-at-Weight-Watcher’s weight.

This post could not have been more appropriately timed. I’m in the habit of weighing myself every morning, and as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’ve gained a couple pounds in the last few weeks. Lately I’ve approached the morning weigh-in with dread, fearing that another day of idleness will reflect itself in the numbers. Then I read something Lynn said that I really needed to hear:

I recognize that this cannot possibly be healthy. That one number shouldn’t be the entirety of my self-worth.

She’s right: health and fitness isn’t all about weight. It’s about feeling awesome.

Many who are successful in improving their physical health only do so at the expense of their mental well-being. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I thank Kelly and Lynn for sharing their stories. They both reminded me that I need to take of my mind as much as my body, even more so now that my body’s in recovery mode.

Bulimic To Personal Trainer: Can Too Much of a Good Thing Be Bad?
The Weight of Fear (Or Good Reasons to Be A Big Fat Coward)

Just a quick post this afternoon. I am holed up in the flat recovering from my various stupidity-induced (i.e. overuse) injuries. I miss the pool. I miss all the food!

I’ve been looking for some music to cheer me up, and in doing so I came across one of my favorite songs for getting hard. It may sound cheesy (because it is), but I used to start every weightlifting session with this song, back when I used the gym. It also turns out to be the perfect song to recover to. And who couldn’t be cheered up by these icons of the 80’s?

I’m one of those rare people who actually enjoy eating their greens, especially when it comes to kale.

Kale is from the Brassica oleracea family, just like cabbage and brussel sprouts. This hearty green vegetable is delicious, versatile, and like all leafy greens, highly nutritious! Kale is very high in vitamins A, C and E, and is also full of sulfer-containg phytonutrients which are thought to lessen the occurrence of a wide variety of cancers, including breast and ovarian cancers.

Me? I love kale for its flavor and texture. There are several varieties of kale, including curly- and plain-leaved, but my favorite is is cavolo nero, also known as “black cabbage” or “Tuscan kale”. I’ve never seen it in US supermarkets but it’s popular here in London.

Last year, my favorite way to prepare kale was simple: lightly steamed with salt and pepper. When served with a bit of brown rice and lentils, you get a complete meal that is somehow comforting in its simplicity.

At least I think so, anyway.

This year, when I got my hands on the first kale crop, Tim asked me a simple question:

“Can you try to make them yummy this time?”

I guess not everyone shares my enjoyment of pure and simple kale.

Very well. I can appreciate a little flavor boost. So I’ve been experimenting…

• Stir-fried garlic and kale never fails.
• Even better is kale stir-fried with caramelized onion.
• For a spicy kick, top steamed or boiled kale mixed with roasted chili and caramelized onion garnish
• When all else fails, greenophobes can hide their kale in a big pot of soup or chili.
• Kale also makes a great addition to tofu scrambles!
• Kale pairs nicely with carrots. What do I mean? Read on…

One pairing I can definitely recommend is kale and carrots. In both stir-fries and salads (yes, kale can be eaten raw!), the sweetness of the carrot is a nice balance to the earthiness of the kale. Here are a couple recipes that take advantage of this combination.