Food Archives - Page 3 of 9 - Conversations through the middle

Weight loss going in the right direction!

November 19, 2012

I am amazed, but after five days in Morocco I still managed to lost two pounds! I weighed myself when I got back home on Wednesday, in time for my Jenny Craig weigh-in, and yes, I’d lost two pounds.

Just to update you re the Jenny Craig diet. After completing my two week blogger trial I was invited to continue with the weight-loss programme for another month, how lucky is that?

So I‘m happily munching my way through my Jenny Craig meals and snacks – though Dotty seems to have eaten most of the cereal bars – grrrrh.

Just to get back to Morocco, the food was so healthy – lots of luscious fresh fruit every morning and masses of gorgeous salad at lunchtime, then in the evening vegetables cooked Moroccan style, couscous, fish – that really it shouldn’t be a surprise that I managed to shed a little weight. There were no crisps, no chocolate, no biscuits – in short, no rubbish to stick to my hips.

Food – Dotty’s baking day

November 18, 2012

Today will go down in our family history as the day Dot baked her first muffins and biscuits almost entirely on her own (though she did leave the washing up to me).

I remember learning to bake with my mam and I’m glad that Dot is showing the same enthusiasm for cake making as I did… and just as much enthusiasm for eating the results.

It is now getting on for 8pm and she has had so much sugar today I won’t be surprised at all if she doesn’t sleep.

The ginger biccys before they went into the oven…

… and when they came out… yummy!

And not forgetting the chocolate chip muffins!

Now, this evening, there are hardly any muffins left – though we have enough ginger biccys to last until Christmas!

Foodie Friday – quick, quick brownies

October 26, 2012

I found this recipe when I was browsing the internet looking for something I could bake for Dot mid week. I was after something quick, nothing complicated and something with a bit of a yum factor. After a few hours timewasting when I should have been working, and countless recipes later, I came across these brownies.

Last time I made brownies they were so rich (too chocalatey, yes there is such a thing, so overpowering they made you gag) and they took ages to make. This time I had none of that. I baked them today and they turned out, well, different, but nonetheless delicious with lots of yum factor – or so Dot tells me…

Chocolate brownie or Christmas pudding?

Ingredients

200g butter or margarine

165g cocoa powder

400g light brown soft sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

125g plain flour

2 eggs

100g chocolate chunks (or broken chocolate)

Method

1. Grease and line a 20 x 18cm tin. Preheat the oven to 180°C / gas mark 4.

2. Melt the butter and cocoa together in a saucepan. Add the sugar and vanilla. Mix thoroughly.

3. Remove from the heat and mix in the flour then the eggs. Mix and add the chocolate chunks (or broken chocolate). Pour into the baking tin.

4. Bake for 20 minutes. The brownies are cooked when the top is slightly springy.

5. Cool and cut into 15 slices.

See, it looks like mud!

Just a couple of things to add to this:

Nothing in the recipe tells you where to put the chocolate chunks (!) so I added them to the final mixture, just before putting the tin in the oven. I also used a 100g bar of chocolate instead of chocolate chunks – I used one with 70% cocoa and it also contained cocoa nibs (they are the little bits you can see in the photos). I have to say Dot had great fun bashing the **** out of the chocolate bar so we ended up with lots of little bits.

I’m not a great cook. Or a great baker. That much is obvious from the photographs. My brownies look like mud, and nothing like they look in the picture on the website. When they came out of the oven there were pools of liquid lying on top; the brownies looked more like Christmas pudding than brownies. When they had cooled and I cut them into squares, well they weren’t squares. Some of them resemble squares, the rest simply mashed up into bits. I left them in the oven longer than 20 minutes, just because of the liquid pooling on top. So when I tried to cut them they were rock hard on the edges but soft towards the middle.

Yet I think that worked and I have discovered something new. They are gooey but chewy, hard yet soft, they should be awful but they taste delicious. Not to blow my own trumpet, but both Dot and OH couldn’t get enough of them. And me, well I tasted a tiny bit, despite the diet, and I think they are wonderful!

A weighty matter – dieting with Jenny Craig

October 25, 2012

I have just made chocolate brownies, which perhaps wasn’t such a good idea as I’m trying to lose weight. For the past fortnight I have been sampling the Jenny Craig diet plan, complete with what seemed like an enormous amount of Jenny Craig food when it arrived.

I have had a weekly telephone consultation with a lady called Clare, during which we discussed my eating habits, how much weight I wished to lose, how I found the food, if I’d kept to the plan and any other issues I wanted to raise. These talks have been helpful, though of course I’ve only had two of them as part of this short-term introduction to the company.

Nonetheless, I have lost four pounds – one the first week and three the second week. A sensible amount to lose in two weeks I think. The food has been great – I’ve liked all of it, though a couple of the meals looked very unappetising to me before cooking.

Overall I had a good selection to try: a variety of breakfast cereals, soups and noodles for lunch, assorted main meals for the evening, and snacks – biscuits (yes, really), cereal bars and crisp-type things (the salted ones were yummy).

I would say if I’ve learned anything over this past fortnight it’s how to gauge portion sizes. When I saw my first Jenny Craig dinner I thought it would never be enough, but do you know, it was, especially when eaten with a selection of vegetables. This confirmed to me what I’ve been thinking for years – my OH cooks too much food and fills our plates too high (I can blame him as he is a superb cook).

Of course the guys at Jenny Craig worked out just right how much food to send and the diet meals delivered lasted the full two weeks. Now I’m on my own I hope to keep up the good work and shift more of those excess pounds in time for Christmas. And boy do I have loads of them to shift – now I’m in my 40s I find the weight goes on much quicker than it ever did before and I’ve put on about two stone in the past year.

And about those brownies – I made them for Dot, so no need to worry about me eating them…