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Category Archives: daily food project 2012
Daily Food – an overdue update April 21st – May 7th
I have recently embarked upon The Dukan Diet so my daily food pictures have changed somewhat, gone are the lovely pastas, breads and daahls and in come endless pictures of hard boiled eggs, cottage cheese and chicken breasts! I think that it’s worth a bit of food tedium to have lost 3.5kg so far, so this current regime shall continue for a couple more kgs and then I’ll be back to (almost) normal eating habits. There are a few meals out, we’ve had a few meals at mum’s since starting this diet, but she does it too, so the food fits in perfectly. Other than those feasts, we’ve been out for Japanese, a slap up birthday Italian (carparcio, veal chop, loads of salads, prosecco and red wine – oops) and a Christening (poached salmon, ham, divine chocolate cake, cheese and Pavlova – oops again).
Here’s what I’ve eaten since April 22nd:
On the top row:
Chicken Tikka at our favourite Indian cafe in Manchester, perfect Dukan Diet food.
Fishy starter at mum’s for lunch.
A typical Dukan lunch, sliced homemade burger, boiled eggs, cottage cheese, salmon with homemade tartare sauce.
Chopped salad.
Second row:
Slicked chicken breast, chopped up boiled egg with yoghurt dressing.
Stirfried chicken thighs with five spice & Chinese flavours with green veg.
Boiled eggs, cottage cheese, gherkin.
Smoked salmon, prawns, celery, squid, smoked mackerel pate, yoghurt
Third row:
Tinned tunal salad with fat free fake eggy mayonnaise. Very odd.
Cooked turkey breast and homemade turkey patties with Indian spices.
Sashimi – yum!
Cottage cheese, chicken breast.
Fourth row:
Carparcio with rocket and Parmesan salad – out for a birthday supper.
Dressed crab.
Pavlova – at a Christening.
Fishy starter at mum’s again.
Daily Food – March 23rd to April 20th.
I’ve just found a whole batch of Daily Food pictures which I had formerly ignored and not posted, so here’s giant batch of my nosh. Towards the end of this batch Peter and I embarked on the Dukan Diet to undo some of the recent damage caused by enjoying ourselves too much! The Dukan involves an initial ‘attack phase’ of eating only pure, low fat protein for a length of time depending on how much weight you wish to loose. After this you carry on eating pure protein every other day, alternated with days of yet more protein, but livened up with vegetables. No oil, butter, alcohol, chocolate, rice, pasta, bread, potatoes, cereal, lentils, junk and plenty more as well. You’ll notice the change in the pictures!
The top row:
Daily Food – March 8th to 22nd.
I’m still photographing my food every day, but it’s great to be posting them to Flickr rather than here every day!
Here’s some of what I’ve eaten in the last fifteen days (click on a thumbnail to see larger or click here to see all the pictures with longer descriptions in Flickr)
On the top row
Roast veg, puy lentils and mushrooms with goats cheese.
Mid week fizz as a treat
Soup and wrap out at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.
Scrambled eggs with smoked salmon.
Second row
Ingredients for supper.
Bircher Museli.
Chinesey chicen thights, spuds and choi sum.
Miso soup with noodles and veg.
Third row
Chargrilled chicken breast burger at the Horse and Jockey in Chorlton.
Lazy and sunny lunch at home – deli, cheese and salad.
Found in the fridge lunch.
Healthy breakfast.
Fourth row
Strange breakfast.
Bircher museli and tea for breakfast.
Noodles for lunch.
Daily Food 35/365 Feb 02 – Bruschetta.
I have decided that it is totally impractical to upload a Daily Food picture every single day, it takes too long and some of the pictures are, frankly, very dull indeed with much repetition. So from now on I shall upload the pictures of which I am proud either because they’re great pictures or the food was particularly delicious and I want to write about it.
Daily Food 34/365 Feb02
Broad bean, pea and mint bruschetta and mozarella, basil and chilli bruschetta as a starter to a supper with friends. To follow this I cooked Lauren Pascalle’s baked butternut squash but changed the recipe to use cous cous rather than quinoa. To follow was Nigella Lawson’s chocolate pear pudding which was fabulous. A very good meal indeed!
Tagged bruschetta, starter
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Daily Food 31-33/365
I find that I am somewhat behind with my Daily Food posts, so I shall make a concerted effort this week to catch up with my backlog and get into ‘real time’. Here three small meals from a couple of weeks ago.
Daily Food 31/365 (Jan 31)
If there’s a bar of Lindt Super Fine Milk chocolate around I find it very hard to resist – especially with a cup of tea!
Daily Food 32/365 (Feb 01)
I met with Adam for a cup of tea at Eastern Block cafe in the Northern Quarter for a bit of a mid week catch up. I’d had lunch at home after the gym and decided to have a bit of a treat in the shape of this rather delicious chunk of chocolate chip shortbread.
Daily Food 33/365 (Feb 02)
One of my regular and favourite breakfasts – porridge with demerara sugar and plain yoghurt.
Tagged Breakfast, cake
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Daily Food 27-29/365
Daily Food 27/365
I bought some beautiful pink grapefruits and here’s the first one from the batch, the first I’d had for ages. It was so sweet and juicy – delicious!
Daily Food 28/365
A Saturday lunch for the two of us, at home. We’d been to the lovely newish Booths supermarket at Media City in Salford to buy some nibbles and wine for the evening as we had our friends Phil and Laura coming round for a drink before popping down the road to one of favourite local restaurants, The Persia Grill for a slap up feast. While we were at Booths, Peter decided on a piece of roast, rolled belly pork, not something I would have chosen in a million years but there were some nice bits! I used up the remains in a delicious Chinese style, rice noodle dish for supper a couple of days later which was much better than the original.
Daily Food 29/365
A light lunch after a greedy meal the previous night made with larder and fridge supplies. Tinned sardines in tomato sauce, tinned tuna, a nice fresh salad, some posh olives which didn’t taste of much and a couple of ryvita.
Tagged fruit, lunch
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Daily Food 26/365: At The Buddhist Centre in Manchester
My car was due for a service so when I had dropped it off I spent the rest of the morning in town having a nice mooch around, a little light shopping and a visit to the art gallery. All very nice and something I hadn’t done for a while. Part of the plan was to have a nice lunch somewhere and the venue I settled on was the Earth Cafe in the basement of the Buddhist Center in the Northern Quarter. It’s a great little cafe serving super healthy vegan food in massive portions. I don’t eat there very often for the simple reason that it’s not open at the weekends and that’s when I’m usually in the area. I had a Spanish chickpea and spinach stew with brown rice (which they cook wonderfully, I wish mine turned out like that!), carrot salad and broccoli and beetroot salad, all for £6. Delicious!
Daily Food 26/365
Tagged lunch, vegan
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Daily Food 25/365: Turkey Meatballs
Daily Food 25/365
Turkey Meatballs in Tomato Sauce with Pasta
These really did taste much nicer than they sound. I was in my (ongoing) trying to eat less after holiday phase and decided to buy some rather unatractive turkey mince instead of the more tasty and calorie laden lamb mince which is my favourite. I have cooked a fabulous turkey patty recipe by Yotam Otolehghi on a few occasions but I didn’t think about it while I was shopping and when I did think about it later, I found that my post holiday fridge didn’t have all of it’s normal supplies and the recipe just wouldn’t have worked. Instead I turned to my computer and after wadidng through numerous horrible sounding turkey dishes for ‘slimmers’ I came across this from Nigella Lawson. I usually like her recipes so I gave it a go. It was certainly simple enough, actually, it sounded so simple that I had to make it a bit more complicated and the result was very nice indeed. I had the leftovers last night with some pasta and vegetables when I arrived home, ravenous after my late yoga class.
Turkey Meatballs in Tomato Sauce – with thanks to Nigella Lawson
- For the sauce
- For the meatballs
-
- 500g/1lb 2oz turkey mince
- 1 free-range egg
- 3 tbsp breadcrumbs
- 3 tbsp grated parmesan
- 2 tbsp finely chopped onion and celery (see above)
- 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
- ½ tsp dried thyme
Preparation method
- For the sauce, put the onion and celery into a food processor and blitz to a mush. (Or you can chop as finely as humanly possible by hand.) Reserve 2 tablespoons of the mixture for the meatballs.
- Warm the garlic oil in a large, heavy-based saucepan or casserole, add the onion and celery mixture, along with the thyme, and cook at a moderate to low heat, stirring every now and again, for about 10 minutes.
- Add the cans of plum tomatoes, filling up each empty can with water to add to the pan. Season with the sugar, salt and pepper, stir well and let the mixture come to a bubble, then turn the heat down and simmer the sauce gently while you get on with the meatballs.
- For the meatballs, put all the ingredients for the meatballs, including the reserved chopped onion and celery, and salt according to preference, into a large bowl and gently mix together with your hands. Don’t overmix, as that will make the meatballs dense-textured and heavy.
- When all the meatball ingredients are not too officiously amalgamated, start rolling them into balls. The easiest way is to pinch out an amount about the size of a generously heaped teaspoon and roll it into a ball between the palms of your hands. Put each meatball onto a baking tray lined with baking parchment or greaseproof paper. You should get about 50 little meatballs.
- Drop the meatballs gently into the simmering sauce; I try to let these fall in concentric circles working round the pan from the outside edge inwards, in the vaguest of fashions.
- Let the meatballs simmer in the sauce for 30 minutes, or until cooked through. Serve with rice, pasta, couscous or however you so please.
Daily Food 24/365: Carluccio’s
DailyFood 24/365
I had survived my first day back from Cuba without falling asleep or feeling jetlagged so when it was suggested that we meet a friend for a film and food it sounded like the ideal way to stop me from flaking out before bed time. The food venue was one of our favourites, Carluccio’s mainly because as we were on the phone to our friend to decide where to go I received an emial from them telling me that there was a ’2 for 1 deal’ on main courses – easy decision. This is a picture of my starter which was a special for the day, it’s a mushroom bruschetta and after the previous ten days of tasteless and non-seasoned food it was a joy to eat something so garlicy and chilli flavoured which I enjoyed very much.
Tagged starter
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Daily Food in Cuba: 17/365 to 20/365
Daily Food 17/365
When we arrived at Jibocaoa beach for our eight days of Caribbean paradise, the skies were grey, the wind was howling and the trees were waving around rather alarmingly. We, being thoroughly British, put on a brave face and dutifully sat on our sun loungers fully clothed, reading our books and drinking our watered down, all inclusive, drink as many as you like Mojitos. Ironically, it was on one of these days that my lily white skin succumbed to sun burn, the small are of my skin which was exposed to the elements and not covered by my cardi and it’s still faintly red today, a whole ten days later. Still, it was better than Manchester. On the third day, the sun came out and the wind ceased and we were rewarded with the freshly felled coconuts which were expertly hacked open by the ever willing hotel staff, down on the beautiful beach for us to have a few mouthfuls of the oddly refreshing and faintly coconutty water from within.
Daily Food 18/365
It took a couple of days for me to get bored of white beans for my breakfast and to wait patiently in line for the egg man to do his thing. Omelets, scrambled and fired, just how you want them, all for a wait in a queue where the nice man will do exactly as you ask, if you give him a CUC, he’ll even smile for you. Very nice they were too. Two real, fresh, white eggs, cracked and scrambled just for me and served on the strange and slightly briochey white toast (toasted by me in one of those odd conveyor belt toasters which never work the first time round), none of that horrible liquid egg juice which we had cooked for us at the smart breakfast at the smart hotel in Havana. I kept trying the cheese to see if it would eventually taste of anything. It didn’t.
Daily Food 19/365
We had heard about ‘lobster night’ purely by accident so we made sure to be there and to be hungry and we weren’t disappointed. I love lobster and will eat it whenever the opportunity presents itself, which isn’t too often. So imagine our delight when we found the tasty crustaceans to be plentiful and perfectly cooked – plain boiled and there for the taking again and again and again. All they needed was some little pats of butter from the bread station and some damp salt to make a deliciously simple feast.
Daily Food 20/365
When this appeared in front of me, it was the most delighted I had ever been by one of the most bizarre plates of food I’ve ever eaten. That’s what a seven hour coach journey will do to me. By the time we arrived in Trinidad on the south coast of Cuba we were so exhausted from the seemingly endless coach trip (including one broken fan belt incident resulting in a nice shady sit down on the side of the motorway for the passengers while the driver took his stockings off to make the repair) that I feel we would have eaten anything. In fact, we did what we never ever do, and that was follow a tout from outside the bus station to his restaurant which was all of ten paces away. He was such a charming young thing, that we really didn’t have the energy to say “no”. When we sat down in a cool, lofty ceilinged prettily decorated room with tables laid with proper sized wine glasses and white table cloths, we could have married him. The fact that the food was so horrible was made totally immaterial to the kind welcome and chilled wine. I couldn’t even bring myself to photograph the other dish which was four halved cold, hard boiled eggs with the yolks removed and mixed with something tasting like Shipphams Fish Paste and then creatively put back into the eggs. I think it would have cracked my lens, mind you, we did eat it. The spaghetti had that weird taste of Heinz tinned spaghetti with what was actually a decent tomato pasata and sprinkled with the typically tasteless Cuban cheese. We ate every last mouthful. They were so nice to us that they even looked after our overnight bags for us while we explored the town before collecting them later on the way to our hotel for the night. The establishment was Sr. Juan’s, opposite the bus station which doesn’t seem to get a mention on one single website!
