Live For Food

Generally I would say avoid buying ready cut, chopped or grated products.  

However in this case it’s worth it:

If you want grated mozzarella always buy it ready grated.

Never try grating fresh mozzarella yourself – you will get in a big squishy mess.

If you don’t use much mozzarella in one go, put the rest of the packet in the freezer.

You can use it straight from frozen in cooking – on the top of pizzas or baked mushrooms for example.

And it will keep quite happily in the freezer for a month or two!

This question has the same answer as, “How long is a piece of string?”  In other words, there is no right or wrong answer, but it depends for what you are going to use the piece of string.

The answer to how often you should weigh yourself is a personal one, but it comes down to this:

• Weigh yourself as often as you need to keep yourself accountable
• Don’t weigh yourself so much that it drives you crazy and the number is all you can think of

Which of the following is you?

a) Your weighing habits affect your mood:

• If you find yourself obsessed with the number on the scales
• If you think about the number and worry about it all day
• If the number affects your mood for that day i.e. low number = happy, high number = grumpy

Then you are weighing yourself too often!

You need to try:

• Not weighing yourself at all – measure your progress by an item of clothing instead
• Weighing a maximum of once a month

b) Your next weigh in date determines your eating habits:

• If you find yourself in a cycle of eating unhealthy food just after a weigh in followed by your food choices getting healthier the closer you get to your weigh in
• If you don’t weigh yourself if you had a big meal the night before your normal weigh in day

You need to try:

• Weighing yourself more often, and averaging the results over a period of time to get the big picture
• Remembering the scales are not a teacher that tells you off after you’ve had an unhealthy snack!

c) You weigh yourself constantly:

• If you have to stand on the scales at least twice a day, morning and evening
• If you panic if you are not going to be somewhere with scales at your scheduled weigh in time
• If you are obsessive about weighing yourself naked, after going to the bathroom, and before eating anything

You need to try:

• Taking it down a notch – try cutting back to once a day to start with, with the aim of getting down to once a week
• If you can’t do it, get a close friend to hide your scales for a couple of days to help you realize that you can get through the day without standing on the scales

So – what about me?  Well I’m not proud to say I’ve done all three of the above – all in the name of sensibly keeping track of my weight!

At the moment I am trying to eat healthily and cut back a bit to lose a few excess Christmas pounds.  The most effective way of keeping track of my weight at the moment seems to be to weigh every day, first thing in the morning when I wake up, whenever that may be.  I keep the weight tracked on a spreadsheet, and then I take the average of my weight for the last seven days and take that as my true weight.  This smooths out the ups and downs of the last week and lets me see my progress on a more realistic scale without driving me too crazy in any of the above ways!

Do you weigh yourself regularly?  How do you keep the crazy at bay?

I tend to buy quite a lot of lean minced beef (ground beef).  Its always on some kind of offer in the supermarket, and I rarely get tired of bolognese, lasagne or shepherd’s pie.  Every now and again though I fancy a change and go and hunt up a new minced beef recipe.

So I was intrigued by this recipe I found for minced beef curry and decided to give it a go.  I changed the ingredients slightly to suit what I had in the fridge:

Ingredients (serves 2)

250g lean minced beef
1 small slice of onion finely chopped
3 mushrooms, chopped
3 florets of cauliflower
small piece of butternut squash
1 tablespoons olive oil for frying
1 clove garlic, crushed in a press
4 bird’s eye chillies
1/2 tablespoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
dash of cayenne powder
1/2 a 400g tin peeled and chopped plum tomatoes
pinch of salt
50ml water

Method (as adapted from the original to suit my ingredients):

Heat the oil over a medium heat and add the onion when hot, stir and fry for 5 minutes or until the onion just starts to brown.

Add the crushed garlic and chopped chillies, stir and fry for a further minute.

Add the meat and continue to stir and fry until the meat has lost all its pink color, make sure that it is well broken up.

Reduce the heat slightly and add the ground spices and cayenne, and the chopped mushrooms, continuing to stir and fry for 3 minutes ensuring that all the meat is well coated in spice mix.

Stir in the chopped tomatoes and salt, continue heating whilst stirring occasionally until the mixture is back to a gentle boil.

Add the cauliflower and butternut squash and stir. If the vegetables are not completely covered by liquid, add some of the water until they are.

Bring back to the boil, cover and simmer gently for 35 minutes.  Check and stir frequently during this time.

Result:

Overall I enjoyed this recipe.  It was something different to do with mince, and it was tasty.  However it didn’t taste a lot different from chilli con carne – it just  had different vegetables and no red kidney beans.

It also came out quite watery.  I often seem to have this problem when using tinned tomatoes.  I think probably the answer is that such dishes really need to sit and simmer for an hour or so at least to reduce the sauce down, but I don’t often have the time for that.  If I do bolognese I tend to use passata which is thicker and seems to get round this problem, but I like to try and follow new recipes by the book as much as possible to begin with.

I also forgot to stir in any coriander right at the end – that might have differentiated it from chilli.  I’m terrible with instructions that have to be left right till the end until serving.  I so often forget to stir in the final herb or ingredient!

Root ginger is widely used in Indian and Chinese recipes.

You might not use it that often, but you can’t beat the taste of fresh ginger.

So once you’ve bought your root ginger, chop it into chunks and freeze it.

When you need it get it out of the freezer about 15 minutes beforehand.

You can both peel and grate it whilst it’s still frozen.

It’s  is a lot easier than grating it fresh as it’s much firmer and the liquid doesn’t come out in the same way.

Plus it keeps for longer.

Try it for yourself!

If you are having trouble either losing or maintaining your weight, and you are either getting towards the end of your weight loss journey, or perhaps have hit a plateau, or maybe you just have a small build, its possible that you may have to be more careful with your calorie intake than other people.

Personally I think it seems to be the height of unfairness that the less you weigh, the less calories you need, and the harder it is to either continue losing weight or maintain that loss. You would think that after all the effort you put in to lose the weight, you would be rewarded with a bit of leeway, but unfortunately it seems to work the other way round.

So if this is you, and you want to continue weight loss, or stop the weight creeping upwards again, why not start by analyzing the calories you are drinking.  Even if you keep a food diary it can be easy to forget about these calories or not take them into account.

A cup of tea with milk in can be anywhere between 10 and 40 calories (I’m quite keen on milky tea myself). I calculated for my own personal intake that at work every day I used to drink 200 calories of milk just in my tea.

I can’t face it black, and I’m not keen on herbal teas particularly, but I tried green tea and decided I like it and slowly weaned myself off the tea with milk. Now probably two thirds of the tea I drink is green tea without milk. It may take trial and error to find a different tea you like. Check out tea manufacturers websites to see if you can get sample tea bags, or try a different tea at a friend’s house.

I don’t drink coffee myself as I don’t like it, but beware the coffee calorie count from commercial shops such as Starbucks. Their coffees can have as many calories as a small meal.

Fruit juice is of course a healthy drink, but nevertheless a 200 ml glass of juice contains about 100 calories. Treat fruit juice and smoothies as food, not drinks!

Pop or soda is another popular choice. Its not something I drink regularly myself, only on odd occasions, but remember that a 500 ml bottle of Coke has around 200 calories in it. Solution – choose diet pop. Okay the aspartame doesn’t taste great, but if you’re trying to lose weight at least its calorie free. Personally I think Coke Zero tastes better than Diet Coke.

Finally, watch out for alcohol. If you go out for the evening have a glass of water after every alcoholic drink. At home buy small wine glasses, or stubby bottles of beer, and limit yourself to one drink a night or the calories will add up.

My typical day’s drinks would be one or two cups of tea with milk, two glasses of water, two or three green teas and a glass of red wine. I try and save other drinks for special occasions.

So if you drink too many calories try keeping a drinks diary, then cutting back on the liquid calories, and see what happens!  You might be surprised.