Sarah Discovers How to Eat – Progress Report #3 [August]

Facts & Figures

It’s been 92 days… 107 recipes down, 278 to go. My recipe rate is 1.16 per day. I need at least 1.05 recipes per day to stay on track – so I’m still ahead of schedule.


Hits and Misses

Hits – Low Fat
Salmon marinated in Den Miso
Brown Rice Salad
Restrained Mushroom Risotto
Mushroom Udon Soup
Beef Braised in Beer
Vegetables with Ginger and Garlic
Braised Fennel
Poisson au Poivre
Cambodian Hot and Sour Beef Salad
Fine Pasta with Crab

Other Hits
Lemon Pie (Weekend Lunch)
Red Wine, Cumin and Onion Gravy (Weekend Lunch)
Pig’s Bum (Weekend Lunch) – ohhhh yeah!

Misses
Braised Pheasant with Mushroom and Bacon (Cooking in Advance)
Beet greens with buckwheat noodles (Low Fat)

The Low Fat chapter is a treasure trove of quality recipes that can be made quickly and simply, generally with store cupboard ingredients. I’m planning to repeat many of these recipes when the mood takes me (I’ve already re-done the mushroom udon soup). And there are still a couple I haven’t done yet – tataki of tuna, the Thai mussels, Thai clams, two salad dressings and the two char siu marinades – so I’ll be trying these ones soon.

One thing I’ve discovered is that we don’t like beetroot! Raw, cooked, and especially the leaves.


How I’m Feeling

About recipes and the project in general… as much as I (obviously) love Nigella’s recipes and her writing, I think I've reached a slightly jaded and over-it point - suddenly all the recipes I see in Australian Gourmet Traveller, Delicious, Waitrose Food Illustrated, Vogue Entertaining and Travel, and even (I'm ashamed to say) Donna Hay are starting to look incredibly inviting. I even got Bill Granger's new book, simply bill, today and his Peach, Almond and Yogurt cake is just crying out to be baked! But obviously I can't start cooking from these sources - I have just enough time to cook all the How to Eat recipes, and I'll definitely fall behind if I start going to other recipes. Not to mention all the unnecessarily excessive calories I'd be ingesting if I were adding yet more puddings to Nigella's plentiful ones. Waaah!

And speaking of excessive calorie ingestion, I’m feeling rather sheepish – August was supposed to be the low fat month, where I’d recharge myself, calorifically speaking, ready for the onslaught of cakes, custards and puddings that are to come in the next nine months. Did I succeed? Did I bollocks. In general, as you can see, I was generally eating healthy meals, but just going nuts in between (alcohol, puddings, chocolate, ice-cream etc.)

This isn’t to say, necessarily, that the advice and recipes in Nigella’s Low Fat chapter are bad, or no longer relevant – even in the current post-Atkins, post-post-low-fat era of dieting. I honestly think that if you were serious and motivated about wanting to lose weight, then the advice in the low-fat chapter would be incredibly useful. I mean, low calorie is low calorie.

And just an aside – this month’s dramatically increased consumption of vegetables really made its effects felt on my family’s and my digestive systems. Feral, yes, but I thought I should just warn anyone else who’s thinking of doing this. (For any Malaysians, wa lung pumpwee, pung sai kia chay… hehehe)

But now that the supposedly low fat month is over, I’ve really, really got to stay motivated with exercise. And with that in mind, I’m off to the gym to work on my pecs. Laterz babes!

xox Sarah