Strange times

I haven't blogged for ages.  This is largely for the following reasons:

(a) I haven't really cooked anything for a while; and
(b) I'm just getting fatter and fatter.

I find myself in a very weird and uneasy situation: one where I'm totally unhappy with my life, with myself...hating the way that I look and feeling that my weight is responsible for a good 80% of my misery (I have been thin - I KNOW it's good being in that gang) and yet I'm seemingly powerless to do anything about it. 

I arrange nights out.  I eat anything and everything that I want when I'm out, taking no care to avoid the bit that's fried.  I invite people over for lunch and cook them onglet with beef dripping chips and mayonnaise. 

Our systems went down at work today and I went out to do various bank-related stuff.  On the way back to the office I noticed that FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER there wasn't a queue around the block at Chilango, so in I walked.  Burritos aren't even really my thing.  I could have had a salad.  I could even have had a relatively healthy burrito, but no.  I looked at the array of sauces and cheese and guacamole in front of me and I pretty much thought "What's the way of making this the most unhealthy it could possibly be?  Get it all in there."  And so I did. 

I'm out of control and I truly, truly don't know why.  Confession time - I've been having counselling recently (it's finished now) and my therapist asked me why I wasn't taking action over a couple of issues that we've been focusing on.  Inaction over one of the things was completely clear to me - scared of change, fear of rejection and all that jazz.  But this?  Why am I doing everything in my power to screw myself up even more?  Why can't I just stop eating?  I just don't know.  I really can't figure it out.

It's making me so unhappy.  There's an event on next week and I'm probably going to bail out because I'm ashamed of how I look right now.  I don't want to meet people looking like this.  I'm horrified that I haven't lost the weight I'd intended to lose before going to Australia.  We're going to the Sydney Races - I'll have to wear a skirt or a dress...this is disastrous.

I don't really know why I've done this blog post. 

I've just revisited my list of New Year's Resolutions.  I have resolutely failed on all of them except I HAVE given up smoking (go me!) and I have cut down my alcohol intake significantly.  Although now when I do drink...woweeeeeeeeee....it's not a good look. 

Anyway.  Sorry for the moan.  And to my actual, real-life friends, I'm sorry I'm such a miserable bastard right now.  You've been so good to me.

Chicken fatteh

I've been asked for the recipe for the chicken fatteh in my last (very recent) post, so here it is.  It's taken (and slightly adapted) from the most recent Weight Watchers book that my very clever sister wrote.  It's very very easy and utterly delicious - far nicer than it sounds like it's going to be!

Ingredients (for 1 person)

1 chicken breast, sliced
1 tsp mixed spice (I didn't have this so used ground cumin, coriander and cinnamon - less of the cinnamon than the other two, but I think that this mix would be better than mixed spice)
1/2 tsp chilli powder
About 75ml-100ml 0% fat greek yogurt (I used low fat yogurt as it's all I could get)
1 small garlic clove, crushed
1 1/2 small pitta breads (I used a whole large one as I have so many points to use up but you could just use half)
lemon juice
50 ml chicken stock
a handful of cherry tomatoes (5 or 6?) cut into quarters or one large one
8 g pine nut kernels (I used 12g, again because I have lots of points) toasted
chopped fresh coriander

1. Coat the chicken in the spices and chilli.  Dry fry or fry in fry light in a pan until cooked.  Rest for a few minutes before serving.

2. In the meantime, in a bowl combine the yogurt, garlic and a squeeze of lemon.

3. Split the pittas and toast until nice and crunchy - they shouldn't be soft.

4. Make up the chicken stock and add a squeeze of lemon to it.

5. Toast the pine nuts.

ASSEMBLE THE DISH!!!!!

Use a big bowl (like a pasta bowl or something.)

Put the crispy pittas in the bottom and drizzle over the stock.  Scatter over the tomatoes and half of the pine nuts and then pour over half of the yogurt mixture.  Sprinkle over half of your coriander then put the chicken on top, pour over the rest of the yogurt, then pine nuts and finally coriander again. 

It's one of my new favourite things.

I also made it for a delightful vegetarian friend using quorn chunks and roasted aubergine.  It rocked his world - he said it was the nicest thing he'd eaten in a long time, but given that he'd just spent 6 months in the South African bush, I'm not sure how much of a compliment that is. 

Regardless, just make it.  Yummers.

I'm just rubbish

The last month or so has been disappointing.

I rolled into the new year feeling positive, full of vim and vigour and determined to make positive changes and feel happier.  And for a short time it worked. 

On 3^rd January I joined weight watchers and felt like I was completely In The Zone, somewhere I hadn’t been in a good 3 years.  I was enjoying the things that I was eating and found that so long as I wasn’t overly ambitious, I did have the energy to cook low fat, delicious food in the evenings.  I present to you, for example, my chicken fatteh:

SO GOOD. 

But then things started to go a little bit wrong.  I tripped over an uneven paving stone on the way home from work (yes, I was sober) and ended up in a huge amount of pain.  My energy levels took a dive and I started to struggle.  A week later, I ate oysters and started vomiting…and vomiting…and vomiting.  I had 4 days off work and have been feeling pretty shocking since I returned which was almost 2 weeks ago.

As if that isn’t enough, I now have a horrible cold and chest infection and I feel dreadful.  I can’t sleep, my spirits are incredibly low, I have no energy.  The thought of having to see people and do anything is completely overwhelming (Dear friends, I love you, honest.  Please don’t hate me.) 

I have fallen off the weight watchers wagon after losing 8 ½ pounds in 4 weeks.  I couldn’t go today to face up to the damage because I was trying (and failing) to get antibiotics.  I’m slightly relieved as I just can’t face the disappointment and disgust with myself. 

Fat Fran isn’t getting Fin.  I’m horribly aware that I’m going to Australia in 2 months and I’m going to be a huge fatty which is exactly what I didn’t want to happen. 

I just can’t make this work.

New Beginnings

I find Christmas, and the run up to it, pretty hard. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Christmas - I love how sociable it is and that I get to see lots of friends and family - but it's also tough. I totally lose control of myself and gorge and gorge on alcohol and food for a good month. I watch myself getting fatter and fatter and I beat myself up for being a self-destructive idiot with no willpower who is just making a bad situation worse. Christmas also makes me reflect a lot on my life.

I go home for Christmas every year and I'm always hugely excited about it, but then I get there and I'm surrounded by my family's families and it just reminds me that I haven't got a little family of my own, nor am I anywhere near to having one. And I find that difficult, heart-wrenching, soul-destroying and terrifying. Again - don't get me wrong - I love spending time at home with my family, but there are moments where the melancholy breaks through a bit.

So it's a new year. It started well, I saw it in with one of my very favourite people who cares about me a lot and dragged me out to have fun. I danced. I never dance, ever. We got drunk, we ate dirty dirty food at 2am (well I did, he's vegetarian - how dirty can it get?) and then we rolled home to our respective beds.

I woke up on January 1st feeling brilliant and positive and like this could be the year that I get a bit happy and start being a bit nicer to myself. So I made some resolutions:

1. Give up smoking.

Yup. It has to be done. It's disgusting and expensive and I have no lung capacity and, frankly, I have enough vices. This must be done by the end of the year.

2. Drink less; eat less and better things.

I drink too much. I can drink most people under the table. THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING. I also eat way too much. Portion control is my nemesis. I'm going to kick its ass this year. I'm also crap at eating fruit and vegetables. These must start featuring at each and every meal.

3. Be nicer to myself & less self-destructive.

Wah wah wah. No real idea how but I'm going to try.

4. Lose 5 stones.

Yes, really. 5. I calculated that I have put on 2lbs per month, on average, over the last 3 years. Idiot. Now I have to lose it. I have lovely small clothes to get back into, I was happy when I was thinner. I've joined weight watchers and I am going to my first meeting today.

5.Take lunch to work a minimum of 3 times a week.

I'm skint. In addition the only places near to my office are Tesco, Pret and Carluccios. Bad. This resolution worries me because I've recently realised something: I don't like cold food. And we have no heating facilities at work. Salad makes me want to shoot myself and I'm not a huge fan of the sandwich. Uh oh.

6. Use the step machine when watching tv.

Yes, I really do own one. I have used it once and I got tired so I hid it. Idiot.

7. De-clutter the flat, paint the kitchen, bathroom and doors.

I have been meaning to paint these things for 5 years. I'm almost certain to break this one because I'm so lazy.

8. Rejoin Guardian Soulmates once thinner and BEHAVE on dates.

My ex really laughed at this one. I do need to behave on dates though. I need to drink less (nothing?) and not get carried away by The Dream (Oh Ny God He's Perfect We Will Totally Get Married And Have Babies And Snuggle On The Sofa Forever And Ever Amen.) Men can SMELL the presence of the dream. I need to BE COOL. I love dating, I'm good at it (not the getting-a-relationship-from-it part, but the date itself is almost always FUN) and the only thing stopping me from dating is my embarrassment at how I currently look.

9. Shop in Nunhead for fresh food.

I'll break this one. I just really, really love Ocado. My bank account hates it.

10. Learn to meditate.

I'm an anxious egg. I spend a lot of time feeling stressed, anxious, worried, whatever you want to call it. I'm trying to stop this but I'm not doing very well. I think it also contributes to my insomnia, so I think that meditating would be good for me. Anyone know how?

11. Stop eating out all the time.

Essential. I can't afford it and it's not diet-friendly. FACT.

And that's pretty much it. Well, there's one more thing but I'm going to be keeping that close to my chest for the time being.

2012 is going to be the year where changes are made. Scary, but brilliant...I hope.

Happy new year.

X

Chinese style beef shin

I've been going through an anti-cooking phase. I'm sleeping really badly at the moment which has resulted in me having pretty much no energy to do anything at all, including eat properly and look after myself. It's probably all a bit of a vicious circle, but I just can't be bothered to fix it. My healthier, more-balanced eating is taking place when others cook for me.

I've just been up in Newcastle visiting my little big sister and her three kids. This is my sister, Chris:



On Saturday night, Chris and I went out for a civilised dinner with my friend Sue (regular readers will remember Sue from my holiday posts.) What was meant to be a civilised dinner ended up with us going to the Pitcher and Piano on the Quayside, which is one of the most godawful places in the world. But funny. Sue and Chris did much dancing. I spent a large part of the evening smoking in the "b@stard cold" to quote a Geordie lass that spoke to me (she was wearing v little, I was wearing a lot.)

Anyhoo, the descent into boozing and dancing left my sister feeling a touch delicate on Sunday morning and left her reluctant to handle the raw meat for our slow-cooked dinner that she'd promised me.

Chinese beef shin (serves 4-6 depending on hunger levels)

Ingredients:

1.25kg beef shin
Vegetable oil
2 onions
3 garlic cloves
50g peeled ginger
Stalks from a bunch of coriander
2 tsp Chinese 5 spice
3 star anise
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
100g muscovado sugar
50ml light soy sauce
50 ml dark soy sauce
2 tbsp tomato purée
600 ml chicken stock








Firstly, trim the beef shin of as much fat as possible. There's quite a bit of it in parts and, frankly, I'm fat enough. Cut it into bite size chunks like so:



Brown these off in a little oil in batches, setting them aside for later.

While the meat is browning, peel and roughly chop the onions, ginger and garlic and put them into a food processor with the coriander stalks and whizz it into a paste.

Wipe out any excess oil from the frying pan and put the paste into the pan with a good slug of water. "Fry" this off so that the onions soften and it smells pretty ace. The water should mostly evaporate and it will look like this:




Transfer the paste to a casserole dish and throw in the 5 spice, star anise and the peppercorns and cook for 1 minute. Add the sugar and tomato purée, cook out for a couple of minutes and then finally add the light and dark soy sauce.




Return the meat to the pan, cover with stock and bring to the boil. Put it in the oven at about 120-130c for 4 hours.




Normally when I have some cooking hours to kill, I watch a film or have a snooze. Yesterday, I showered and got ready to go to the cinema with Chris and the kids.

Part way though my shower, Fin (Chris' 4 year old) barged into the bathroom (no lock, I'm not just weird and forgetful) and refused to leave until I shouted "GET OUT!" repeatedly. I returned to my bedroom and found him sulking in my bed.

After a bit of coaxing, we had a lovely chat, talking about Christmas and such-like, and then the following happened. Fin leant forward and blew a raspberry on my naked arm, looked up at me angelically and said:

Fin: You're a fat guy.
Me: Oh......well yes. I guess I am.
Fin: I'm a thin guy.
Me: You are. You're very lucky.
Fin: So I'm a thin guy and you're a fat guy......Why are you a fat guy?
Me: Well, I eat too much.
Fin: Ahhhh! So you're Mr Greedy!!!
Me: Ummm. Yes. I also don't exercise.
Fin: (nods) Because you're too fat.

It's possibly the most refreshing conversation I've had in years. He's saying what he sees, is being bluntly truthful and it's great. And it made me laugh. It made Chris cringe her ass off. It's also made me go: "OH HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!!! I'm a freaking lard-arse, I MUST FIX THIS IN JANUARY!!!!" Which is no bad thing.

Anyway. Once the cooking time is up and the beef is falling apart, remove the meat and keep warm.




Fish around in the sauce for the star anise and throw them away. The sauce needs to be reduced by half which you can do while you're cooking rice and stir frying veggies - we had peppers, baby sweetcorn and mushrooms with soy sauce and pak choi stir fried and finished with sesame seeds and a dribble of sesame oil.




Add the meat back to the thickened reduced sauce and serve (I know, I will never be a food stylist):




Incredibly easy and so tasty. The meat really takes on the Chinesey flavours. I'm going to try it with pig cheeks next time, simply because I prefer them and I think that they would work brilliantly in this, possibly better even than the beef.

So there we are. Something to eat, but only if you're a fat guy.*

* it's actually not really bad for you at all!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Piggy heaven

I’ve kind of lost my blog mojo, both in terms of writing blog posts (I’ve been meaning to blog this recipe for a couple of weeks and have failed miserably) and doing the actual dieting itself.  For reasons that I’m not going to go into here, I’m not in the greatest of places right now – every area of my life is complicated, stressful and making me sad and I have no motivation or enthusiasm to do anything but try to survive each day as best I can.  Some days it’s easier which is largely down to the fact that I have some truly incredible friends who have gone above and beyond the call of duty by putting up with me.  Other days, it’s not so easy. 

Consequently, I am now at my absolute heaviest and the scary bit is I don’t think I even care that much.  I DO, as I know I look horrible and I feel uncomfortable and the numbers on the scales are frightening (not that I’ve looked at those for a few weeks) but I actually can’t be bothered to do anything about it.  I need comfort, which usually presents itself in the form of poached/scrambled/fried eggs on toast or a big pile of rice or pasta, and that’s all that I’m about right now. 

This recipe is the ultimate in comforting…the most comforty comfort food I think I’ve ever had.  I grew up in a household with an AGA so casseroles, fish pies, shepherd pies and so on were what we lived on.  That, and the fact that my mum is a brilliant cook, meant that we ate fantastically well and healthily (evidenced by the fact that I only put on weight once I left home, went to university and discovered takeaway for the first time!) but, I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything quite as delicious as these pig cheeks.  Sorry mummy (but thank you @misswhiplash who sent me the original recipe!  I am forever in your debt.)

Pig cheeks with leeks and onions (makes 8 portions)

Ingredients:

2kg pig cheeks (in my bag from @markymarket, 2 kg = 24 cheeks – perfect)

Seasoned flour

2-4 tbsp olive oil

5 onions, finely sliced

3 leeks, split lengthways down the middle and sliced finely

10 sprigs of thyme, leaves removed

3 bay leaves

2 tbsp honey (runny, not set)

400ml white wine

400ml chicken stock

2 tbsp Dijon mustard

100ml half fat crème fraiche (mixed with a little cornflour)

Or in pictorial form, here they are!

Pig cheeks are amazing.  Little nuggets of loveliness, unlike the HELL ON EARTH that is an ox cheek – they’re big beasts that are nigh on impossible to get a knife through and make you sweat.  Never, ever try to prepare ox cheeks when you have a tiny baby kitten in the house as it will drive them wild and they will discover that by digging their claws into your clothes/flesh/whatever (OUCH), they can climb all the way up to your shoulder and sit there like a parrot, mewing away longingly. 

But that’s by the by.  Now, I don’t know if it’s technically necessary to remove the silvery layer on the top of them (I have no idea what that is even called) but I decided to because it looks suspiciously like it may involve a bit of fat and I wanted to lose all unnecessary fat that I could.  So, trim off your pig cheeks until you have a stack of them that look beautiful, like this:

Heat up a non-stick frying pan and start rolling the cheeks in some seasoned flour.  Add as little oil to the frying pan as you can get away with and then start browning off the cheeks in batches, they’ll probably need a couple of minutes on each side.  They smell awesome.

Once they’re all browned off, leave them on a plate on the side while you get on with the vegetables.  

At this point, I switched to my enormous casserole.  I debated doing this bit in fry light, that evil spray stuff, but given that the leeks and onions are supposed to caramelise, I thought that would be a bit disastrous, so I probably used around 1-2 tbsp of oil, added the leeks and onion and fried incredibly gently (lid off) for about 25 minutes, at which point they should be soft and silky and look like this:

Sprinkle in the thyme leaves, pour in the honey and increase the heat under the pan.  Cook this for a few minutes until it’s a bit sticky.  Apparently it’s meant to go a bit brown, mine didn’t and I’m fine with that. 

Pop the pig cheeks into the pot, add the wine and the chicken stock, some seasoning and the bay leaves and give it a big old stir.  You need to bring this to the boil and then transfer it to the oven (around 140c – even lower if you want to cook it for longer) for a good 3-4 hours:

After several hours, check that the pig cheeks are perfect (eat a bit!  You totally deserve it) and then do a bit of fishing around for all the cheeks as they need to be taken out so you can make the sauce delicious.  Look how awesome the cheeks are!!

To make the sauce, add the mustard and the crème fraiche to the cooking liquid (don’t forget to stir cornflour into the crème fraiche before adding - @rankamateur’s top tip to stop it from splitting or forming lumps in the sauce, and it works!), bring it to the boil and reduce it so that it’s nice and thick and saucy.  Check the seasoning and then put the cheeks back in and serve, 3 cheeks per person, like this (although a carb with it would be an idea):

My ex has recently moved into a flat on his own and when I visited him about 10 days ago, I took him a few of my freezer goodies to start him off.  On Tuesday night, he had the pig cheeks.  I came into work yesterday to the following one line email:  “OMNOMNOM.”  He’s absolutely bloody right. 

Filling The Freezer

I have decided that the Freezer Is My Friend.  Not in terms of ready meals - yacksville except for fish fingers (do they count as a ready meal?) - but in terms of pre-prepared (by me) delicious meals for one.  The sort of thing that I can whip out of the freezer in the morning, chuck in a pan when I get home from work and serve up in less than 15 minutes with some pasta or rice and a couple of my 5-a-day on the side.

My freezer is a pretty scary place.  It's teeny tiny, yet contains an extraordinary amount of crap including frozen peas, soya beans, quorn sausages (they're blatantly getting chucked out), chicken breasts of a huge variety of ages, an East London Steak Company steak (WIN!), a bag of wine slush, these horrible little scallops (who knew that scallops could actually be actively unpleasant?), some ropey looking chicken livers, half fat coconut milk and a number of bags of entirely unidentifiable "food".  Most of this is going to go in the bin (NOT the steak - never the steak) to make space for my new fad.  Filling. The. Freezer.

So far I've made bolognese and oxtail ragu.  This is all well and good but I felt like I needed something less rich and with absolutely no tomato in it at all and something that goes with a carb that isn't pasta.  I racked my brain...BINGO!  Casserole!  Specifically...

Chicken and tarragon casserole (makes 6 portions)

Ingredients: 

12 chicken thighs, skinless and boneless

100g cubed pancetta (you can totally leave this out, it's just as good without it)

12-18 whole shallots, peeled (use 18, they go amazingly mushy and delicious)

500g chestnut mushrooms (if you use the baby ones you won't need to do any chopping at all)

A little olive oil

2 tbsp seasoned flour

2 tbsp dijon mustard

500ml chicken stock 

150ml dry sherry (apparently wine works too)

5 tbsp creme fraiche

3 tbsp fresh tarragon, chopped

or, pictorially: 

Before we start, do NOT do as I do.  Unless you have ace kitchen skillz, don't be cheap and buy chicken thighs that are skin on and bone in.  The skinning is easy and weirdly pleasing.  The boning...not so easy.  My chicken thighs ended up a little bit massacred.  I feel really bad about this, they really didn't get the respect that they deserved.  (Will someone buy me some good knives - preferably Kin - and teach me how to bone stuff please?)

Anyway.  Take your skinless, boneless chicken thighs and coat them in the seasoned flour.  Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan and brown the thighs in batches, popping them into the bottom of a large lidded casserole dish as you go.  

While this is going on, deal with your shallots.  TOP TIP KLAXON!!!!!  Shallots are a bit of a fiddly pain in the butt, right?  Not any more.  Cut off the woody root end, put the shallots in a bowl, pour over boiling water and leave for about 20 seconds.  Drain the water off and then peel the skins off - it's SO much easier than regular peeling and you don't get the weeps either.  (Top tip courtesy of @rankamateur - she was also the one that told me about this recipe too.)  Here are the shallots:

Once the chicken is all browned off, fry off the pancetta until it's brown and crispy.  The original recipe calls for 150g - I used less than 100g and I genuinely think that you can leave it out entirely as I made it without for a non-pork eater last night and it was still entirely delicious.  However, if you're using the bacon, get it brown and crispy and chuck it into the casserole on top of the chicken.

In the bacon fat, saute off the shallots so that they look like this:

Once brown, they need to see the inside of the casserole dish too.  The final bit of frying is for the baby mushrooms.  They want a few minutes of browning off and then - yup, you guessed it - they go into the casserole as well, along with the dijon mustard.

Make up the chicken stock and pour it into the frying pan with the sherry.  Let the frying pan cool down a bit first if you want to avoid extreme bubbling, boiling over and a big old mess all over your hob.  Clearly, I did not do this because I am very, very foolish.  Deglaze the pan and pour the liquid over the chicken/bacon/shallot/mushroom mixture.  Give it a bit of a stir around so that the mustard gets mixed in.  Add a bit of black pepper but no salt at this stage - there may well be enough from the seasoned flour and the stock cube.

Put the lid on the casserole and put it in a preheated oven at around 140c.  This is the bit where you go off and do stuff but, unlike last week when I made the ragu, there's no real time for a nap.  You have 90 minutes to kill.  I watched an episode of the West Wing, put fresh bedclothes on my bed and painted my nails.  If I had alcohol in the house, I would have tucked into that instead of doing all these good things.  

90 minutes later, return to the kitchen, remove the casserole and lo and behold!  This is what you have:

The chicken falls apart, the shallots have gone all soft and silky and melty, the sauce is delicious.  YUM.  You're not finished yet though.  Pour the liquid through a sieve/colander into a saucepan.  Put the creme fraiche into a separate bowl and stir some of the sauce into it.  If you put the creme fraiche straight into the sauce, it doesn't really mix in properly and you get little spots of white through your sauce.

Mix it together and then add to the saucepan, whisk it around and then bubble it all up furiously so it thickens up a bit.  Chop up the tarragon and then add that to the sauce, turn off the heat and check the seasoning.  

Pour the sauce over the chicken and serve with either mashed potatoes or some rice.

Voila!  This is pretty much my food heaven, it's just so comforting.  I think that you could easily get away with using significantly less creme fraiche and I won't be using any bacon in it in the future - I think this is the first thing that I've ever cooked where bacon genuinely hasn't added anything to it.  The best thing about this recipe is that it's incredibly easy - you don't even have to chop anything other than a bit of tarragon right at the end.  This is definitely going to be added to my mental list of favourite things.

I still have a bit of space in the freezer though.  What next?  A curry?  Pork?  Chicken again?  Bring on the suggestions but while you're thinking, make this.