Just something I threw together (recipe)

I was a bit bored by the thought of salad for lunch today and we had a couple of tins of cherry tomatoes in the house so I decided to make a "rustic" soup.

You will need the following for two generous servings with the stats as above:-

• 1 tin mixed beans (I used Morrisons mexican bean salad)
• 1 tin cherry tomatoes in juice
• 1 largeish courgette
• 1 medium/large red pepper
• 10g Coconut oil (or 10ml any plain oil otherwise)
• 1 good quality vegetable stock cube
• 120g good chorizo - this will make or break it

De-stalk and remove the seeds from the pepper.  Chop the courgette and pepper into chunks you'd be happy eating in a mouthful of soup.  Drop the chunks into a non-stick soup pan with the coconut oil and fry a little.

Courgette and pepper bathing in warm coconut oil

 While the veggies are frying, remove any skin and chop the chorizo into chunks.

First, you gotta do the truffle shuffle!

Add the chorizo to the veggies and toss until glossy and you can clearly smell the paprika aroma from the sausage.

*glisten*

Add the tomatoes and break them up a bit, top up with a little water if need be and add the stock cube.  Cook for 5-10 minutes to reduce a little.  You want the courgette and pepper to retain their bite, so don't over-cook at this stage.

Shiny, red, globes of juicy, delicious joy.

Add the beans and heat through thoroughly.

Serve and enjoy!

By god, this is delicious!

Flaming salad!

(...or how I made a very pretty salad with lots of reds and oranges in it.)

We had a load of peppers (190g) and tomatoes (300g) from Abel and Cole that needed using up, so I roasted the peppers in the oven with olive oil and fresh thyme and rested them in the fridge overnight in olive oil.  Next day, I'd decided to make a salad with them so fished out the tomatoes and some left-over baby new potatoes (120g) from a previous dinner, chopped it all up together and added lots of Spanish chorizo (50g) (thank you Ocado for some really nice stuff on that front - soft, sweet and nicely flavoured with lots of paprika) and a dash of lemon juice, black pepper and a pinch of salt.

And look how it turned out...

Sooo pretty!  And so tasty with amazing quality ingredients from Abel and Cole.  The only ingredient not from them was the chorizo.

Tricky lunches

Lunches during the week have historically been difficult for me.  Having hauled myself out of the pit of "sandwich&crisps" years ago, I've been through salads, shop bought soups and home made soups.  The latter being particularly tricky due to lack of re-heating facility at work, which has now been worked around by the use of a wide-mouthed Thermos flask.  It still remains something that annoys the crap out of me that it takes up so much time and effort to make lunches.  However, I struggle on most of the time and I'm in a home made soups phase at the moment...

Winter Squash, Beans and Chorizo soup (4 portions; 305kcals, 17g protein, 40g carb, 10g fat, 12g fibre, 5.5 portions of fruit&veg):-

• 1 large Winter Squash (approx 1kg after de-seeding and peeling)
• 15ml Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• 1 Tsp Fennel Seeds
• 1 Drained Can/224g Borlotti Beans
• 1 Vegetable Stock Cube
• 1 Drained Can/180g Kidney Beans (in water, not sauce)
• ½ Ring/112.5g Spanish Chorizo Ring
• 1 Tin/400g Tinned Plum Tomatoes

Almost any Winter squash will do in this recipe; Butternut, Turks Turban, Sunshine, Table Ace, Pumpkin (all varieties) etc. but not Spaghetti Squash as that's a bit too stringy and the texture isn't creamy enough.  Peel and de-seed the squash.

Slice into thick slices, then cut into cubes.

Place the cubed squash in a large container that has a lid, add the fennel seeds and olive oil, put the lid on and shake/toss to coat all of the pieces well.

Spread the chunks over a baking tray and bake in the oven on a medium heat for 30 minutes or until soft and chewy-looking.  Remove from the oven and allow to cool a bit.  Make up the vegetable stock with a little hot water and have some extra water on standby.  Add the stock to the squash chunks along with the tinned tomatoes and blend to a thick, smooth consistency with a hand blender.  You should see soft ridges in the paste.

Gradually add more hot water, continuing to blend until you have a soup consistency you would like.  I'd err on the side of thicker than thinner as you can always thin it a bit more later.

Chop the chorizo into small cubes.

Add the drained beans and chopped chorizo to the squash soup/puree.

Then gently stir together to coat the beans and chorizo chunks but not break them up.

If eating immediately, re-heat gently in a pan and serve.   Otherwise you can chill it in portions and it will keep in the fridge for 2-3 days or in the freezer for a few weeks.  Reheat carefully and do not add salt until reheating is complete otherwise the beans will become hard and unpleasant.

Metoo with the sloppy :o)

I have had rather a sloppy day today, but I just needed it, so.

Breakfast of Total Breakfast with fruit and skimmed milk is getting a bit tedious, but that's what I have when I cycle in the morning as it's the fastest way to get enough releasable energy in place for my commute in the morning.  So, that's what I had.  Then I had second breakfast when I got into the office, showered and changed, of Greek yoghurt, strawberries, banana and honey.  Nom!  Lunch of the usual roasted chicken in a salad of various things like lettuce, celery, sweet pepper etc..  Then, the afternoon just went pear-shaped and I cracked at 4pm and went to the coffee shop across the lane from the office, where I'd had a meeting in the morning and coveted the cakes on offer, and bought a slice of treacle tart.  But for once I was brave and I asked them to tell me how much it weighed.  So they got out some scales and weighed it for me!  They were totally understanding!  I'd checked on WLR before I went for a rough idea of how many kcals it might cost (I had loads to spare at that point.  Like... loads!) and hoped it was around 130g of average to heavy treacle tart.  And lo!  It was 137g!  So, that way 500-600 kcals of refined sugars and fat in an incredible dense delivery mechanism.  And it tasted -amazing-.  I think I can honestly say that it was the nicest treacle tart I have ever eaten.  And it meant that instead of eating my fruit&nut bar, I donated it to my boss, who'd not managed to have any lunch by 5pm and I relied on the treacle tart to get me home.

Now, either the treacle tart had worn off, or I was a teensy bit fatigued from the quite extensive cycling this week, but I had no legs pretty quickly on the way home and it was really hard work.  It took 47 minutes and felt quite difficult.  I did have a nice chat with a Welsh guy on a motorbike at a set of lights though, so that was nice.

Dinner started out as chilli with couscous, peas and sweetcorn.   Which turned into chilli with pitta bread as I'd run out of steam by dinner time.  And then I was still hungry after that.  So I had another pitta bread with chorizo and cheddar with mustard.  And a couple of glasses of wine to finish off a bottle that was in the fridge.

But... you know what?  I've put in 4,400-odd kcals of exercise this week, so *raspberry* to it all.  I'm under maintenance and there's plenty of room for a nice dinner out tomorrow night as well.

A little extra effort

Today is another good day for keeping it real and hauling ass into exercising.  Though I love going to the gym, I'm not so enamoured of functional swimming.  As I did weights yesterday, however, it had to be a swim or a run today and it's way too hot for me to run any time after about 8am, so swim it was.  Intervals make it a little bit less boring and as I'm stronger, I'm feeling stronger in the water too.  It's not translating into extra speed though as it does require more than just the bare strength itself so this is where the intervals come into it.  And then, once I've done the Nokia Thames Swim, I'll dial in some proper structured sets, e.g. of 8x200m with 20s rest in between sets at a pace of 01:45 per 100m (i.e. 18s lengths - which is pretty achievable given that my 200m time trial time is 03:15 or so).

Dinner tonight was a really nice one... take one chicken breast (125-150g), lay it on some kitchen foil enough to wrap comfortably and loosely with some to spare.  Smear cream cheese on one side really really thickly (30g).  Grind some black pepper onto the cheese and press chorizo slices (x3) onto the cheese.  Wrap the whole lot up in the foil and bake in a pre-heated oven at 190C for 15 minutes then 150C for 15 minutes.  Serve on a bed of mashed butternut squash.  NOM!

The cheese goes soft, mixes a bit with the chicken and chorizo juices, so make sure you pour that liquid over the top as it's really flavoursome.  That little bit of extra effort with tonight's dinner was really worth it.  I'm glad I bothered :o)  Really nice flavour and I'm feeling nicely full and almost clean too! (though the cream cheese is a bit on the processed side as it's an extra low fat one with added thickeners)

Nutritional info (including 400g butternut squash):-

Calories (kcal)	339
Carbohydrate (g)	29.3
Protein (g)	41.5
Fat (g)	6.8
Fibre (g)	5.5
Fruit & Veg	4.4

B - greek yogurt with 1 scoop MP Max, Yeo Valley fruit compote and flaked almonds
S - strawberries with greek yogurt and a small squirt of agave nectar
*swim*
S - 1 scoop MP Max in skimmed milk
L - lettuce, celery, beetroot, cherry tomatoes, sweet pepper and a chicken breast
S - mango and single cream
S - Frijolemole with carrots
D - chicken stuffed with cream cheese and wrapped in chorizo, with butternut squash mash

Exercise - 33 minutes swimming (315kcals before background tax)

Calories (kcal) [kcals to maintain weight (inc. exercise)	1463 2068]
Protein (g)	152.5 (42.1%)
Carbohydrate (g)	141.4 (36.6%)
Fat (g)	34.1 (21.2%)
Fibre (g)	23.5
Fruit & Veg	16.5