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.

Warmer and much less stressy

As I said, we stayed in a hotel last night. So I got a lovely hot bath before bed and was actually too warm in the night. When the power finally came back on properly at around 10am today my stress levels dropped quite significantly.

Gymmage today was quite good; I did try JAG's suggestion of negative movement practice for pull ups but was too weak to do anything other than drop quite quickly, so I went back to using the machine assistance but concentrated on making the lowering movement very slow. I think it might be time to get a trainer at this gym. I've got about 2 weeks left before I need to change my weights routine, so now would be a good time to have a chat and see what are the options.

Protein count for today is pretty high, probably due to the cooked brekkie at the hotel :oD

Exercise - 51 minutes weights (HRmax 178, HRavg 158)

B - bacon, scrambled egg, baked beans, mushrooms and grilled tomatoes
*gym*
S - 1 scoop whey in 200ml water
L - tomato and pancetta soup with mascarpone and 1 scoop whey
S - carrot and houmous
S - tangerines
S - banana
D - beef chilli with couscous, peas and sweetcorn

Calories (kcal) [kcals to maintain weight (inc. exercise)	1806 2199]
Protein (g)	138.1 (31.3%)
Carbohydrate (g)	158.2 (33.6%)
Fat (g)	68.0 (34.6%)
Fruit & Veg	12.0