Day 49: Losing Weight, Yes I Am

Oh, it is nothing major.  Only that the clothes are just a smidgen looser, and the belt has had to be tightened one notch.  It may be the slowest weight loss since records began, but at least the cycle of weight gain and loss is trundling is very gently downhill.

I have tried the Weightwatchers thing before, with some limited but alas, temporary success.  I am a classic comfort-eater, and when I am down or stressed or just lacking in energy, I will wolf down a packet of chocolatge digestives without pausing to calculate the points value.

But do you know how much a small packet of chocolate digestives costs in my local corner shop?  £1.59!!  I may not care enough to count the calories, but I sure as hell care enough to count the pennies.  Therefore, there are simply no biscuits in the house.  Apart from a couple of packets of Oreos when they were on special offer at 49p, I have scarcely eaten a biscuit since the Year began.  If I want a biscuit badly enough, I have to bake some - and somehow, the effort of doing so seems to negate the attractions of eating them all in one go.  As my mother used to snap at us when we devoured the contents of her cake tin, There is no point baking for you all - you just eat it!

The other factor in this has been portion control.  We are just too used in the affluent west to massive plates of food.  A whole pizza?  In terms of calorie content, all we really need is a slice.  Likewise, I am all too fond of just piling the pasta into the pot, measuring 'by eye', and adding a little extra for good luck.  That usually works out at between 75g and 100g dry, which is a hearty plateful for a short lady.  But really, a portion of pasta need be no more than 50g, especially if it is being mixed in with a rich sauce.  So I have dug out the kitchen scales, and have been trying to stick to that.  A standard 500g bag of pasta ought therefore to make 10 meals, which if you go for the cheapest spaghetti works out at about 4p per portion.

I do still have some way to go.  Last night I hadn't eaten since breakfast, so that when I got home, the restraints were off, and I rustled up a huge bowl of pasta.  But I did stir in only half the bolognaise sauce instead of the whole tub, which I would definitely have done previously.  And no pudding. 

Nearly 50 days.  Let's see if by Day 100, the belt can be tightened another notch.

Total Expenditure: £13.51  (I had to buy a book from Amazon for my work - sadly, it wasn't available in any library here.)

Day 17: Flavours from the Near East

A couple of months ago now, I spent a working week in and round about Jerusalem.  It was an amazing week, an amazing city, and amazing land.  But I am not here to rhapsodise about that, although I certainly could.  I am here to rhapsodise about its food.

Everywhere we went, we ate pretty much the same thing: hummus, falafel, baba ghanoush, pitta breads, and all sorts of little dishes of this and that.  I lived on this stuff for a week,  and I never once got sick of it.  Even more importantly for present purposes, it was most wonderfully cheap. 

So what to do upon my return but try to recreate some of these dishes?  Hummus, for example.  It is ruinously expensive in the supermarkets - at least £1 for one little tub.  There has to be a cheaper way.

Now, I have actually made hummus before.  It was for a church social to which I had to bring along a savoury dish designed to feed four.  I followed a Jamie Oliver recipe that time, loading the required amount of dried chickpeas into my slow cooker and soaking them over night.

Disaster!  There must have been something wrong with the quantities listed, because the chickpeas swelled and overflowed (overflew??) my little slow cooker.  Twice.  The mass of them just kept swelling and growing and oozing across the kitchen counter like a monster from a 1950s horror movie.  I did finally succeed in cooking the chickpeas in a very large pot, after which I whizzed them (in about 10 batches) in the food processor, and then added the tahini, lemon juice, and garlic.  The result was unutterably bland.  At this point I knew for sure that the quantites were all messed up, and emptied an entire bottle of lemon juice into the mixture along with a full bulb of crushed garlic.  This resulted in a dish that was faintly flavoursome.  But it had to do.  Off to the church social I went with a portion that would have fed 12 hearty eaters, leaving at least the same proportion behind in my fridge.  It took me a fortnight to work my way through it.

This time I am hoping for a more limited success, but tahini is proving difficult to find, and so the hummus is on hold until I track some down.  However, I did turn an aubergine into baba ghanoush this evening.  Ideally it should contain tahini too, but the BBC recipe didn't list it.  It should have.  The end result was passable, but nothing like the wonderful delicacy I ate in Jerusalem - so I think I will have to keep experimenting there.  Once I perfect the recipe, I will post it.  I am also soaking a small quantity of chickpeas, with the aim of trying my hand tomorrow at falafel.

In terms of cost, I spent a half hour in Tesco's recently, darting excitedly around their World Foods aisle.  For this is what I discovered:

That there are in this world people like me who dabble in a little Indian or Middle Eastern cooking here and there.  They can pick up a Tesco's own 500g bag of dried chick peas for 78p.  But if you actually are Indian or Middle Eastern, then chances are that a wee 500g bag of chick peas isn't going to take you very far.  So Tesco has introduced in its World Foods aisle a whopping great 2kg bag of chickpeas for only £2.39.  That is a saving of 73p!  Granted, it will probably keep me in falafels for an entire year, but that's okay.  What's more, the World Food aisle also has massive bags of spices, such as a 400g bag of paprika for only £1.69.  You would have to buy 8 jars of Tescos own paprika to equal that, at a total cost of £5.52.  I am not sure that I would ever use such a quantity of paprika, but it might be worth sharing out among friends, for example.  Because I resent these wee jars! 

So anyway, there's my frugal tip for the day: check out Tesco's World Food aisle.  And maybe other World Food aisles in other supermarkets.  While chickpeas take over my kitchen.

Total Expenditure: £12.21 (on enough food to last me for a fortnight or, in the case of the chickpeas, for a year.)

Day 11: Shampoo and Capers

When I moved in last week, my new flat had an air of the Marie-Celeste to it.  Jars of half-eaten mayonnaise; wilting house plants demanding immediate attention from a less-than-competent nurse; and a DVD still in the DVD player, which had me briefly worried, emblazoned as it was with a large red heart and displaying no title.  It turned out to be Love Actually, which shows that I was right to be worried.

The whole effect is as if my predecessors have just popped out for a morning paper, rather than moving back to America after two years.  Naturally, they did not want to take anything with them beyond a couple of suitcases, so they just packed their bags and left, kindly bequeathing to me the entire contents of their larder, bathroom shelves, and medicine cabinet.

This is why I have been frantically baking to use up the eggs they left behind.  But beyond perishables, they have also left lots of flour and baking goods, a goodly supply of tea, various oils and condiments, and a few oddities such as an easy pannacotta mix and more fish sauce than I can use in a year of Thai cooking.  There is even a freezer drawer full of frozen vegetables.  Frugality Win!

However, the downside of all this bounty is that I have had to hunt rather stickily through the lot and throw out anything too badly out-of-date, or simply dodgy-looking.  Also, I will never ever eat a jar of capers, not even if all other foodstuffs were wiped out in a nuclear holocaust.  In such an event, they and the cockroaches are welcome to one another.  But at the end of this clearout, I have been left with a good stock of food basics, and I am heartily grateful for such American generosity.  Although they could have cleaned the flat a little more.

However, inheriting the life-style of strangers in this fashion has left me a little puzzled by their habits, even if the mystery DVD was in the event entirely innocuous.  For example: ranged on the bathroom shelf at the foot of the bath are - get this! - nine different bottles of shampoo.  Each one of them is a different brand or scent, and two are accompanied by a conditioner.  And what's more, these are no remnants: each bottle is about half full.  This is wonderful for me, and puts off the cheap shampoo search until at least Christmas.  

But nine??  What was going on there?  There were only two of them living in the flat.  Did they have a different shampoo for each day of the week, and with a couple on the side for when they felt like ringing the changes?  And on a related matter, who in their right mind would pair a minty Alberto Balsam Tea Tree Tingle Shampoo with an Alberto Balsam Sunkissed Raspberry Herbal Conditioner?  I tried it, and my hair smelled like an antiseptic pavlova.

I realise as I write this, that by my own account, even trying the combination makes me not quite in my right mind.

Ah well.  Who can penetrate the mysteries of the human heart?  Or even of the human DVD collection?