Howl

Hello and happy Wednesday. It's almost the weekend, don't you know?

I've been busy and haven't had much time for running or exercise in general. I've had lots of time for eating and drinking and I'm consequently feeling very full and bloated all the time.

I have managed to squeeze in a running club night yesterday and an hour of Davina Body Buff today. It's my first run through the DVD even though I bought it ages ago. It was fun and a real challenge.

Instead of applying for jobs I've been cooking with vegetables we were given by Mr Scientist's parents and to use up ingredients I bought the other week. I made 3 1lb jars and 1 200g jar of green tomato chutney (green tomatoes courtesy of Mr Scientists' parent's vegetable patch). Unfortunately I only have the 3 1lb jars left because I accidentally knocked the smaller jar on the floor and it smashed. I now have a very clean floor.

I used this recipe. I made it last year with green tomatoes from my mum's garden, but I had around 750g of tomatoes so I increased all the other ingredients correspondingly. Last year's batch was very salty so I decreased the amount of salt I put in to 1.5 tbps.

I also made another batch of tahini-miso-walnut carrot slices and froze them.

I've also got a large bag of 'Bright Lights' swiss chard that needs eating up sharpish. I'm going to have some steamed with dinner tonight and make a frittata with some tomorrow, but I know we'll have some left over.  

Any ideas what to do with swiss chard?

Bento Thursday

I made bentos for Mr Scientist and I for lunch today. I followed this recipe for a bento with rice, sweet pepper confit, wasabi-soy sauce broccoli (not pictured), and baked carrots with miso-walnut topping. I forgot the edamame to go on the rice. It was delicious and very, very filling. It took me about an hour to make, but there was leftover carrots and broccoli which could be frozen or used in another meal and loads of walnut-miso topping leftover which I'll be dividing up into portions and freezing. I don't think I'll be making bentos every day, though. I do still want a pretty bento box instead of a plastic box.

The last post of the blog where I got the recipes from said the blog owner, Maki, was ill in hospital, so I hope she is recovering.

Today was another running club evening. I skived the last one due to insomnia the day before. I should have skived tonight's run because Tuesday was a nice long run and tonight was INTERVALS (DUH-DUH-DUHHHHHHN!). 8 x 400m with a 3 minute break between numbers 4 and 5. My first 4 were very good, coming in at around 1.39, 1.41, 1.39, and 1.39. Then I did 1.45, 1.42, 1.44, and I think the last one was 1.44 or so as well. I'm fairly pleased although as usual I tailed way behind everyone else. I know it's not competitive but I'd like to see less of my bum being handed to me on a plate every week.

I got some bad news today as well. My work contract ends at the end of November and I had applied for another job in a completely different field. It looked interesting and I thought I was a perfect match but I received an email saying I hadn't been selected for an interview and due to the high volume of applicants they couldn't provide any feedback. Bummer. :(

I'm upset and quietly despairing of ever being hired ever again because my area of work is very specialised and there are no other jobs requiring those skills where I live. I'm hoping to use the redundancy as an opportunity to switch 'careers' because I'm bored and unfulfilled in my current one.  I say 'careers' because I'm in my late 20s and have only 3 years experience in my current career.

Has anyone out there switched careers in their late 20s How did it go? How did you know what you wanted to do? How did you approach the job search and application process knowing you had some transferable skills but also lacked ones related to your new area?

August Recap

How did it get to be September already? You can definitely feel autumn in the area around here. The fields have been harvested and the leaves on the trees are slowly beginning to turn.

In August I set the goals to lose 2lb, cut down on emotional eating, and stick to the 10k training plan. I've lost 1.6lb despite going to Leeds festival last weekend, cut down on emotional eating a bit. I haven't stuck to the training plan because I started going to a running club and prioritised their runs over the ones on my training plan. Since getting a 5k PB on the 20th of August ago I've barely run at all. I tend to naturally have a period of sloth after PBs or hard races. Still, not a bad month all in all.

My September goals are:

• Lose 4lb
• Finish reading Intuitive Eating and apply the rules to my life

This post's soundtrack is provided by The Naked and The Famous, a new-to-me band I saw at Leeds Festival. On the Saturday afternoon we only really wanted to see Patrick Wolf so we spent the time up till he came on wandering around the stages listening to bands we didn't know so well. The Naked and the Famous came on and I loved them instantly.

Here's a recipe for some date balls I made recently which were inspired by some dates I had once which were pitted and had a slice of dried lemon placed where the stone used to be. Blend a cup of pitted dates, a quarter of a cup of cashew nuts, a heaped dessert spoon of lemon peel (I used Tesco's Italian Mixed Peel) and a pinch of ground cardamon together. Add a drop of water if the mixture isn't coming together and form into 8 balls.

Nerves and New Complete Vegetarian Review

Hello, hello.

Last night I had a dream about the Great North 10K on Sunday. I dreamt I ran it in six hours and when I looked at my Garmin I'd only covered 3.2 miles or thereabouts. Wail!

Running has been better and I no longer have stomach aches, but then I've been slacking recently and haven't been pushing myself at all. It's feeling like I've been building up to the race forever and I'm beginning to get bored of it. I think this apathy is due to being worried because I haven't received my race pack with my number yet. To my paranoid mind that means it's not going to come and I'm not going to be able to run in the race. I've been raising money for charity and if I can't run in the race I'll have to tell everyone and it'll be humiliating. Also even if I run I've been so rubbish recently I'm going to run it really slow and come in at 1 hour 30 or something because I still haven't gotten around to walking the course and I don't know what the hills are like and I'm worried that they're crazy steep and and and...

And breathe.

On to the review. A while ago I bought Rose Elliot's New Complete Vegetarian. I like it. It's clearly and concisely laid out and has some gorgeous photos, but not so many that as with some other cookbooks you wonder if the glossy photos are padding out a book lacking in recipes.
 The recipes are well written but invoke my pet cookery book peeve - no indication of how long it takes to prepare and cook the food at the beginning of the recipe. Grumble grumble.


I've tried out a few of the recipes. They tend to be on the easy and cheap side to make and favour everyday vegetables like carrots, courgettes, peppers, potatoes, and peas etc. Even the curries have ingredients you could easily find in a supermarket and won't languish unused in the back of your cupboard. Most recipes are healthy and just a touch on the 'wholesome' side of life with lots of brown rice, pulses, fresh vegetables and little oil. However there's plenty of cakes and bakes at the back of the book if you want to indulge.

I've tried peppers and macaroni (sauted peppers, onion, and tomatoes mixed with macaroni), courgette rice (brown rice cooked with courgettes, tomato and onions), and pea, potato and carrot curry. On the whole they've been quick and simple to make, although sometimes lacking in a little oomf when it comes to taste. Mr Scientist thought the peppers and macaroni and courgette rice were bland, although by 'bland' he actually meant 'not a curry containing 3 chilli peppers'. They were still nice, however, and the peppers and macaroni perfect for a quick midweek supper.

This book is not going to collect dust on my shelf, and I'm going to use it a lot.

Quickie

I haven't died, fallen off a cliff, gotten lost while running or been buried under a pile of books. I've been very very busy and not really motivated to blog.

I have, however,

• Received my Garmin Forerunner 610 which I'll be reviewing shortly when I get over its new and awesomeness and stop wearing it all the time, even when doing the cleaning.
• Tried to walk to High Cup Nick and failed due to bad weather last weekend. ('Shall we go back?' *Looks at horizontal rain and soaked Mr Scientist* 'Yeah')
• Missed an interval training session simply because the gym was far and I was lazy.
• Baked a lemon polenta cake for a friend because she's moved house and it's the first time I'll be seeing her since she moved.
• Made an aubergine and chickpea curry from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen. It was delicious.
• Taken my car in to have the brakes fixed. I'm pretty sure this officially makes me an adult, but I haven't received my card yet.

Laters

Parklife - Easter Run, Simnel Cake.

You should cut down on your pork life mate get some exercise!

I drove home to see the family on Friday, this song came on the radio and I was transported to being a teenager again. Awesome. 

In the boot I had a slowly cooling simnel cake that I'd spent the morning cooking. I managed to forget to buy light muscovado sugar despite it being the first ingredient in the list so had to substitute dark muscovado sugar and golden caster sugar, which left the cake rather richer than it should have been. I also forgot to buy more ground ginger, but since you use stem ginger that wasn't so much of a problem. There is a lot of chopping involved, but the cake was delicious. 

Oh, and finish off the unused marzipan in the Estonian way - chopped into slim strips to be dunked in strong black coffee and eaten while hot.

It's just as well I took my running gear with me and did a 3.88mile run on Saturday morning. When I got back home my dad immediately asked me if I wanted a glass of cold water. Thanks, Dad.

Chilli

My partner, Mr Scientist, made a chilli to go with the polenta I made. I would blog a recipe and picture of the delicious chilli but apparently it's 'not good enough' and 'just like a student chilli' so you don't get to see the masterpiece that was his chilli.

It was darned tasty though.

World Vegetarian : Soft Polenta Mixed with Cheese and Spring Greens with Garlic

Imagine silky soft polenta with a hint of cheese underneath gently blanched spring greens that were then sauted with garlic, mustard seeds, and onions. Mmm.

The spring greens should have been broccoli di rape, but Tescos didn't have any of that, and a quick google showed that broccoli di rape looks a bit like spring greens so I thought eh, close enough. This would also work with curly kale, and I think the curly kale would mimic the slightly bitter taste of broccoli di rape that Jaffrey mentions in her introduction to the recipe. At least it would if I liked curly kale. Oh another thing - halve the amount of oil/butter that Jaffrey lists in recipes. I didn't, and that's why the greens are so shiny.

I used the oven method of cooking cheesy polenta - you mix polenta with water, bring a pan of water to a boil, add the polenta mix and grated cheese, bring to a boil until it starts to thicken, then bung in a pre-heated 200C oven in a greased baking dish for 50 minutes. Jaffrey recommends 60g of parmesan, but since that's not vegetarian I swapped it for Northumberland oak smoked cow's milk cheese, which is made with vegetarian rennet and has a lovely delicate smokey flavour. The recipe made a lot of polenta and it only had a slight taste of cheese, which is due to me swapping the cheese as the oak smoked isn't as strong a cheese as parmesan. However I 'tidied up' the leftovers to make a neater line in the baking dish (ahem) this afternoon and it tasted a bit stronger, so it's one of those recipes that improves with a little age.

We're eating the leftover polenta with a kidney bean and quorn mince chilli tonight, yum!

World Vegetarian - Green Pepper and Cucumber Salad

I wanted to try a nice, simple salad for my lunch today to show that World Vegetarian doesn't just include curries that take hours to prepare. The green pepper and cucumber salad is a your bog-standard common-or-garden salad and has all the ingredients you can see in the picture above as well as a bit of olive oil and a rather precise 4 tsp of lemon juice. I juiced half a lemon and after using this there was a fair bit of juice left, which is annoying because I hate waste, so I popped the rest in some hot water and drank it while blogging. I can understand why you're only supposed to use 4 tsp because it would have been too lemony and acidic if I'd used all of it. However next time I may throw caution to the wind and use 5 tsp of juice.

It was very tasty eaten with a toasted brown pitta bread filled with halloumi cheese (when I lived in Syria we called this squeaky cheese) and home-made pickled beetroot on the side.

World Vegetarian - Green Bean and Potato Curry

Green bean and potato curry

This curry took ages to make. I had the whole evening, but it took two people good 40 minutes to chop the shallots and green beans needed. Apparently in Sri Lanka they cut green beans 'at a steep diagonal into 5mm wide pieces' - wanting to do this properly I tried to do just that. I didn't include the full amount of beans and it still took ages. When I make it again I won't bother and just chop them roughly. The crunchy green beans and smooth potato did work together very well.

Either way it was tasty, but not delicious. The recipe calls for the juice of 1 lime and 3 chillies. I couldn't taste the lime much and the chillies' heat overpowered the curry powder somewhat, which is something I referred to in my post about making the curry powder, and made it taste a touch bland. The coconut milk did make it lovely and creamy. When I make it again I'll include the juice of 2 limes, only 2 chillies and more salt or a bit of vegetable stock to emphasis these flavours.

World Vegetarian - Sri Lankan Raw Curry Powder and Green Bean and Potato Curry.

This dish was good, but time-consuming and rather expensive to make. We already had most of the spices, but there were quite a few in the curry powder we didn't already have.

Sri Lankan Raw Curry Powder

I'm not sure why it's 'raw', maybe because it's only warmed at 60 degrees C rather than being toasted. It was easy to make - pre-heat oven to 60C, bung ingredients on a tray, leave for an hour, allow to cool, and grind. I ground it in the food processor, and it came out well. It filled half a washed-out old 250g salsa jar.

Warmed spices

Ground curry powder surrounded by a halo of its own foodie yumminess!

The powder has a mild, delicate flavour of coconut, curry leaves, coriander and fennel so you have to be very careful not to overpower it with other flavours. It can be used in any vegetable curry and although World Vegetarian only uses it in 2 curries this isn't really problem because the recipe only makes around 120ml. The recipe I used it in required 4 tsp and this used up about half of the powder so you won't have loads left sitting in the cupboard. It still took an hour to make though. It's going to be a staple in my kitchen, but only on special occasions.

Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian

I turned vegetarian a few months ago and, getting bored of trawling the BBC Good Food website for veggie recipes, bought two vegetarian cooking bibles  Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, and Rose Elliot's New Complete Vegetarian. I'm going to be trying them out over the next few months and giving my verdict.

I had a flick through World Vegetarian yesterday.

First Impression
At first I felt a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of recipes in the book as there a quite possibly thousands of them. I bit my lip and worried it would be relegated to my bookcase shelf and never be used. But then as I flipped through the pages I began to make a mental note of all the recipes I wanted to try and it grew and grew and grew and grew. These recipes sound delicious, and Jaffrey's introductions are charming and personable without being whimisical or irritating - Sophie Dahl I'm looking at you - and it sounds like she's stood in the kitchen with a cup of tea chatting about where she first heard about this or that, or giving tidbits of advice about presentation.
 
Presentation
It's well laid-out. There aren't any mouthwatering pictures to pour over, which is a shame. It would have been nice to have seen the beautiful cover design mirrored in the book's contents.

Oraganisation
It's fairly well organised. The chapters are Vegetables; Dried Beans, Dried Peas, Lentils and Nuts; Grains; Dairy Foods; Added Flavourings (by which she means chutneys, sauces, and spice mixes etc); and Soups Salads and Drinks.

The recipes are then organised alphabetically by the main ingredient and at the beginning of each section there's a short introduction to the vegetable touching on Jaffrey's experiences and how to prepare them, where a picture or two of a dish would be nice. Each recipe has a short introduction as well for example giving advice on how to chop the ingredients, or what kind of an effect the spices will have.

There is a list of special ingredients that the reader may be unfamiliar with information on how to prepare it, where it comes from or what effect the ingredient will have on the dish. There's also a list of necessary equipment and of suppliers of hard-to-find ingredients.

Finally at the end is the index. It's comprehensive but could be organised better. The recipes are listed by the main ingredients and often duplicated in both sections if there is more than one main ingredient - so asparagus with pine nuts comes under Asparagus, pine nuts with and Pine nuts, asparagus with. Recipes are also listed under the type of food and also again by what part of the world they're from. So for example, Turkish bread appears under breads and later on under Turkish-style recipes. The index, unsurprisingly, is a little hard to navigate at first because everything's in a tiny font size and the only difference between entries is that non-English words are in italics. It would be easier to navigate if different types of entries were differentiated somehow.


Recipes

I've tried a few recipes and will blog them. I must say I'm impressed. The recipes vary from curries that require you soaking ingredients over night or toasting and grinding a special spice blend to simple salads that can be chucked together in seconds. So far they seem to work, although it's hard to go wrong with a curry and I haven't tried to make any of the breads yet.

Some are very simple and economic to make from readily-available ingredients or store-cupboard staples. Some require pricey, specialist ingredients and Jaffrey occasionally notes good substitutions. Generally the recipes are fairly healthy, but there are exceptions with lashings of coconut milk and oil or cheese. Some recipes have 3 or 4 ingredients, some have a whole shopping list's worth.

There is incredible variation in where recipes are from. From what I've seen there are recipes from China, Japan, India (including Gujarati, Kashmiri, and Rajasthani recipes), Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran, Ethiopia, Italy, Macedonia, Bangladesh, Australia, Latin America, Mexico, Spain, Lebanon, Cyprus, Greece, the Ukraine and the list goes on...

The recipes could be written a bit better, however. How many servings it makes comes right at the end, which is mildly annoying. The recipes don't explicitly state how long it will take to prepare and cook, which is fairly aggravating. Word of warning - if it is a curry it will take ages regardless.

Summary

The sheer variety of ways to prepare common and rarer ingredients means it's not going to languish unused. There is something for whatever mood you are in and for whatever your tastes. It's great for when you're in a food rut, or need to eat something up and aren't feeling inspired by that very full bag of polenta skulking in the cupboard.