Another nice grocery delivery this morning, nearly all of which was fruit and veg. Once I had unpacked it all (too much plastic! Is it really necessary to cling-wrap a head of broccoli?? – bag of wrappings on far right), it looked as if I was about to celebrate Harvest Festival in my kitchen!
After washing the fruit and leaving it to drain, I started prepping the veggies. From start to finish, including the fruit, it took about 2 1/2 hours. It sounds a lot, but it saves a great deal of time when coming to prepare meals. My new chopping aids were a great help.
Here is the bulk of the veggies prepped.
There was a huge amount of veg trimmings. I mixed them all up in a bowl, ready to make stock.
In the middle of this it was time for a late lunch. I used some of my prepped veggies and a few bits and pieces left over from last week to make a hearty salad, consisting of some left-over cooked bulgur wheat, little gem lettuce, rocket, baby spinach, cucumber, tomato, cashews, dried apricots, raisins, grapes, and some fresh beetroot which I chopped using the julienne grater on my new chopping machine for the first time. It did a great job. I added a bit of oil-free balsamic vinaigrette.
When I poured out the glass of kefir, it seemed to have a life of its own, and it bubbled up and overflowed! You can see how foamy it is. It is fermented, of course. It was pretty sharp, but that’s how I like it. Beside this is a small glass of what Chef AJ calls “pot liquor.” I like this posh nosh name for veg stock!! I make a huge amount of veg stock, more than I need for recipes, and rather than waste it, I drink it. It is delicious, and full of goodness, and you can drink it hot or cold. Each time, the flavour varies, according to what veggies I’ve been cooking. Chef AJ starts her day with a bottle of this when she takes her adorable little dog Bailey for her morning walk.
Finally, my normal rehydration/electrolyte drink. I make up a litre of this every day. It’s good for Kermit, my stoma. With an ileostomy, you have to be very careful not to get dehydrated, because you don’t have a colon, the final part of the digestive tract whose function is water absorption. The stuff the hospital recommends is pretty boring, and you have to add rubbish to make it palatable. I found this recipe online – it contains fresh lemon juice, Himalayan pink rock salt (pink because of its naturally occurring additional minerals), maple syrup, kombucha, and coconut water, topped up with filtered water. It’s delicious and I never tire of it. For my dessert I had some home-made yoghurt and a plate of fruit. It was all very satisfying.
One of the main things about a whole-foods, plant-based diet is that it is low in caloric density. This means that you have to eat a lot to get the same amount of calories you would get in a non-vegan meal. When you eat a diet rich in fat and animal protein, which is calorically dense, your stomach doesn’t send the same signals of being full to your brain until you have over-eaten, and this is one of the reasons why we have such an epidemic of obesity today.
After lunch I made the stock. This is the second lot, ready to go in the pressure cooker, along with the other ingredients I included, in order to give it some more flavour. Tomato and onion powders are such a useful ingredient – very concentrated pure flavour.
Since embarking on this journey I have discovered smoked paprika. If you haven’t tried it, I recommend it – it is extraordinary!
This was the stuff on the counter at the end of the session, before I sat down for a cup of tea with my hubby, in readiness to prepare our evening meal. I had made a list of meals I wanted to prepare but as always I was far too ambitious! I made two sauces – one just called “Creamy White Sauce” made with boiled potato, cashews, Dijon mustard, lemon juice and cider vinegar amongst other things, and the other, a great favourite: Chef AJ’s Yummy Sauce. It is called this because when she first made it, she gave some to her hubby to try, and he said it was yummy! This was how I discovered Chef AJ in the first place, when I was trawling the internet looking for some recipe or other. The basis of the sauce is a tin of cannelloni beans, but you could cook your own, and it also has Dijon mustard and lemon juice. It’s a delicious basic sauce you can eat hot or cold, and you can add anything you like if you want a different flavour.
I fished out the peppers from the heap of fruit that was drying, and chopped some of them ready. I’ve sliced the green ones, and halved and eviscerated the red and yellow ones, ready to make stuffed peppers later in the week.
For our evening meal I heated up the left-over roasted veggies and the small amount of left-over bulgur wheat, mixed in some of the Creamy White Sauce, and served it on a bed of green salad leaves.
Before bed, after tidying up, here is my very well-stocked fridge to launch us into the coming week!
I continue to struggle with my fridge freezer. I have two chest freezers in the outhouse (one quite small, the other a good size) and also the tiny counter-top freezer we bought for Mum in her flat. The freezer under this fridge is quite small, and I’m not using it much – it’s badly in need of reorganising. When we moved, we put my fridge from our old house in the flat for Mum, and it exactly filled the space, but the move didn’t agree with it, and after a short while it failed, and we got her a new one. This is smaller, so there is a gap at the side, which is convenient for Ruby to squeeze into when my cleaning lady comes – Ruby spends the duration behind the fridge, terrified of the vacuum cleaner! The gap serves no other useful purpose and just waste space. Mum’s fridge is always full – I make 6 bottles of kombucha every week, and my hubby’s pomegranate juice for prostate health is stored in there (I always bulk buy this when it’s on offer because it’s pretty expensive), and Esmeralda, my sourdough starter, lives in there too. I keep the strawberries, grapes and cherries in there, just bringing out a few at a time to store in the pantry, because they go off so quickly in the summer, and any extra veggies which won’t fit in my fridge.
A little while ago I spoke to Howden’s, the manufacturer of my kitchen, and asked whether it would be possible to replace my existing fridge freezer with a full-height fridge. The design of my kitchen is now obsolete, but she said it would be fine, because the appliances remained the same, and they could join the two doors together so they opened as one, even if it still looked like two from the outside. I didn’t pursue it further at the time, and now I’m quite glad I didn’t, because I’ve thought about it some more. If they were able to transfer the existing fridge freezer to the flat, replacing the small fridge and tiny counter-top freezer, I would still have the use of it. I am going to find a kitchen fitter who is licenced to fit Howden’s kitchens and see if this can be done. They would have to fit new doors in the flat, to match the cabinets in there as far as possible. The only slight problem is that it is right next to the cooker and they may say that’s not a good idea! We shall see, anyway. It’s such a minute kitchen that we don’t have much option.
If we do go ahead with this plan, Ruby is going to have to find an alternative hiding place. I can’t think how she squeezes in there anyway. It’s a complete myth that cats measure gaps by the length of their whiskers.
This week I lost another two pounds and my hubby lost a pound! I had been doing the 5:2 diet since 2014 (with a year off while I was undergoing my colon cancer treatment) and managed to lose over 4 stone (over 56 pounds). I had plateaued out about 7 pounds above my target weight, and couldn’t seem to shift it. My hubby decided to join me in the 5:2 after Christmas, and it’s been pretty slow for him – it doesn’t suit everybody. He has been losing one or two pounds a week since we started the whole-foods plant-based diet. He’s a bit depressed that he isn’t losing more, but I encouraged him and congratulated him for his progress. It is better to lose it slowly and steadily because that way, it stays off.
We are not fully vegan yet, and may never be. I haven’t actually mentioned the dreaded “V” word to my hubby or he might freak out! We’ve got a lot of non-vegetarian, non-vegan food in the house and in the freezer, and I am reluctant to waste it, so we will gradually work our way through it. We had a chicken korma for lunch on Sunday and we have a little bit of cheese and eggs, but certainly not every day. Eventually this will be phased out.
My hubby isn’t 100% on board and refuses to watch the film “Forks Over Knives” but he does eat everything I put in front of him without complaining! He’s out and about a lot during the day and I have very little control over what he eats then, but he is conscious that he’s trying to lose weight so he’s being more sensible these days. Sometimes he doesn’t give me enough notice that he’s going out, for me to prepare something for him to take with him. As I get more organised, I shall make sure there’s always something in the fridge – either a box of prepared salad, or something to put in a healthy sandwich. He always takes some fruit with him.
He has never really “owned” his health. He is interested as far as it goes, in his diverticular disease, and he takes his tablets for various other things, but at least he stopped the statins a while back on my suggestion. His health was in a very poor state when we first met, and when we went to see the GP together before our wedding, the doctor read the riot act at him, in front of me, telling him that if he didn’t change his ways, he’s most likely have his first heart attack in the next five years, and it might well be his last! I think the doctor laid it on deliberately, so that I would take it on board and get him in hand!! It certainly worked. If I had known then what I know now, we might both have escaped various health problems, but you can only do the best you can with the information you have.
He’s just not that interested. If he took more interest, we could work together on this a lot better, but if I push too much it’s counter-productive. As long as I make the meals as delicious as possible, he is happy. He hasn’t complained yet!
I have started making almond milk. Eventually this may replace dairy. I am still buying dairy milk but in smaller quantities. I am awaiting delivery of some other ingredients to help me make a decent almond yoghurt – it needs a little help to set. I am also running rather low on almonds and need to put in another order with Buy Wholefoods Online – my favourite online wholefoods shop! I used to order from them only about 3 or 4 times a year but now I’m becoming a regular customer.
The almond milk makes absolutely sensational kefir. You have to add a little sugar for the kefir grains to feed on, and the kefir doesn’t thicken like dairy milk does, but it has an amazing flavour. The grains seem to be thriving and growing, so I must be doing something right!
I tried making oat milk as well, but I found this quite disgusting – it was all gloopy and slimy, and it was a rather unpleasant grey colour. Both the small experimental amounts of kefir and yoghurt I attempted to make with it were revolting, so they got thrown away! Ah well, can’t win ’em all. It would have been good because oats are cheap as chips compared with almonds, although buying them in bulk isn’t so bad. Other people make cashew milk but I haven’t tried that. I am not a fan of soya milk, having bought it in the past and not much liking the texture, so I won’t bother to try and make that.
I am really enjoying this adventure in food and nutrition. It’s always good to have something new to learn, to keep one sharp, especially if it is beneficial to one’s health!
