Merry Food

And peace on earth. Today and every day from this day forward. If only everybody wished for this...

We've been enjoying being thoroughly immersed in thinking of food, reading about, cooking and eating almost-vegetarian, watching and re-watching gazillion mostly-English cooking shows. (Mostly English by TV stations' choice, but we're not complaining.) I didn't buy an eye-candy cookbook for Christmas this year, but goodness me I have a lot of nice ones and more than a few I never really read; I have a few new low GI books which are good to read, (albeit, GI still surprising/confusing us from time to time), and Ben and I bought The Hairy Dieters, which in the UK has been deemed better than porn. 

The Hairy Bikers are funny fellows. I used to think they looked so unsanitary and unappetizing as soon as they came on I changed the channel; Ben had to watch when I wasn't around. For some reason we watched an episode of The Best of British about a month ago and suddenly I couldn't get enough. Though I wouldn't try their recipes, I love their baking the best.

This year we didn't save anything for Christmas. We got stuck into Panettone as soon as Ben came home with it on Friday, (but only the recommended slice of 1/16 of the cake at a time;) munching on raspberries and boysenberries as soon as we came home from picking on Saturday.But strangely no booz; we haven't really wanted any.

Eating healthily has also meant we don't use as much oil or flour and washing dishes has been easier. We got used to the smaller portions much sooner than we expected and feel full quickly. One of the strangest of all is that I've not had chocolate craving for... over a month.

Yesterday, Christmas Eve, though we had no special plans, we each assumed we'd have some kind of sumptuous meat, a salad, and some carbo. Turned out we had a windy, glaring-sunny, heat wave kind of a day so we changed menu: almost-dry-fried monk fish, orange kumara and walnuts, tabbouleh, and cucmber/yogurt sauce. Except I forgot the garlic in the last and it tastes like a healthy milkshake.  We used to make tabbouleh often but hadn't for a while; I don't like parsley too much and the way we were taught by our friend Margaret had a lot of parsley in it. I thought it would be a good thing on a scorcher of a evening, so I looked up a recipe. We didn't have lemons or lemon juice, and it was almost too late to go shopping, so I squeezed a lime and two lemons. We didn't have flat parsley so we used a lot of crinkly ones, which would have given a stronger, green taste. But then I didn't have olive oil so used flax seed oil which is blander but healthy.

When Ben was putting things away after our supper, he asked what I had used the soba/buckwheat for; I hadn't. I only made tabbouleh. But the bulgur packet was still sealed. Ah, that's why it looked slightly different from how I remembered! Oh, well, the texture was similar. I just hope we don't get sick eating uncooked soba.

And that's how it came to be that I more or less created an semi original dish. Though I may never repeat it again.

Today looks set to be hottter; it's sunnier and we have no wind. And it may sound strange to you, but I'm having a break from the kitchen duties today; we're having vegetarian leftovers and fruits for the next couple of days.  And more reading and talking about food.