Lazy Daze

Ah, holidays. Melbourne is at the start of a predicted major heatwave, so there's not much I can do (since I don't drive) without melting. My houseguest has left, and I have a week of nothing much before the next event in my current calendar. Ahhh... So I've been catching up on those things I like to do around the house - I completely made over the garden yesterday; I restored my herb garden and extended it to include some new additions, I designed and created jewellery for my Mum to wear to my cousin's wedding later in the month, and I even tolerated about ten minutes of sunbathing this morning before the sunbeams started to really sting.

Given the heat, and the absence of air cooling or circulation in the kitchen, cooking has been one of the last things I've wanted to do. As of yesterday I started back on a carnivorous way of eating, stripping back to meat-only today. I'm already in ketosis, so hopefully the scales will starts showing progress as I'd really like to have shaken off this Christmas weight before I head off for my beach holiday in just over a week! I know my chances aren't good...

Here's a quick account of my eats over the past three days:

6/1/10

Breakfast: Camembert omelette, made with extra cream and butter. So rich and satisfying!


Lunch: to our delight, Mum & I found roast meat & veg available for lunch in the Westfield Doncaster food court, for $12.50! Such a huge amount of really great-tasting food, with tender, slow-cooked meat and fresh vegetables. Sold by "Rhumba's" or some such, right next to Borders. If you're a local, go get it!


Dinner: I made an interesting salad for the beau, with an adventurous combo of fresh produce - capsicum, carrot, snap peas, pea shoots, and blueberries! It lasted him three meals, and he adored it!


Mum and I had the last of the sashimi salad (still with some salmon roe, but no sashimi) to accompany our serving of the main, which was t-bone beef steak, with Camembert cheese.


To wash down our dinner, and accompany our guilty-pleasure movie of the evning, "Never Been Kissed", I made some guilt-free single servings of Chocolate Cream Cake with Berries, and this time I used less sweetener and mixed the eggs all together, not bothering to whip the white separately. The cake was denser, but somehow softer, and the extra sweetener was not missed. Trial and error to find the amount that suits you best...


7/1/10

Breakfast: A couple of Camembert omelets, served with four slices of shortcut bacon. Needless to say, I certainly didn't need lunch after this wonderful breakfast!


Dinner: After a day of toiling in the garden (a very warm day for physical outdoor activity, involving hacking down overgrown vines, ripping an old watering system out of the ground as well as off of patio ceiling beams, potting and transplanting various succulents and herbs, and hoisting soil and filled pots to useful places. And let's not count the amount of watering can refills I would have done, lugging the big bastard from the tap back to the patio, again and again...), I could not be arsed cooking dinner, so I sent the beau to the chicken place. Yum! I took the legs for dinner, the beau took the breasts, and I saved the rest to pick at.


8/1/10

Breakfast: picked clean the leftover chicken carcass from the night before. I possibly ate more bones/marrow than meat. Yum!

Lunch: a lamb forequarter chop, and two slices of shortcut bacon. They were the only items that were thawed and could be thrown on the grill - by lunchtime, the kitchen was starting to roast in and of itself, so no time to fuss around with frying things (or photograph them)!

Dinner: a delicious, organic porterhouse steak! I took the photo before I topped the hunk with a copious amount of butter. Mmmmmmmm! Tender and juicy, even though I tossed it on the grill straight from the freezer! Naughty!


And now I'm well and truly in ketosis! Feeling good, and even though my weight is still up by a couple of kilos compared to before Christmas, my body composition doesn't show it except for a bit of jiggliness in my lower abdomen. If I can get rid of that before hitting the beach resort in just over a week, that will make things much more pleasant! Bring on the meat!

Meanwhile, my Mum has begun her attempt at Drs. Eades' The Six-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle, starting with the shake weeks of course. She's 58 years young, so her experience on the program will be much more revealing of the potential of the Eades' design. Stick with it, Mum!

Finally, I'm thinking about decreasing my posting rate (i.e. working at the same rate as I have done this week). I have a huge working year ahead of me, with some big after-school commitments as I am directing another show, going up in May. So I am toying with reducing my rate to twice a week - one on Sunday/Monday to look at my weekend eats/reads/etc, and one on Friday/Saturday to recap the eats/events of the week. I may start using Twitter more frequently instead, tweeting about my meals as I eat them, with photos when convenient, and linking to interesting articles so that there is more immediacy to you finding out about them. With 400+ followers of the blog and on Twitter, I'm guessing a lot of you double-dip anyway, and my tweets will be listed in the siderbar of my blog, but if anyone would be saddened by this change, please let me know!

I hope the first week of 2010 has been sweet for everyone, even though it seems like most of us are dealing with the extremes of our usual weather patterns at the moment (very cold or very hot - I'd live near the equator for the consistent weather, were it not for the natural disasters and whatnot...). If you're back at work, I hope you're buoyed along by peppy New Year promise and excitement, and that you're not counting down the days til your next break! I'm still on holidays for a while, it's true, but as of Monday I'll have to get cracking on preparation for the year ahead. Fortunately for me, as the Year 12 Lit teacher, my preparation involves reading classic texts. What a chore... :P And for some of the time, I'll be doing so whilst lying beside a pool in northern NSW... It's okay if you hate me right now :) You can laugh later in the year when I'm so busy with work and the production that I have no time to cook, and all that's offered to me by the well-meaning catering team is carby garbage, which I will refuse and, instead, go hungry! Cold chicken-ville, here I come again!