Quiet day

I had a nice quiet day at home with the kids :) I played pool and lots of other games with Geordie. I prepared strawberries and mandarins ready for the family to raid. Its amazing how much a difference it makes if the food is already cut up and placed front and centre of the fridge. And chilled bite sized fruit is so gorgeous, especially after your taste buds start to change :)

I put a beef stew with veggies on the slow cooker, and I have made Symply too good boscaiola sauce to go with pasta. This pasta sauce is a kid and party favourite and it is weight loss food :)  I calculated the calorie density of the meals as well. Its a pain to do but you weigh all the ingredients as it goes into the pot and then you weigh the entire food when it is finished.  You calculate the calories of the entire pot. I use Calorie King, then you divide the calories by the weight. Then next time you make that dish you have a pretty good idea of how many calories was in it. I save it as custom food in calorie king with the portion being a single gram then you just put in how many grams you ate.

I know that seems absurd and unnecessary and if it is for you that's brilliant, but for me I know I can get complacent and being accurate with calories means I can enjoy my food budget without worrying too much about going over.

Another thing I made today was some homemade veggie stock. Basically when I was chopping up the other two meals the veggie scraps were going into a large pot with water. I use the vegetable stock to flavour my meals and also to avoid using oil when I am frying onions etc. Oils is actually pretty nutrient poor so I try to avoid and minimise it. I hate buying vegetable stock as it is so cheap to make at home. When I make a batch I freeze off most of in a large ice cube tray. I then bag it. I also do this with coconut milk and tomato paste.

The obesity crisis is essentially driven by people not making enough food at home, so anything that helps us make food is critical to our health. I have an extra freezer which is essential. I can make extra food and then save it. This helps prevent a lot of takeaway and waste.

As I have been paying off the house debt I have been losing weight. I am down about 3 kilos from last Monday which is pretty cool given that I have just finished a 4 day holiday. I am getting ahead with the food reserve with some carrot cupcakes in the freezer, as well as ham and bean soup, spaghetti and beef stew ready to go when we need it.

Yesterday I farewelled James at the airport as he is on his way to see his parents for 2 weeks in Sydney. It is a bit harder not having a babysitter so that I can go for a ride with Jason in the morning. That said I do have a cross trainer and treadmill in the house and a trampoline out the back so its no excuse not to exercise.

I did some web work and I hung up some pictures up around the house. I have been really stuck on that for some time as I have been a perfectionist about where they should go and how much I still like them. So I didn't hang anything. I hung up two today and it took a bit out of me. (Yes I know how lame that sounds.) The good news is that I have got another little bit of the medium term backlog off my back, the bad news is that dinner suffered.

How could dinner (Boscaiola pasta) suffer when I cooked it early today? Well it suffered because I already ate it for lunch. What I felt like was baked beans and cheese toasted sandwiches. Yes I know that was diet suicide. And yes I did it anyway. And yes I am bummed about it now.

Some days we don't win eh? However at least I got a little bit ahead with the backlog and food prep.

Where I went wrong was not taking the time to find new things to cook, or maybe it was just not having enough emergency dinners in the freezer.