The FastDay Forum

Many thanks for the links Caitlin, like izzy I will spend many a happy hour following them up.
It's amazing how eating fruit by itself can trigger a desire for more carbs. Do you find this happens with all fruit or less so with berries and lower carb ones? What do you eat with your fruit to lessen the sugar urge? Sorry for all the questions!

Many thanks for the links Caitlin, like izzy I will spend many a happy hour following them up.
It's amazing how eating fruit by itself can trigger a desire for more carbs. Do you find this happens with all fruit or less so with berries and lower carb ones? What do you eat with your fruit to lessen the sugar urge? Sorry for all the questions!

Ah ha! CREAM! Can't you see, she's like the cat that's got the cream...

Actually, cheese does it too...

Many thanks for the links Caitlin, like izzy I will spend many a happy hour following them up.
It's amazing how eating fruit by itself can trigger a desire for more carbs. Do you find this happens with all fruit or less so with berries and lower carb ones? What do you eat with your fruit to lessen the sugar urge? Sorry for all the questions!

Ah ha! CREAM! Can't you see, she's like the cat that's got the cream...

Actually, cheese does it too...

Oh of course @FatDog silly me!

Hey up @izzy and @callyanna I like to do the recipe thing on my fast days, food travel shows, books, oh the plotting that goes on... Anyway the catering standards around here have gone way up since starting all this.

Eating fruit alone can kick off my blood sugar so I tend to go for the more complex GI stuff more fibre stuff like berries which I can do about 50g of on their own without problems. I tend to eat fruit with either nuts, seeds, `greek yogurt`, cream or cheese. This way I can eat larger quantities.

If I do get a carb urge now I will try have something like 200ml of yogurt and 70g of blueberries, yogurt is supposed to have some benificent effect on blood sugar but this might be `woo`, in my case the high fat protein content is more likely the thing that fixes it.

I don't do biscuits now so I like bits of apricots or plums with cheese, especially in the evenings.

Hey @FatDog, I love cream, it was the cream that lured me in... "You get to eat lots of cream cat".

Tofu And Veg Satay Recipe
* * * * *
Quick and easy to make
1 serving
About 25g carbs depending on veg and coconut milk
[Probably only consider this if you like tofu and peanut butter]
* * * * *

Ingredients

2 tbsp high temperature oil

65g crunchy peanut butter - Whole Earth
1/2 tin coconut milk
1 1/2 tsp soy sauce (use tamari the fermented stuff)
1/4 tsp chili flakes

200g tofu - use the pre marinated stuff if you're not used to doing your own

300g assorted colourful veg sliced thinly {
garlic
shitakes
broccoli florets
red pepper
spring onions
red cabbage
}

Method

Satay Sauce
Dissolve the peanut butter in the coconut milk
Add soy and chili flakes
(1 tsp of brown sugar or honey if you're a carbovore)

Tofu
Stir fry tofu set aside

Veg
Stir fry veg

Combine
Add tofu to veg heat (add some noodles if you're a carbovore)
Stir in sauce heat and serve

Hi @Izzy
I think the recipe is Malaysian in origin but they make the peanut sauce from base, and they use meat sometimes, so quorn might work. I got the recipe from the guys at my local cafe and they just use mushrooms and peppers and things.

I like tofu but it's a bit of a shenanigan to marinate and get to the right texture to stir fry. Life is sometimes too short to stuff a mushroom.

Woks And Things
I finally got around to watching `Hairy Bikers` in Hong Kong this morning. I'm very into wok cooking at the moment, but not only for stir fry, I'm experimenting using it to minimum cook western Indian and Mediterranean food.

I make the sauce part of the recipe separate, I then take the veg components from the recipe and stir fry them, when the veg are just cooked I stir the sauce in. This gives me better control over the the veg textures, I can also keep a close check on the sauce.

I have all electric at home so getting very high temperatures is a bit of a fankle but it's okay, I had an electric wok but this died recently so I'm looking for a new one and also looking into portable gas stoves. I find It is a very adaptable cooking method, I went wild camping up in the Scottish Highlands last Spring with my nephew and his partner, we took a calor stove and a wok, it turned out to be the complete camping food solution and also great fun.

Anyway back to `Hairy Bikers`, a few handy cooking tips here like the sesame oil dressing and a few things to avoid like the ketchup in the `sweet and sour`, I find the show funny and like the cultural-hostess-trolley-crash aspect. I look forward to the Thailand episode.

Dinner With VBF
I went over to @FatDog's for dinner last night and a very pleasant evening it was too...

I am welcomed with a glass of red wine some Stilton and nuts, great after the walk over in an icy wind, better still to hear that dinner includes Thai red curry.

FatDogs kitchen looks and smells like a delicatessen, stowed with boxes of spices, bottles of oil, pulses, all in good order, warmth and light, a bookcase plus of cookery books, a computer where all is logged, it's one of these ambient places where you want to spend all day relaxing and chatting.

Later I volunteer to do my sous-chef bit with a mountain of veg all piled up on the big wooden table. With my renewed interest in making food I really enjoy this, cooking with my friend is as always great fun and a good chance to catch up. I tend to be a bit gung-ho with cooking but VBF has a precision approach to food and this I reckon is helping to improve my own basic hippie cooking.

The Thai red curry turned out amazing and maybe the best I have tasted outside Thailand, I find Edinburgh Thai food a bit mild and samey so this was a treat. I am definitely going to be stealing the recipe for this one.

Sharing great food and conversation with friends, these are the times I always remember when I think about the good times. Around 1am some smooth coffee with lots of cream before heading home through the quiet streets of Edinburgh.

Many thanks for a great evening Xx

Wow that kitchen at fatdog's sounds awesome, photo of food and kitchen needed please!

Thanks @Izzy
Yes I think bringing friends together and sharing food is a big part of it for @FatDog. Families breaking bread and chatting, and I also think extended community has been replaced with lonely people and counseling. Social media is useful in some ways but misses out a personal dimension.

I like your camping stove story, pioneering spirit

Not a huge fan of turnip but I have tried it in curry soup and it really works, I might make this next week.

Xx

Hey @Azureblue have not seen your happy sunshine self for a while
I definitely need to get snapping some of @FatDogs meals, actually their newly organised kitchen would make a nice context/backdrop for the food...

Xx

The New Improved Smaller Caitlin
Just discovered I have shrunk, as The Queen is reputed to say when she goes flying over a Corgi "oh dash it". Seriously puts all my sums and plans out of kilta...

I had also entered my data wrong in my tracker although I new this at the time, so was all out...

To quote our beloved bard...

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Thanks to the lovely Moogie the inaccuracies in my tracker have now been sorted and once again I have promis'd joy.

How did this shrinkage of caitlin come to pass? Last height measurement by me, possibly in the 1980s... The doctor has measured me more recently but did not say "cat you have shrunk" no, what she said was "cat your weight is slightly high", puzzled at the time as I thought my BMI was not too bad. Oh how we laughed, the old different hymn sheets chestnut!

I thought I was still 5.10 while actually I was 5.8, meh!

I wondered why the 32" leg jeans now fitted me okay, I thought I had grown less clumsy and had ceased banging my head on things. What height will I be in twenty years I wonder? It is really quite disconcerting.

Well that's it then, enough for now, if I must live life as a smaller person I will make the best of it, time to give up the beach volleyball and start looking at high shoes.

caitlin Xx


* Edit for typo!

... Off to measure myself immediately seriously tho Izzy is right, did the doctor say why, could it be bone mass / density thingymebobs (you can tell I'm not scientific can't you )

Been out in the rain too much? Too many hot wash baths? Drying out in the tumble dryer?
Seriously 2" is a lot of difference ... ? Concerned.
How about getting that doc to test you for osteoporosis please.
:0/