Food Diary Day 2

I don’t have any photos for today.

Not because I didn’t eat anything but because I went out to dinner with GM’s uncle (please don’t mention his name in comments!) and his horrible (I mean, REALLY horrible) new gf and didn’t feel like taking any pictures.

Whilst I didn’t take any photos of food today, I took photos of the shrine Michael Jackson fans have set up outside HMV in Piccadilly Circus to commemorate his brilliance and legacy to music.  It’s just loads of handwritten messages and photos of him plastered over a big wall and a couple of pillars, plus a long strip of paper on the pavement.  Do you want to see?  They also played his songs non-stop but I’m not sure if that was from a portable player that the fans had brought along or if HMV was kind enough to do this for them.

In work news, unlike yesterday the aircon didn’t break.  But it might as well have because it was boiling hot in the building!  I seriously have never perspired so much WHILST SITTING DOWN.  Tomorrow I am wearing shorts, a strappy top and flip flops to work, I don’t care.

The weather is forecast to be the same tomorrow but it gets even warmer on Thursday.  Oh no.  And then on Sunday it’s going to be 17 degrees and raining heavily!  Why!!  I’m going out on Sunday!

Oh I nearly forgot to tell you that I snagged my new blue top!  I wore it today and at the end of the day when I was talking to the receptionist I snagged it on a splinter on her counter.  So sad.  Major heartpain.

Food Diary Day 2

Snack – One banana

Snack – One and a half tangerines.  They were so sour my teeth ached so I had to throw away a half.

Lunch – Salad of hot and spicy grilled chicken breast slices with olives, sundried tomatoes, cucumber slices, tiny cherry tomatoes on a bed of wilted spinach.  Spinach is my new love.

Dinner – Rice with mapo tofu, black pepper beef fillet, sweet and sour prawn balls and roast duck.  I had planned to have Japanese food but the gf apparently doesn’t eat raw food.  They don’t seem to know that the Japanese don’t eat EVERYTHING raw.  She doesn’t eat a load of other things also.  Really special little flower.

Drink – Peppermint tea

Drink – Appletise sparkling pear juice.  It was so hot in the office that I had to waste calories drinking a stupid drink I normally wouldn’t ever drink, just to cool down.

Drink – Water.

Exercise

None!

Horrible day.

Food Diary Day 1

Apparently we are going to get a heatwave this week!  It’s been forecast that temperatures here are set to rise to 30 degrees celsius sometime this week and by UK standards this is a heatwave.  So the Met Office says anyway.

30 degrees celsius might not sound like much to people who live in Asia and Australia but honestly it feels very hot here.  I even perspired this morning!  The aircon system at work is really old and it packed up this morning.  This is something that will happen at least a few times this summer I expect.  Anyway it was fixed pretty quickly but the office is big so it takes time to cool down.  Luckily though, I sit under a draught so whilst the rest of the office were boiling their faces off I was nice and cool.  Hehe.  Obviously sitting under a draught is not so good in wintertime but we won’t think about this now.

The very warm weather is occurring in conjunction with the start of my health kick.  Which works very well because everyone loses their appetite when it’s hot.  Although it makes exercising slightly more painful than normal, even if the gym is air-conditioned.

Food Diary Day 1

Snack – One banana

Snack – Two tangerines

Lunch – Bistro salad (lamb’s lettuce and beetroot strips) with bbq flavoured grilled chicken breast, olives and sundried tomatoes

Dinner – One bowl muesli with skimmed milk

Dessert – 100g – ish blueberries

Drink – Peppermint tea

Drink – Water

Exercise

Rowed 2000m (13 minutes)

25 minutes on weight machines

1 minute on exercise bike (because GM had finished swimming and came to look for me at this point.  So I left)

I think my health kick is off to a good start!  Doing the food diary is a good idea because it prevents me from eating lots of embarrassingly fattening snacks since I don’t want to list them all down here!

Blueberry Cheesecake

I made this cheesecake on Thursday for a bbq round Tpa’s.

It’s essentially the same cheesecake as the one I’d made for GM’s father’s bbq the week before, as in, I followed the recipe but modified the base and the topping.  I didn’t like the chocolate curls topping so I decided to change it to blueberry jam.  This meant that the base couldn’t be ginger biscuit like it was before so I changed it to disgestives and left out the dark chocolate as well.

I’m quite proud of this cheesecake!  I finally got the ingredients right and put in the right amount of white chocolate.  It turned out really fluffy and light.   I made the blueberry jam all by myself too, without a recipe, so I’m really chuffed.

GM’s uncle and aunt gave it a 9.5 and 10 out of 10 respectively.  Hahaha.   When they were giving me marks I felt like I was on “Beautiful Cooking”.  GM’s uncle even said it was better than M&S!  I felt a bit of a fraud because it’s a real foolproof recipe as you can tell from how I made it wrong last time but it still turned out great!

I’ve just ordered some mini tartlet tins off the internet, I’m very excited.  I can’t wait to get them and make little quiches and fruit tarts.  You know, as I mature I feel like I am really turning into Ah Ma.  Soon I will be asking for kitchen gadgets and recipe books for all my birthday and christmas presents hahaha.

Flowers Flowers Everywhere

I think today was the hottest day of the year so far.  It felt like it anyway.

I was making a cheesecake this evening and as I was standing over the mixing bowl I suddenly realised that I was sweating like a pig.  But don’t worry, no perspiration got into my cake.  I’m a very clean cook and baker okay!

So having said all that, would it surprise you if I said that I just bought this coat?  Well I did!  It’s the sales over here and I saw this coat online and had to buy it.  It’s quite thin so it’ll have to be an autumn coat.  Can’t wait to wear it!  Although there’s a little problem in that it’s a bit too small for me but hopefully I will manage to slim into it.

The pattern of the coat up close.  I even love the lining, it’s so pretty!

Okay girls, in order to be able to fit into my coat by autumn time I am going on a health kick of exercising more and eating less, especially less junk food.  Which is why I will start a meme next week of “What I have eaten today” for a week.  I think it’ll be a good idea for me to write down everything that I eat in a day as a sort of food diary.  This will help me identify my food intake patterns and hopefully flag up what I need to change.  As well as probably shame me into eating less I suppose because I don’t think I’ll want to confess to a massive list of fatty foods!

Who wants to join me?!

A Week In My Life 09 : Day 7 – Work It Off, Then Put It Back On

This morning we decided to go swimming.  My swimming bag is different from my gyming bag and those are amongst some of the things I packed.  Actually I hadn’t been swimming for so long that I’d forgotten what I needed and missed a couple of things out.  That poor swimsuit of mine hasn’t seen any water since we were at Rottnest Island in Perth!  In fact, when I took it out this morning for the photoshoot it gave my rug a little sprinkling of leftover sand from Perth.  So well travelled my swimsuit haha.

These next two photos are going to be grainy and weird.  This is because when we got to our health club I found out that the lights weren’t working in the ladies’ changing room.  This is the first time it’s happened and it would have to be on a day when I needed to use the lockers and changing facilities.  Normally when I go to the gym I don’t use the changing room at all since I go in my gym clothes and shower at home.

The lockers.  The changing room is fairly big – there are three changing sections, loos and shower facilities.

I sneaked this pic of the pool once it was quiet.  I had to stop in the middle of my swimming to run to the lockers, grab my camera, snap pics then run back.  All very stealthy.  Although I left a great big trail of water behind me.  But it was a good job I did it when I did because shortly after I got back in the water someone came along and I wouldn’t have been able to take any photos.

Where the window is in the middle of the photo (where the glare is) is the jacuzzi.  On its left is the shower and on the shower’s left there is a doorway and that is the sauna.  On the jacuzzi’s right (after the deck chairs) there is an orangey door and that is the steam room.  I never use the sauna nor the steam room because being too hot makes me feel faint.  Sometimes I use the jacuzzi but very seldom because there’s always someone in there.

This is the other end of the pool.  You can make out the gym through those big windows – the gym overlooks the pool.

This is their cafe area.  I sit here and wait for GM to get his stuff from the locker sometimes.

After our swimming session we went to Valley Park which is this big retail park with shops, restaurants and a cinema.  I wanted to do some quick shopping at Outfit which houses a few of the high street brands so it’s easy shopping under one roof.  Also it’s near where we live and it’s not a hassle going there because parking is abundant and free.

There’s a big Ikea as part of the retail park.

In case you were wondering if I bought anything and what I bought, here is my shopping.  I bought three tops in three different sizes!  The blue top is a size 10, the striped shirt is a size 8 and the black tee is a size 12.  It all came up to £45 which is good for three tops.  I didn’t get any bottoms because no work suitable bottoms seemed to be on sale!

After shopping we went to Burger King in the same retail park.  That was actually the reason why I even went shopping in the first place, because we were there for Burger King.  We wanted to use the vouchers we got from the paper on Day 4, remember?

We used two vouchers.  One was “buy one 6 pack get one free” and the other was “buy a 6 pack and get a drink and fries free”.  So we ended up with three 6 packs of the mini burgers and a drink and fries.

This is what the mini burgers look like.  They came in two styles – jalapeno pepper and onion ring and bbq sauce.  Both styles were good; the jalapeno peppers had a sharp pickled tang and were very spicy and the onion rings were very fragrant.  I personally liked the onion ring burgers better but GM preferred the jalapeno pepper burgers.

This is how small the burgers were on a normal sized plate.  They were really filling though, I was full by the fourth burger but crammed down the last two and by that time my belly was breaking.

So after stuffing my face I did very relaxing stuff like chat on msn with Jo and then had a nap hehe.

At around 5.30pm we received a call from GM’s mum telling us that the barbecue had started and we should go over.

GM barbecuing the Korean meat we bought yesterday.  This one was spicy pork, very yummy.  There was lots to eat.  We had chicken wings, bulgogi, spicy pork, lamb chops, beef chops, sausages, corn and sweet potatoes and even lobsters.

GM’s father bought himself a cake for father’s day!  Haha.  No I think he bought a cake because he knew we were all going over.  This is the usual strawberry shortcake that we always get.  I didn’t have any.

I wanted to have my own cake!  This is my cake out of the tin.

It set!  I am so glad that it wasn’t runny.

Here it is in slice form.  Everyone liked the cake!  Or they pretended to anyway haha.   It was quite good, not too sweet and a bit tangy (because of the mascarpone and greek yoghurt) but it was very very filling.

When we got home I unwrapped the parcel I’d picked up from GM’s parents’ place.  We sometimes get big items we buy sent there because we know there is always someone at home to receive the parcels.  Here is my new slow cooker!  I am very excited!  I must make something very soon.

GM’s aunt gave us a gift of two tea towels from her kids’ school.  Their school had the brilliant idea of getting all students to draw self-portraits and printing this on tea towels.  Aren’t the drawings cute?  I love them!

And so ends this year’s “A Week In My Life” for me.  I had so much more fun this time because Jo, Di and Heri did it with me, thanks girls!  ＼（＾∀＾）メ（＾∀＾）ノ  I loved reading about everyone’s days; it made me feel closer to you all learning about your everyday activities, seeing them through pictures and sharing mine with you.  And I have to say, even though it felt a bit troublesome sometimes it gave my days a sense of purpose that I know I will miss now that the meme has ended.  You all have to keep on blogging!  Otherwise I will be lonely! (T_T)