In honour of a ten-day visit to these shores by Alice, who is the only bassoon player I know, and because I still haven’t got time to write a proper blog post, here’s my highlight from Dark Roasted Blend‘s latest collection of unlikely signs:
Full post here.
I had a conversation with some friends about yoga last weekend. One said she loved it; another said she was put off by the wibbly-wobbly spiritual stuff that seems to come as part of the package.
I thought this was interesting, because although I have certainly been to yoga classes where I was invited to pray to the goddess, the indisputable mental and emotional benefits of exercise suggest that our psychological selves are more closely bound up with our physical selves than traditional religious or “spiritual” (horrible word!) doctrine would like us to believe. We exist in our bodies, not in our immortal souls, which is why eating well and exercising make us happy as well as healthy.
So I am pro-exercise, as long as you can do something you enjoy. I really love Pilates and swimming, but I wouldn’t say I do either with great vigour. It doesn’t matter: the simple fact of taking yourself away from your everyday environment and using your limbs rather than your mind for an hour, especially if you spend most of your time sitting at a desk, has benefits way beyond the calories you might burn up while you do it.
Of course, if you spend an hour sweating over something you hate, like – ugh – hockey, you’re unlikely to end up happier, because the small buzz that the exercise generates will be overshadowed by growing dread at the thought of having to do it again. Finding exercise stressful rather than fun is an easy way to slip into the body-hate mindset that is so pointless and harmful. At school, I was awkward and ungainly and the last to be picked for sports teams, and although that was completely to do with my own adolescent hang-ups and had nothing to do with my actual body, which worked about as well as anyone else’s, the pain of Being Bad At Sport long outlasted the point at which anyone apart from me cared how fast I could run, or how often I could return a serve in tennis (answer: never).
Now that we’re grown-ups it doesn’t matter if we can’t run or hit a tennis ball, because we can choose to do something else instead, but I let that ancient anxiety poison my relationship with exercise for too long.
So if you hated PE and used to hide in the cloakroom to try and get out of it, take heart. It’s not about how many Twixes you burn, it’s about using your body to have fun. Try something off this list, and let me know how you get on:
I’m not very good at barbecue food. I’m not very good at meat in general, and I’m especially not good at meat that comes in big greasy hunks, with bones and fatty parts still attached. And although I like sausages, I prefer them gently and evenly cooked through rather than burned to a crisp (and still pink on the inside), a phenomenon which only the very skilled barbecue chef seems able to avoid.
So whenever I’m invited to a barbecue, I bring kebabs, because the best way to get food evenly cooked is to chop it up small, and because even if you don’t like one of the ingredients, it’s not long until you get to the next one. I quite often do veggie kebabs, but this weekend we had some chicken pieces in the freezer and a chorizo in the fridge, so I made about a dozen spicy chicken and mushroom kebabs, and about a dozen halloumi and chorizo.
The easiest way to get grilled vegetables wrong is to let them dry out, so I started by chopping two red onions, two orange and yellow peppers and a handful of what I think were portobello mushrooms, pouring a couple of tablespoonfuls of olive oil over them, adding a liberal amount of pepper and slightly less salt, and stirring it all together.
(Courgettes are another good addition, but I had used up all our courgettes the night before, making a lovely simple grated courgette and lemon zest sauce for pasta courtesy of a proper food writer, the recipe for which I can’t find now but will link to once I’m able to dig it out.)
The halloumi and chorizo kebabs were easy: I just alternated the cheese and meat with pieces of onion and pepper – the important thing here is to make sure the components have a similar density, so they cook at about the same time. And use slices of onion, not chunks, or the insides will make your eyes water.
I cut the chicken into 3cm pieces and marinated them for a couple of hours in an adapted version of a recipe from Nigel Slater, where you mix groundnut oil (I used pistachio oil, because it was the closest I had), chillis, paprika, spring onions, runny honey (I used maple syrup), lemon juice and crushed garlic, and coat the chicken in it.
I soaked the skewers in cold water for as long as I could before I made up the kebabs, which just about stopped them from catching fire, and I transported the whole thing on a plastic tray which I bought at our local Costcutter, having realised too late that I had nothing big enough to put them in:
One tip: halloumi can be quite crumbly when it’s uncooked, and it’s easy to split it when you skewer it. I found it helped if I stabbed it very quickly and firmly, rather than trying to do it gently.
They need cooking for about five minutes on each side, although there’s nothing in the non-chicken ones that will do you any harm if they’re a bit underdone. Colourful, flavoursome and easy to share with newfound friends, they beat a burnt sausage any day.
Finally recovered from the trauma of last year’s visit to Brockwell Lido, I took myself off there again this weekend. It is a stunningly beautiful place – more attractive in every way than the Endell Street baths, where you’ll more commonly find me – and early on Easter Sunday morning, it was blessedly empty.
The last time I was there, the combined shock of the cold water and the length and depth of the pool meant that I struggled to swim at all, panic overcoming physical strength almost immediately. This time around the water was no warmer, but I’m so much better at swimming than I was a year ago that I managed to fight through the cold and the panic, and about a length and a half in I started to enjoy myself.
In the end I swam ten lengths, which since the pool is 50 metres long means half a kilometre, which doesn’t sound far but is the first time in my life I’ve ever been able to measure a swim in kilometres rather than metres, even if it only was half a one. And it was blissful and gorgeous and I couldn’t believe I was less than five minutes’ walk from home, because it felt exactly like being on holiday, possibly somewhere angular and Scandinavian.
So I went back again yesterday, and it was swarming with children, apart from in the lanes which had been designated for Serious Swimmers (I could tell they were serious, because they all wore wetsuits and goggles and went at speeds more appropriate to motorised vehicles), of which I am not one. I managed two lengths of getting kicked and jostled and splashed on before I gave up and went and sat poolside with a book. And that was just as much fun as the swimming.
So now I have to decide whether I am going to become someone who swims at the lido, where it is bracing and elegant and I feel faintly heroic having swum there, or someone who swims at Endell Street, which is craven and heated and more like having a bath than a swim. I suppose I could alternate, but annoyingly the lido isn’t one of the pools included in my Swim London membership, so it’s a fiver each time I want to go. Am I a woman of action, or a woman of leisure? This summer, I’ll find out.
Talking of things you can do in Brockwell Park, I played bowls yesterday. Or boules, or petanque, I’m not sure, and in any case we played a bastardised version of it because we didn’t know the rules. But it was nearly as much fun as swimming, and a lot more sociable. I foresee more sunny afternoons spent on the bowling green.
When I was little, Easter and Christmas meant one thing: chocolate. The ritual and ceremony around both festivals – the build-up, the songs, the decorations – were exciting, but only because they were pointers along the path that led to a WHOLE DAY where I could eat as much chocolate as I liked.
These days I’m ambivalent about chocolate, but the excitement has remained intact. Now what excites me about Easter and Christmas is the sense of a special occasion and the likelihood of long days spent with family and friends – catching up, laughing and, yes, eating. But whereas aged eleven I would have taken all that chocolate and eaten it silently and solitarily in my bedroom, now the food is bound up with the celebrations, which feels like a happier and healthier approach.
None of which means I don’t eat too much on these occasions, and this year was no exception. I had a Cadbury’s Flake for breakfast, and then a buttered bagel, after which we had a family lunch of roast chicken with ratatouille, green vegetables and roast potatoes with gravy, followed by apple crumble and ice cream.
Then we sat in the garden and ate cake and chocolate eggs and cheese, and while I can’t remember how much I had of the first two, I’m pretty sure I ate about half a round of camembert as well as substantial slices of stilton, brie and red leicester. My aunt, sitting next to me, didn’t have much cheese but said she’d overdone it on the chocolate eggs, and it occurred to me that we probably always attach more importance to the foods we have a troubled relationship with than to those we can take or leave. Maybe I had two chocolate eggs or maybe I had ten: I’m not obsessive about chocolate, so I didn’t notice and it doesn’t matter. My aunt didn’t have any cheese – or didn’t have much, I can’t remember – and so in my mind she didn’t gorge herself like I did. And she probably didn’t, but had she been gorging on chocolate I wouldn’t have noticed, because I don’t think chocolate is important.
All of which serves as a reminder that our perception of our eating habits is rarely the same as the reality, and that our notions about food often veer wildly from what is true. This was reinforced starkly to me recently when I heard an interview, I think on Women’s Hour, with someone who’d carried out a survey relating to teenage girls and body image. The vast majority of girls were unhappy with their bodies, and when asked whose body they’d like to have, most chose Cheryl Cole’s. What was interesting about that was that when they took the girls’ measurements, most of them were already about the same size and shape as Cheryl Cole. In other words, they were unhappy about their bodies, but when asked how they’d like to look, they described the bodies they already had.
It’s not hard to imagine that what these girls really wanted was to be successful, or beautiful, or rich, or popular, or any of the other things Cheryl Cole is. Hey, I’d like to be all of those things. But the idea of young women suffering crises of confidence and perceiving that crisis as a desire to possess something that in actual fact they already have is horribly sad. And it exposes as fantasy right from the start the idea that if women eat less and exercise more they’ll end up happy with their bodies. With rare exceptions, the unhappiness that we weave around our physical selves has very little to do with our actual physical selves.
All of which I will ponder as I make my way over the coming days through the remainder of the Easter chocolate. Anyone got any Rennies?
I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but here in WC2 the weather has been beautiful for the last few days, so when I suggested sausages for dinner last night, mashed potatoes and onion gravy didn’t feel like quite the right accompaniment. I googled “side dishes” and trawled through the results for inspiration, and eventually decided on a potato salad with gherkins and coleslaw.
Potato salad and coleslaw are things you can easily buy in the shops, but they’re usually gloopy with too much mayonnaise, so I plumped for a halfway house, making the potato salad from scratch but buying the coleslaw from a local deli, in the best tradition of the lovely Nigella.
Potato salad can have just about anything you like in it – the only essential ingredient is the new potatoes. For this one I added a finely-chopped raw shallot with fresh parsley and a dressing made from equal parts olive oil and white wine vinegar, with a dollop of Dijon mustard and a dollop of runny honey. I’d use a bit less vinegar than oil another time. Pour the ingredients together in a tumbler and whip them up with a fork into a paste, then pour that over the potatoes, shallot and parsley and stir.
Potato salad is nicest when it’s still slightly warm, so I made the salad first and then let it cool for just as long as it took to grill the sausages. We had a mixture of Toulouse and smoked sausages last night, but just use your favourites. Add a spoonful of coleslaw and a gherkin and you have a meatily flavoursome summer supper for almost no effort at all.
Since (mostly) giving up booze I have been experimenting to discover which soft drinks go best with different kinds of food. My most exciting finding so far is that ginger beer is an excellent substitute for dessert wine. The ideal non-alcoholic companion to this meal is, I think, a nice cloudy apple juice.
On this weekend’s menu: hot cross buns, Easter chocolate and the rest of the wedding cake tasters that we brought back from Dublin at the weekend. It’s a tough gig but someone’s gotta do it.
For a while last year, I used to walk about a mile across the park every morning and evening to get to and from the tube station. I mentioned this to a colleague – I can’t remember the context – and she said “ooh, you’re good.”
“Well, I enjoy it”, I said, although what I actually wanted to say was “Why are you assigning a moral value to my unremarkable journey to work? In what sense is it good?”
Of course, what she meant was that by choosing to walk rather than take the bus I was behaving in a way that is somehow designated as morally superior. It’s a mark of my own peculiar oversensitivity to the notion that exercise is innately noble that I minded, but mind I did (slightly).
I remembered this earlier today, when I was eating a breakfast croissant at my desk. Croissants are one of the foods that make me realise what it might be like to have a religious experience: they’re so perfect – their shape and texture and colour and weight as much as their flavour – that I almost think they must have been created on a higher plane. There is nothing to touch a good croissant.
Anyway, I was enjoying this one when someone walked past my desk, peered at me solemnly and barked: “naughty!”. I bit back my immediate response, which would probably have had swearing in it, and managed instead to say “it’s only a croissant”.
Both incidents are entirely trivial and neither ruined my day, but they do point to one of the most troubling aspects of our relationship with food, which is the idea that not only are we behaving “badly” or “well” if we eat certain foods, but that this is so widely accepted that other people feel entitled to comment on it. It wouldn’t matter if I were Kate Moss eating a lettuce leaf or Dawn French eating a cow pie: it wouldn’t be up to anybody else to point out to me their interpretation of the moral value of my food choices.
For one thing, unless you’re my doctor and I’m under close dietary supervision, you have no idea what my croissant (or my cake, or my glass of wine, or my lettuce leaf) means in the context of the rest of my diet. Maybe I usually eat three croissants for breakfast and today I’m only having one. Is that “naughty”? Maybe I have an eating disorder and croissants are one of the things I can bring myself to eat. Is that “naughty”?
And, well, for another thing, it’s just plain rude.
I hope I’m not overextending myself with the number of blogs I’m now writing or contributing to. I do have a day job, after all. But the idea behind this one has been percolating for a while, and I didn’t want to fill Glad All Over with rants about dieting (after all, a diet is nothing to be glad about), so I’ve made a new place for them. Do pop over and visit All Stewed Up if you feel inclined. It won’t be of any interest at all to some people, which is another reason to give it its own home. For those people, I fully intend to continue posting links to songs and desirable furniture, as well as the odd review.
I said last week that I’d post a food diary for this week, so here it is. The idea behind it was a sort of “practise what you preach” attempt at demonstrating that I’m not secretly eating fish and steamed vegetables every day, and now that I look back at it there are a couple of points which I think bear some discussion. I also kind of wish I’d done it during a week where I’d cooked more and eaten out less. But that would be missing the point. Let’s start at the beginning:
Saturday 9th April
Breakfast: Two Weetabix with milk and sugar
Lunch: Lentil soup with bread, cheese and assorted salads; mango and banana cake
This was at the home of friends, which is why it’s such a nice-sounding meal.
Dinner: Fettuccine with salmon and cream
At a pretty crappy restaurant off Charlotte Street. If I could remember the name, I’d advise you to avoid it.
Sunday 10th April
Breakfast: Buttered toast
Lunch: Artichoke, olive and pepper pizza
In the Half Moon in Herne Hill, which does the best pub pizza I know.
Dinner: Pasta with grated cheese
Pasta with grated cheese is my go-to dish when I’m too tired or lazy or it’s too late to make anything else. This was an eleven-o-clock supper, which is probably why I had no appetite the next morning.
Monday 11th April
Breakfast: none
I never don’t have breakfast, but for some reason I skipped it last Monday. Actually, I’m convinced – contra received wisdom – that I eat less through the day if I skip breakfast and thus skipping it would be conducive to weight loss, but screw that. Breakfast, done right, is the best meal of the day. I wait and have it at my desk, which means I always have something to look forward to on my commute, even on the meetingiest of days.
Lunch: Jacket potato with cheese and salad
Dinner: Chicken kiev with oven chips and steamed broccoli
Tuesday 12th April
Breakfast: A plain croissant and a banana
Lunch: Tuna and cucumber baguette
Dinner: Chicken and bacon pie with mashed potatoes
Snacks: A gingerbread man
Wednesday 13th April
Breakfast: An egg roll
Top tip re. egg rolls: they need salt and pepper. An unseasoned egg roll is a horrible thing.
Lunch: Chicken curry with rice and naan
Left over and reheated from a takeaway the previous Friday night. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but I seem to still be here.
Dinner: Pitta bread pizzas
Whenever the beloved is away, which he was on Wednesday night, I have pitta bread pizzas or jacket potato, because those are the two things which I love and he doesn’t.
Snacks: A bag of Minstrels, two plain pitta breads
However, I ruined my appetite for the pitta bread pizza by eating two plain pitta breads while I was waiting for them to cook. I am all for snacking between meals, but not at the expense of enjoying the meals themselves. Lesson: don’t cook something time-consuming straight after a swim (when it’s already late and you’re already starving) – or, if you must cook something time-consuming, make the effort to resist snacking while it cooks.
Thursday 14th April
Breakfast: Egg and cheese muffin with hash browns
In Burger King. I love Burger King breakfasts.
Lunch: Cheese and tomato panini
In English, the singular of panini is panini.
Dinner: Spaghetti with meatballs
Snacks: Half a chocolate muffin, some free cheese cracker things
The latter on a plane, where I think it’s obligatory to eat any free food that comes your way.
Friday 15th April
Breakfast: A banana
Brunch: Scrambled eggs and smoked salmon on a bagel
Dinner: Noodles with grated cheese
Snacks: A square of very dark chocolate
There goes the pasta-with-cheese again. Twice in a week is unusual even for me, but the latter part of the week was spent in Dublin and eating habits invariably get disturbed with travel.
Unsurprisingly, the best food of the week was Saturday’s lunch, prepared with care and shared with friends, and the worst food of the week was the stuff I didn’t really want but ate because it was there – to wit, the two emergency pittas and the chocolate muffin. In Fat Is A Feminist Issue Susie Orbach talks to women who say they don’t know what need they’re trying to fulfil when they open the fridge late at night, but they know it’s not hunger. In my case, it’s quite often boredom. As I said last week, I didn’t keep this food diary in order to change my eating habits, but on reflection I think “not eating things you don’t want to eat” is a pretty good habit to get into.
I accidentally listened to Radio 5 for a bit this morning, having switched over for the football last night. They were reviewing today’s papers, with an eye for the human interest angle that the Today programme generally lacks (I don’t know why I persist with the Today programme: it’s so clenched, compared with anything else you can listen to at that time of day).
Anyway, as a result I can tell you that the tabloid press are “concerned” for Kate Middleton, who has apparently lost weight in the run-up to her wedding, and is having her engagement ring narrowed so that it won’t fall off her finger. The two facts were presented as though they were linked, making the assumption that Kate’s fingers have shrunk since she got engaged, without taking into account the possibility that the ring was always too large and she’s only just getting it adjusted. It’s a second-hand ring, after all, and I can confirm from personal experience that it’s very easy not to get around to having a ring adjusted to make it fit properly.
Anyway. Kate probably has lost weight, regardless of whether she meant to. I’ve lost weight, without intending to, because planning a wedding – or, anyway, planning a big wedding, which I have somehow accidentally ended up doing, though it’s not quite on the scale of Kate and Wills’ – makes you twice as busy as usual, so you have less time to eat, and what you do eat you burn up faster. That’s one side of it. The other side is that lots of women do deliberately lose weight for their weddings, because they’re going to be looked at all day by lots of people, and because for this one day they’re trying to match up to the fantasy adult version of themselves that they imagined when they were five years old, and that fantasy adult was almost always slim.
I’ve no objection to women losing weight for their weddings, any more than I’ve any objection to women losing weight for any other reason, if they can do it without being miserable (big if). But I do object to the expectation that it’s something all women will choose to do, and I especially object to the media criticising Kate Middleton for losing weight during her engagement when it’s almost entirely their fault that women in general, and those in the public eye especially, feel anxious about their size. If you want her to stop losing weight, I want to say to them, maybe you should try not talking about her weight.
Glad All Over 