Tag Archives: vegetables

Blood Tests, Reading Ease and Vegetables

The day started with a blood test. The nurse took part of a tube before it stopped, never to start again. As she moved the needle to restart the flow I had a sudden, sharp pain in the wrist. I mentioned this, thinking she may have hit a nerve, but was told the needle wasn’t deep enough to hit a nerve. Well, it was deep enough to hit something, which stopped when the needle was withdrawn.

We had trouble after taking the needle out as I suddenly bled profusely, and wouldn’t stop. That’s the nature of Warfarin – you bleed easily, except when a nurse is trying to take a sample.

With the original; hole no longer flowing, she tried again. This time we got 3/4 of a tube before it stopped. A certain amount of tube swapping took place and we ended up with enough blood to allow it to be poured from tube to tube to make a full one. If it isn’t full they call you back for another test, which is always irksome.

Anyway, it is done. The results are on target, which is good. Now I just need to wait for the letter to tell me when my next test is due. They send the results and dosing instructions out by email to mke sure they get to me quickly, but they only send the new appointment date by letter, when they also confirm everything else. This is slightly different from the Nottingham system where they rang if anything needed changing, and made the appointment at the same time. I can’t say which is a better system, as they each have advantages, but it takes a little getting used to.

Last week I helped someone with editing a book. One of the suggestions I made was that he should cut down sentence length and complexity. I’m not perfect at this, but I do know a lot more about the basics of good writing than my work might show. I cannot be bothered to use simple words all the time, remove all adverbs or cut out all the verbal tics. I write for pleasure and don’t want to spend half my time sorting out the faults. This is me, this is my writing and these are my thoughts. I’m faulty and I’m happy with that.

Anyway, I fed the first section of this post through a couple of online readability calculators. They calculate mysterious figures with strange names. However, they seem to agree that I am writing reasonably comprehensible words and am very slightly above the ideal scores. However, this still leaves me writing at about t5he level of a Harry Potter book, so I’m happy with that. It’s easy enough for adults to understand but not too basic.

Foodwise, we had our standard breakfast and sandwiches for lunch, so didn’t add anything to the food numbers. The evening meal was a Chinese-style rice dish with green beans, sweetcorn, mushrooms, spring onions, pineapple and broccoli. It also had ginger, garlic and mango chutney, though probably not enough to count. It didn’t have peppers because, in the last couple of days, they have become inedible. This is embarrassing and I hate when I let it happen. They were too bad even for soup.

I was on 23 yesterday, and am now on 27. I have three days to find three more. I’m thinking of vegetable hash tomorrow – sweet potato, swede and cabbage will carry me across the line, which will be good for the first week.

I have mixed feelings about it as a system, but if it starts me thinking about food again, it will be worthwhile. We became a bit casual about nutrition over the summer. We had plenty of salad but teamed it up with too much processed meat and pork pies.

Trousers, Typing and Tongue Twisters

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I slept well last night and woke just before nine. It’s not exactly industrious, but it will do for me. I have nowhere to go and nothing to do, so 9.00 is as good a time as any. I managed to dress without industry and decided I could dispense with trousers today as I was not intending to go out. Slipper socks and a good long flannel shirt will do to preserve my modesty, though I will be keeping the blinds partially drawn after yesterday’s events. It wouldn’t do for the neighbours to know too much about the informality of my dress habits.

The lack of trousers means there was no trouble with trapping my foot in a twisted leg, or tripping whilst hopping around muttering things about tricky trouser designs. If only I had tartan trews that last line would have had potential as a tongue twister. The world needs a tricky tongue-twister about tripping with two trapped feet in your twisted tartan trews. Well, my world does . . .

I thought I’d make a quick start on the typing today, before the pain in my wrist catches up with me. Rest, a hot water bottle and patience have seen the pain disappear from my right arm, shoulders and left elbow. Only the pain in my left wrist remains, and that is where I had trouble with carpal tunnel before. I have ordered a wrist splint and set myself a target of resting and being patient for the next few weeks. With luck it will go without further intervention. In the meantime I will alter my typing position to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

My previous typing set-up may have looked chaotic, with things set at different levels using boxes and books, but it worked well and I had no problems from aches and pains (or RSI and carpal tunnel to give them their modern names).

We had vegetables for tea last night. With a bigger oven I feel that my roasted veg should be better, but I’m not sure they are. This is slightly disappointing, but I will get over it. I even pre-heated the oven and the roasting tins last night, even though my prudent side is much perturbed by the idea of heating an empty oven.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We had cauliflower with mustard cheese sauce, with potato wedges, carrots, leeks and brussels. I read a recipe that says if you leave the cut brussels face down for the complete cooking time it traps the steam inside and gives you sweet, tender brussels. It seems to work, though buying decent brussels also helps. I will have to buy some tough monster brussels to really see if it works. We seem to have been eating better since we moved and altered our routines.

Ah well, 10am now and time to prod my sleeping wife into action with a cup of tea and a suggestion that it is her turn to make breakfast. If you don’t hear from me again you can take it that the suggestion went down badly.

Old photos again. I really must do better.

So far it has been . . .

A Post About Vegetables

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It’s that time of night again, and having got used to relaxing I am having to force myself from a comfortable chair and set to cooking without a plan. The vague notion was “cauliflower cheese”. I thought I might do cauliflower steaks but it started falling apart and so I compromised by roasting two halves. It will be much the same, just not so charred and attractive. But there will be fewer irritating cauliflower bits around the place. They get everywhere!

Tree Gibraltar Point, Lincolnshire – dramatic setting

Sweetcorn and baked potatoes will be the only accompaniment in what is likely to be a disappointing meal. And a small amount of cheese sauce – we seem to have used most of the cheese. My vegetable intake has gone down seriously over the last few weeks and I need to address it. If I count the berries I had for breakfast as one portion, the cauliflower and sweetcorn only makes three and an apple will make four. That’s one short on my five a day and quite a lot short on the recommendations of many countries, and many scientists. I have let it slip badly over the last few months.

Time, next week, to start clawing my way back to eating better. The first step is planning. Sitting down to order from a list is always likely to result in better meals than pressing buttons as I try to think. That’s why we end up with sausages, pasties, pizzas and quiches so many times. Add a few beans, some potato and a tub of shop coleslaw with a few salad bits, and you are set for the week. It’s neither healthy nor nutritious, but it is filling.

Dabchick, Gibraltar Point, LincolnshireIt’s partly to do with being rushed all the time (or disorganised, as it is also known) , and partly to do with being lazy.

I also need to get back to making soup. I’ve been having far too much cheese on toast for lunch. It is fatty, calorific and lacks vegetables, even with tomato or spring onions on top. Soup is much better.

A late butterfly

Pictures are from September 2020 – post apocalypse.

Cold, Procrastinating and Reflecting on the Nature of Trousers

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From sticking my head out of bed to setting foot on the old, hard tiles of the hallway took me three hours. Most of it was, quite clearly, taken up by procrastination, though some was taken up by the need to escape from my trousers after the second leg went disastrously wrong.

You would think that after 200 years of trouser design it would be possible to design a garment that allowed an elderly man with bad knees to dress with dignity. However, it seems not.

It is cold, which always slows me down, and it is Monday. Julia now goes to work on her own on Mondays, so I don’t need to get up. And, with her not being here, I have, if I’m honest, no reason to get up.

I skipped breakfast, because it was nearly lunchtime, and am now considering skipping lunch as I am not actually hungry and managed to rewrite three poems in my head whilst messing about with socks.I need to write them down soon or they will get mixed up with the instructions for cooking meals for the next three days, which are also jostling about in there.

Corned Beef Hash with Many Vegetables, a Vegetable Stew and Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry, in case you are wondering. The “many vegetables” are onions, leeks, parsnip, carrot, sweet potato, swede (or neep or rutabaga depending on where you live) and spinach. Not bad for a dish that used to contain just onions, potatoes and corned beef. The vegetable stew will be much the same but will have lentils (which I have to sneak in because Julia objects to them) and pearl barley but probably no spinach. Well, they can’t be identical or it looks like you aren’t trying. The curry will have sweet potato and chick peas, onions, tomatoes (tinned), spinach and rice. It seems rice counts as one of your daily portions. I also have a small orange and a small apple for lunch. For at least three days of the week I will be getting plenty of healthy vegetables.

I aim to surpass the five a day suggestion as a regular thing – we have fruit for breakfast and lunch which helps, and am now looking at ensuring we eat 30 plants a week. It’s not hard when they allow you to count coffee and spices. If I have the four meals above plus fruit, and then count tea, coffee and spices, I’m already up to about twenty.

Chorizo and Bean Stew

Day 74

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On reaching home (after a journey featuring many red lights – I am definitely paying for my satisfaction at so many greens last week) – I started on pizza. Or, to be accurate, I started slicing vegetables for the topping – all the hard work had been done by the supermarket, who had provided the bases in a convenient, though ecologically disastrous, plastic bag.

Green peppers, spring onions, tomatoes, mushrooms and bacon – the theme being “oddments I found in the fridge”. I then made a green salad consisting of ten sorts of vegetable-based food source. Rocket (arugula), spinach, coriander (cilantro), pumpkin seeds, olives, tomatoes, spring onions, celery, cucumber and pomegranate seeds. I’m fairly sure that even the most desperate counter would not include sesame oil and lime juice, though I did add some. Still not sure if flour in the pizza base counts, though I’ve already covered it by eating sandwiches if it does. If you can count oatmeal in porridge, wheat flour in bread should count.

When Julia eventually returned home, after yet another unsatisfactory staff meeting, I popped the pizza in the oven and we had hot, nutritious food. If only all our meals were this good, fresh and timely. I would add “additive free” but sadly the tomato sauce was from a jar and the pizza bases were baked by a factory, so this probably isn’t true.

We had two excited men in the shop. They had a 1921 Gorge V penny which, according to eBay, is worth £41,000. That merely, of course, means that some idiot/con man/money launderer has put a penny up for sale at £41,000. It hasn’t sold and it isn’t worth that, but that’s not what people see when they read the story. We must have had a dozen calls this week on the same theme.

They wouldn’t believe the shop owner that it wasn’t valuable, and they wouldn’t leave, so to get rid of them he went through a bag of pennies and gave them one with the identical date. At that point you could see it dawning on them that people just don’t give you a coin if it really is worth £41,000. I suppose you could say that the penny dropped . . .

(I have included a link to the dictionary as I’m not sure if that is an American expression or not).

Coins in the picture are half-pennies of Elizabeth II. They were the first pre-decimal coins I found when looking for George V pennies. They aren’t rare either, so I thought it would do.

Day 50

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What a nice round number. You can almost imagine Number 50 wearing a waistcoat and a watch chain, can’t you? Or maybe that’s just me.

I had a go at celery soup today, as I have been threatening for weeks. I got the celery out and searched for a potato . . .

There are none. My attempt to reduce carbs and wrinkly veg has left us with no spuds. That’s why the soup is very orange. In the end I didn’t use celery, because in my search for potatoes I found several bags of carrots. I decided that carrot and ginger soup sounded nice, and the celery plan was, once more, put on hold.

In went half a leek (I had one hanging about and couldn’t be bothered to peel an onion). Then the end of a bag of carrots, garlic paste, stock cube, some swede to take some of the sweetness out of the carrots, and some ginger. Not enough ginger, as it turns out, as you can’t actually taste it. Maybe I should have gone with the thyme. The only thing that stopped me was fear of overkill but now, on looking it up, I find there are recipes for carrot, ginger and thyme soup. Presumably these were written by people like me who throw stuff at a pot and seek to justify it later. I really ought to take a more serious attitude to soup and start with a recipe instead of a pile of random ingredients.

However, as random as my soup is, it still has a long way to go before it becomes as bizarre as some of these soups.

The soup in the header picture is a swede, carrot and parsnip soup. Not the restrained colour. Now look at the one below, which is today’s soup.

Carrot & Ginger Soup

Day 8

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Up late, quick breakfast and off to work. Still first to arrive. Got a parking space, though customers from the hairdressers had used the spaces in front of the shop and parked two cars in three spaces. As usual, fought off the urge to park in front of the hairdresser and see how they like it.

We packed the parcels, I put two medallions on (one an Alcan medallion which features the Kitimat smelting plant and the Kemano power plant. It’s all very interesting, and proves, once more, the benefits of collecting for expanding the mind.

During the morning Julia texted to tell me I had a small package. At first I thought she was just being generally disparaging about my physical attributes, but further reading revealed that the Post Office had delivered a small package for me at the house. It just goes to show how modern written communications can be misunderstood.

Today was my day to have a half day, so I went home at 1am. For lunch we had the last of the Spiced Sweet Potato soup followed by the leftover vegetable stew and red cabbage from the last two days. For tea we had potato and paneer curry. I am now made up of such a high percentage of vegetables that a vegetarian cannibal could eat me without troubling his conscience.

This state of affairs won’t last – I’m planning on eggs and bacon for breakfast

and a roasted gammon joint for tea. We put two gammon joints in the freezer in case the reported possibility of Christmas food shortages became real, but they didn’t. Experience shows that if we leave them in there we will forget about them, so we are going to start eating them as part of a determined freezer clearance exercise.

Soup

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I made more soup this week, using a 1kg pack of frozen casserole mix from TESCO. It comes ready chopped and by the time it has been left to thaw in the fridge for 2 days all the veg is nice and soft and doesn’t take as lot of cooking. It cost £1, which is probably expensive compared to buying the veg separately, but cheap when you consider the time it saved me chopping and cleaning up.

Recipe: Boil the bag of veg with stock and seasonings, liquidise, dilute, eat. Or drink. We had a discussion at work about that – do you eat soup or drink it? My view is that you eat it if you use a spoon, but drink it if you sup it directly out of a receptacle. Anyone have any other views on what is a long-running topic in the shop? (We tend to avoid politics and religion in favour of coin design, soup consumption and the various roadworks in the city).

It came out a little bit beige, due, I think, to the presence of potato and swede and the low quantity of carrot. Apart from that, the basic soup turned out well. The seasoning left a little to be desired as I used garlic, ginger, lime juice and too much chilli. I must buy lemons, as the lime isn’t quite right. I must also restrain my tendency to add a bit more chilli. It never looks to be enough. However, a little goes a long way and soup is supposed to be nutritious rather than a test of fortitude.

Quantity? Well, I had a soup flask of it for lunch yesterday (a bowl and a half or thereabouts) and we had two bowls of it last night for tea. We will be having it for lunch today and for lunch tomorrow (I’m trying to cut more bread out). After that I think we should be about finished, though lunch on Friday is a possibility.

Tips for next time – only use half the bag, add a carrot and use less chilli. Possibly add turmeric, which is always good to bring the colour up.

Making soup always reminds me of the soup sessions we used to do on the farm. I used to do one with schools making vegetable soup from a supermarket bag. Out of a dozen kids it was rare that you could get more than one or two to taste the soup. They claimed to eat soup at home, but didn’t trust anything that had been made in front of them from vegetables, stock cubes and water. They preferred “proper soup” from a can or sachet.

A Cheap and Easy Meal

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Take a bag of ready chopped stir-fry veg, a pack of noodles and some sauce. Put them in a wok, mix them together and let them heat through.

It takes ten minutes, is very simple and is safe for those of us with poor knife skills.

I ordered it from TESCO as a special offer package deal on our last Click & Collect order but they didn’t have any sauce so they just sent me the veg and noodles. I wasn’t happy and really, if they don’t have all three offer items, they shouldn’t just send you two. Fortunately I had suitable sauce so we were OK.

Cost about £2 for two large portions. It could have been cheaper if we’d cut our own veg into little strips but a few pence seems good value to avoid cutting my fingers. It’s healthy, though I’m sure the sauce has a lot of sugar in it.

Stir Fry Vegetables

Note how I have avoided mentioning flavour. It’s quite bland, even with a good helping of plum sauce, and the bean sprouts can be overpowering. It would probably benefit from some prawns or meat, but as we are trying to cut down our meat consumption, we are trying to like the taste of vegetables.

That isn’t quite fair, as I do like the taste of carrots, parsnips, peas, beans, chickpeas, broccoli, cabbage and onions, to name just a few. It’s bean sprouts I’m not that keen on, they are watery and they somehow seem to kill the flavour of the meal. They aren’t just tasteless, they seem to drain flavour and make everything else seem less tasty. When we are doing our own stir fry we tend not to use them, though I suppose we really should start growing our own as they are cheap and easy.

Another Routine Sunday

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I eventually prised myself from bed just after mid-morning. I had been up earlier but my back was so stiff I’d gone back to bed to get some warmth and do some straightening exercises. At that point I fell asleep and, as I say, reluctantly emerged. I’m tempted to say “like a butterfly from a chrysalis” but that wouldn’t be an entirely accurate picture.

We breakfasted on what was supposed to be smashed avocado and eggs on toast but Julia is such a gentle soul the avos were no more than moderately roughed up. It’s a shameful thing to do, offering any sort of violence to an avocado – they should really be filled with prawns and thousand island dressing. Or mayonnaise with ketchup, which is my version. However, this is the modern way and Julia likes it so who am I to complain?

After that we had toast and marmalade whilst watching The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was the 1988 TV version with Jeremy Brett. I like him as Holmes, but there are several other versions of the story which I prefer. Holmes really should be in black and white.

Then it was off to the laundry for Julia and off to the supermarket for me.

Shopping

The laundry was crowded, because it was a dull wet day. The supermarket was not crowded, but the people in it all seemed to be on a mission to get in my way.

That was the first part of then day. On our return I wrote the first 240 words in twenty minutes as I cooked pie and beans for a meal that was a mixture of late lunch and early tea.

View from the Driving Seat

I then frittered the rest of the afternoon in front of a fire, watching quizzes, snoozing and drinking tea. No, not all at the same time.

It is now 8.00. Washing up is done, the roast vegetable as are in the oven for tonight’s meal and the ones for tomorrow are boiling as I type. We will be having gravy tonight as we eat roast veg, Lincolnshire sausages and Yorkshire puddings.

Monday night’s veg will, with the addition of last night’s rice (which is currently frozen, to avoid food poisoning) and some other bits, will provide another go at veggie burgers. I will have two on Tuesday night with ratatouille (Julia is dining out for a birthday celebration) and on Wednesday we will both have veggie burgers and ratatouille. My capacity for repetition of meals means I can happily eat the same thing for three or four days if necessary.

You could chart my life from pictures like these

The timer just went off – time for a trip to the kitchen, where mounds of steaming vegetables are waiting for me.

Later I will return to load some photos and publish the post.

The writing has taken 37 minutes according to the kitchen timers I had running at the time. I bet the photos and Tagss take at least another 20, if not more.

This blog hates me – it’s just taken twelve trouble-free minutes to do the photos and Tags. It’s trying to make me look like a liar by doing everything the easy way…

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Life after the Care Farm