Blow your trumpet!!

First things first...2 years since my last blog post?! Life has been busy!

However, something happened today and I felt the need to bore as many people as possible with it :)

A bit of background: In May 2011 I decided to change the future for me and my son, Alister.  I abseiled off the Forth Rail Bridge in aid of Chest Heart and Stroke Scotland, saw photos of myself, and was so horrified at how big I looked that I weighed myself for the first time in a long time. The number on the scales terrified me: 19stone 8lbs. I was less than half a stone away from 20 stone, how did that even happen without me noticing? 

Seriously, if you need some motivation to lose weight, get your arse in a safety harness, it's a real eye opener!!

My immediate thought was that I was essentially killing myself. Having lost my dad far too young, I couldn't willingly make that a possibility for my son. None of us can stop bad things happening, but we CAN stop making them more likely if we want to.

Over the next few years I lost about 3 stone through using the MyFitnessPal app to log all my food and exercise. I would go through spells of losing weight easily, then during holiday periods I would fall off the wagon and put a bit back on again. But at September 2014 I was at 17 stone 2lbs and had taken up running, using the C25K app (I'd definitely recommend this if you fancy giving running a go). I was also following the Fat Girl's Guide to Running (with Julie Creffield) on Facebook. I signed up to Julie's first monthly fitness challenge which included daily and weekly fitness and nutrition challenges. At the end of September I was thrilled to have lost 10lbs!! 

In the meantime, an old friend of mine, Nikki Williamson, had trained as a Slimming World consultant and was going to be starting her classes in October. I'd gone to groups in the past (Rosemary Conley, Scottish Slimmers...) but was in the "I'm not paying someone to weigh me" camp. But as it was Nikki, I decided I would go to support her in her new venture. I even believed that I wasn't going for me for a bit :) 

So I hopped on the scales on the first night and the 16stone 6lbs that showed on the screen wasn't a surprise. I set myself an interim target of 13stone and it felt like a mammoth, unreachable number right then.  

Apologies, this has become a bit of self therapy, but hang in there, I will get to the thing that happened today!!

To cut a long story a bit shorter, on 16th June this year I reached that first target and set a new one of 11stone. 3stone 6lbs lost in 9 months, happy days! Slimming World just seems to fit in to my life easily, and I finally admitted that a group support network is exactly what I need. We have a walking group set up now on a Wednesday too, which is lovely!  I've now lost 3stone 11lbs, and managed to not put weight on over my summer holiday period, a massive result for me. Shopping is weird, I can't remember when I last shopped for size 12 or 14 clothes, but it's nice trying stuff on. I absolutely can't remember when I last weight 12 stone anything, but I do now!  I even won the Woman of the Year award in our Slimming World group. Me! Ha ha!! This is the same girl as in the first photo up there ^^

Anyway, today I went to Aldi. I have lots on this weekend and was planning to get a Tesco delivery but rejigged some stuff and went to Aldi today. It's about a 5km round trip walk for me and I needed lots. Now school and work are back to normal I'm determined to get back in the habit of planning the meals for the week and shopping for that.  So I took Alister's big rucksack and another couple of bags and off I went with my list.

I put all the heavy stuff in the rucksack and carried the lighter stuff in bags. So in the rucksack I had bags of veg, frozen peas, frozen prawns, tins, masses of fruit, 6 litres of milk, bacon, mince, eggs...it absolutely weighed a tonne. I had to stop a couple of times on the walk home to take a rest but then plodded on. As I was walking I tried to guess how much the rucksack of stuff weighed. My estimate was about 4 stone. As I've lost 4.5 stone since last September I thought it would be interesting to weigh the bag when I got home to see how close it was.

2stone 2lbs. That was it. Nowhere even near 4 stone.  This huge, rammed full bag weighed less than half the amount that I've lost in the past 11 months.  A third of what I've lost since I was at my heaviest.  I don't feel much different to how I did back then. I'm not smarter, or happier, or prettier, or funnier, or more caring, or less loving.  I'm just smaller and weigh less.  And healthier. The weight loss has been gradual so I don't really notice anything different. But I've said to a few people recently that if I was given a 7 stone bag to carry around with me I'd sure know about it! And I'm completely blown away by this thing today. Even half the weight of that rucksack is heavy! I know so many people in our group who have lost a stone or 2 stone and aren't blowing their own trumpets about it - GET BLOWING!!!!

Fill a bag with stuff, weigh it, get it to the weight you have lost, and I bet you completely underestimate the enormity of what you have done! Go on! Do it today!! Then give yourself an almighty pat on the back, and a big hug!! 

Chillis!

I LOVE CHILLIS!!  They really are amazing; such a huge range of different flavours and heats.  I know very little about them other than there are loads of varieties and diferent chillis work better for different recipes.


And living in Scotland it's not like there's a chilli farm round every corner!  However, the good news is that here in the Kingdom of Fife we've had the lovely ladies at Chillilicious around for quite a while now, they make lots of lovely chilli based goodies (I get twitchy if I don't have a pot of their chilli piccalilli in the fridge) as well as chilli inspired fused glass in their workshop in Ceres.  Read about their yummy goodies in my old post here.

But now for the GREAT news!!!  My little corner of the Kingdom is now home to a new up and coming chilli farm! YES! Right here in Dunfermline, Alan Stenhouse is working hard to bring us Spice of Fife!  It looks like it's going to be a great thing for the area if you like using chillis, he's got greenhouses packed with beautiful, flourishing chilli plants and lots of different varieties.  Have a look at the Facebook page for some great photos of the plants developing.  The recent warm weather has created a little tropical paradise (well, if you're a chilli plant!).  And he knows his stuff, if you're not sure which variety of chilli will work best for whatever you are making, ask him! 

You can find him on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/SpiceOfFife
on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/SpiceOfFife
and at the website here:http://spiceoffife.co.uk/

If you are planning to go to The Great Scottish Brave Harvest Chilli Festival 2013 at Scone Palace on 21st and 22nd September (yes, a chilli festival in Scotland!!), Alan will be there with lots of chilli goodies.  I've been lucky enough to try his strawberry based hot sauce, Chilli Berry Punch, as well as his Chilli Sookers - hard boiled sweets in a variety of heats to suit every chilli lovers taste buds!

We all loved the hot sauce, the strawberry base is really unusual but works so well with the chilli heat. We've had it with slow cooked Mexican beef, on cheese sandwiches, I even mixed some up with some cider vinegar to make a salad dressing! And the sweets were fab, really different and sweet and hot all at the same time, lovely!!

As well as these products, there's also strawberry, black pepper and chilli jam (delicious!), chutney, chilli oils (using Scottish rapeseed, and since I'm always banging on about how great this oil is that makes me VERY happy!), and chilli toffee.  They can even make little pots of jam and chutney as wedding favours for your big day; almost makes me want to find a husband.  Almost... Nah!

There's lots of other yummy stuff in the pipeline too, including chilli cheese, chilli chocolate and chilli ice cream which I'm particularly intrigued by!

But even more exciting than all of the chilli products is the fact that Spice of Fife are developing a chilli club in the area.  Membership will be restricted to 100 members in 2014 and for a one-off payment of £27.50 you will receive the following:-

• A Personalised Gift Card for 2014 Membership
• Selection of Chilli Seeds to grow your own
• 3 Chilli Plants (April/May)
• Bottle of Chilli Liquid Feed to help plants grow
• Bottle of Spice of Fife Chilli Oil
• Jar of Spice of Fife Chilli Jam
• Bottle of Spice of Fife Chilli Hot Sauce
• 10% discount on any product purchases made in 2014
• Free Delivery to KY11 / KY12 postcodes

Now, I have tried to grow chillis before and I did actually manage, but then went on holiday and the plants got fried at the window. Oops. I really am not green fingered! But for those of you who manage to keep things alive (I have succeeded at keeping a boy and a dog alive, that's my limit!) and love chillis this is a great thing. You can also buy individual plants from Spice of Fife at the moment, get in touch with them to see what is available.  You might just pick up a variety that you wouldn't be able to buy in a local garden centre. 

All very exciting!

All of this has reminded me that I have a little pot of strawberry, black pepper and chilli jam in the fridge. I'm thinking a wee cup of tea and some toast and jam could be the order of the day... :)

Salads!

I would love to say I haven't written for a while because I'm such an incredibly busy and important person (oh go on, it's a little bit true, in MY world!), but mainly it's because I'm lazy!

I go through phases of feeling the need to write and then once it's out of my system it can be a while before it sweeps over me again.

Today, I just felt like having a wee chat about salad dressings. As one does!

Supermarkets are choc-a-bloc with every kind of salad dressing you can think of: creamy ones, low fat ones, spicy, citrus, herby, fruity... there's just hundreds of the damn things - and the price of some of them, ooft!!!  But my favourite is a good glug of rapeseed oil, a squeeze of lemon juice, some cider vinegar (about 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar as a guide), a blob of dijon mustard, some salt and pepper then give it a whisk together or put it in a container with a lid and just give it a good shake.  Tastes better than the bottled stuff and if you have the stuff in the house anyway it costs pennies to make.

Have a play around with it to see what you like: try different oils, even flavoured oils.  I like rapeseed as, aside from just preferring the flavour, it's homegrown and it has around half the saturated fat of olive oil.  There's loads of vinegars, red or white wine vinegar and balsamic vinegar make great dressings too.  Maybe switch to wholegrain mustard, add a teaspoon of honey, pop in some garlic or ginger... the possibilities are endless!

I just finished a bottle of my lovely lemony mustardy one so I don't have any decent photos but here's our lunch from my birthday last week, I wanted a plate full of my favourite things!  We had quesadillas filled with buffalo mozarella, chorizo and taleggio cheese, plus a salad of baby leaves, watercress, spinach, rocket, figs, olives, feta cheese, baby plum tomatoes, grated carrot, and lemony mustardy dressing - a bit of a mish mash on a plate but perfect!!  Salad has come a long way from the lettuce, tomato and cucumber with a blob of salad cream (although I do LOVE salad cream!!), put whatever you love into it.  You get really good jars of veg in oil in pretty much any supermarket now: roasted peppers, artichokes, mixed mushrooms - all sorts. Give them a go, bung a few in with a bag of mixed leaves, put a bit of home made dressing on, just enough to coast the leaves but not drown them, and see what you like.

Other things you might like in your salads are grains - quinoa, couscous, bulgar wheat etc are so readily available these days, and although fairly plain in taste they do take on the flavour of other things well.  I love cous cous with red onion, coriander, fresh chilli, lime juice and a bit of salt and pepper in it - pretty much fresh salsa mixed with cous cous.  But that's lovely mixed in with salad leaves too.

Salad doesn't have to be dull, even with something in it a bit more calorific like a bit of feta and a bit of oil based dressing you can still pack it full of vitamins, antioxidants and all sorts of good stuff.  And just because cheeses and oils are higher in calories and fat, remember that there are good fats out there!

Hope you are all having a wonderful summer, we certainly are!

Summer Lovin'

Well, I think we can safely write off Summer 2012.  A few warm days in between torrential rain and thunder storms does not really count as summer!

But last night for dinner we brought a little bit of summer into our living room (whilst also having to turn the heating on for an hour to take the nip out of the air!) in the form of beautiful, spicy, fresh, tasty chicken tikka wraps, yum!

I used a sachet of Chilli Papas 2 in 1 Tikka spice mix.  You can either use it to make a tikka masala that has a nice little nip to it, or add it to natural yoghurt along with some garlic, ginger, onion, lemon juice and your choice of meat, veg, fish etc to make a marinade.  The spice packet for this mix is so pretty, the beetroot powder gives the dish a lovely flavour and a stunning colour without the need for any nasty chemical additives...

 I used a couple of free range chicken breasts.  The lemon and yoghurt makes the meat lovely and tender and juicy and you can taste every spice in the mix, rather than it just being a flat spice flavour, absolutely delicious.  I marinaded the meat for about 4 hours, but if you need it in a hurry, 30 mins would do.  Then, as it was hardly barbecue weather, I just popped the chunks of chicken under a medium hot grill for about 15 mins or so.

The picture above is one I made a couple of months back using Warburtons square wraps, but last night I used some nice multigrain wraps.  I smother some more natural yoghurt over the wrap, put some nice fresh salad leaves on (I like a mix of baby spinach, rocket and watercress), put the grilled chicken on and top with another dollop of yoghurt and a wee squeeze of lemon juice.  It's a firm favourite in our house!  If you are particularly hungry you could serve with rice and salad, that would be lovely :)

Chilli Papas now also make their mild Mandalay mix as a 2 in 1 so you can use that as a marinade aswell.  Not tried that yet but it's on the list! (www.chillipapas.com)

Happy munching! xx

Back to school!

Yes, here in sunny Scotland the kids are all back to school, just in time for the weather to brighten up a little as per normal!

Little Pots of Love will be back soon with Round 2 of Chip Wars, but in the meantime I thought I would do a quick post about school dinners/packed lunches.  School dinners north of the border used to be well regarded, even by a certain Mr Oliver in his TV series to overhaul the sorry looking offerings dished up to kids.  I never used to mind if Alister wanted to have school dinners as they usually had a really good choice of hot meals, baked potatoes, salad bar etc etc.  Even if he didn't fancy something hot he would choose salad and a ham baguette, he's good at making healthy food choices.  But over the past year or so there seems to be more food being bought in and less being made from scratch by proper school cooks, which is a shame.  A few times when he had school dinners I found I was paying £1.75 for him to have a tiny hot dog and a yoghurt. I'm sure he could have chosen more but who would want hot dog and carrots, for example??

He's always preferred packed lunches anyway, but last term we both got a bit lazy.  He always asked for a wrap with cheese spread and ham, and it was easy to do so that's what he got. Pretty much EVERY day! So this year it's changing.  Packed lunches can be healthy, tasty, varied and cheap so I have bought a few different sized tubs and I am trying out some things on him.  Thank goodness I have brought him up to enjoy pretty much everything!

Today was his first day back.  Last night I cooked some pasta and stirred some green pesto through it, I toasted a few pine kernels and added them plus a handful of halved baby plum tomatoes.  He had that plus a yoghurt, some fruit squash, some grapes and a little biscuit for afterwards in the playground.  He loved it, except there was far too much pasta!

For tomorrow I have just made this:

Pasta again, although if I had any I would have used noodles instead.  I stir fried some sliced carrots, yellow pepper, green pepper and cooked pork in a little rapeseed oil, added some teriyaki sauce to warm ti through then added the pasta back in.  It smells lovely, or so the boy shouted from his bed anyway!

My next change I need to make is to stop giving him a bag of crisps for tuck at breaktime.  We've agreed he can have crisps on Fridays for a little end of the week treat but otherwise it will be something healthier.  He's a good fruit eater, but for a bit of variety I think I'll try some breadsticks, or cheese twists, or maybe make some mini muffins with fruit in them.  Apple and cinnamon muffins sound good!

All of your suggestions for healthy lunches and snacks are welcomed,  I have a lot of packed lunches still to make!!

Crisp... crunch... CHIPS! (round 1)

Hi, I'm Alister, I'm 9 years old and I'm Jill's son.  I would like to do a post about... CHIPS!

I've been going around Dunfermline trying chips from lots of places.  Not only on this post am I going to talk about chips, I'll also tell you about my lunch today at The Inn at Carnock, near Dunfermline.

But first... CHIPS!! About 2 weeks ago I went to Grill48 but we forgot to take pictures but we will go back!     The chips were lovely and golden with a lovely flavour.  They were so crisp on the outside that you could hear them crack as you bit them, and the middle was lovely and fluffy.  The steak ciabatta that I had with them was gorgeous.

Moving on to chip sample number 2!  At The Inn at Carnock, they looked amazing but the flavour wasn't as nice as the chips at Grill48. They were crunchy, but not crunchy enough.

So Grill48 wins Round 1.

My lunch today at The Inn at Carnock was a minute steak baguette with red onion marmalade.  Even though I'm a kid I ordered from the adult menu but was still surprised when 2 baguettes appeared!

I didn't really mind because the bread tasted so good!  The bread was nice and fresh, it was very soft, it was very crisp on the outside (maybe a bit too crispy for me) and had a lovely doughy flavour.

The red onion marmalade was too sweet for my liking (and my mum's!) but I did enjoy my lunch.

I'm going to try lots more chips to see if anyone can beat Grill48.

To be continued...

A little ray of lemony sunshine

School holidays can be...ummm...challenging! I am lucky enough to work term time so although I get lots of time off in the summer, it means my boy and I are with each other 24/7.  And so it's only natural that now and again we need to spend a little time in separate rooms!

So one day last week we had a nice morning but by lunchtime he was getting a little cheeky and I was getting a little short tempered. So he spent the afternoon chilling out watching TV and I spent it in the kitchen trying a couple of recipes I had on my to-cook list.

My last blog post dealt with the bran scones from that day, but I wanted something a bit special and light and zingy to counteract the dark, grey, wet, miserable summer days we were being dealt.  My younger brother (BAFTA award winning, no less!)  is filming a new TV show with chef Peter Sidwell at the moment and so I had a nose around the interweb for some of Peter's recipes.  Peter is the chef at Rheged in Penrith.  If you've never been to Rheged, do make time to pay it a visit if you're in the area, it's a great place... http://www.rheged.com/

There's a nice little bio of Peter on the website, along with one of his recipes which hit the nail on the head as far as I was concerned - Lemon Meringue Posset. A quintessentially British dessert with a twist, lemon curd on the bottom and crunched up meringue on top, lovely!  It got me thinking that I would like to do a regular feature where I take a recipe from a respected chef and make it at home.  A lot of people are scared to try, I'm a bit more haphazard and up for having a go!  So, hopefully, this might encourage someone to have a pop at something that seems tricky at first.

This is the recipe ----> http://www.rheged.com/files/Lemon%20Meringue%20Posset.pdf

And this is the end result:

If you do have a go, the measurements for the cream and the creme fraiche are a bit confusing as one says 300ml = 1/2 pint and one says 300ml = 1/4 pint.  Use 300ml of both and ignore the pint measurements.  For the curd, you need 6 egg yolks.  I used the egg whites to make my own meringues to go on top, they really are easy to make.  When you are separating egg whites/yolks break each egg into a little bowl just in case one of the yolks splits and you end up contaminating all of your lovely clean egg whites. Then add them one by one to a larger bowl.

I have always used Delia's measurements/timings for meringues and they have always been great.  For each egg white you will need 2oz of caster sugar. I like using golden caster sugar as I think it has a more natural taste, and it gives the meringues a lovely golden colour.  In a clean, grease free bowl whisk the egg whites on a medium speed until they start to firm up, then increase the speed and beat them until you get firm peaks.  At this point, add the sugar a bit at a time and whisk on a fast speed until you get firm peaks again that will be lovely and glossy.  Either split the mix into small blobs on a lined baking tray, or make one large meringue.  I made half the recipe for the posset dessert so only made 3 egg white meringue and there was LOADS. Pop it in a preheated oven at gas mark 2 or equivalent, then turn it down to gas mark 1 as soon as they are in the oven.  When the meringues are baked, turn off the oven and leave them in until the oven is completely cooled, this will dry the meringues out and give them a nice crisp shell.

Before:

After, with a lovely golden colour:

Easy peasy, honest!!

The recipe also calls for home made lemon curd which seems daunting but really is fairly simple to make.  Just follow the recipe and, most importantly, once you add the eggs to the bowl keep the mixture moving with a hand whisk so the eggs don't scramble.  I ended up making a double batch of the lemon curd the following day as it's so delicious, I'll never buy shop bought again! It was absolutely gorgeous on the warm home made bran scones that I made the same day.

The dessert really was one of the nicest I've ever tasted.  The very fussy 'wife' even gave it a 10/10!  Time consuming to make, but well worth the effort to make everything from scratch.  It just wouldn't have been as nice with shop bought lemon curd and meringues.  Go on, give it a go, bring a little bit of lemony summer sunshine into your day!