Just eat it.. eat it...

Here follows a blog post about things I have recently stuffed into my face while making the "nom nom" noise. Considering the extensive list of things I don't eat because they make my joints ache it consistently surprises me how many yummy things still have my name on them, so to speak.

Banana with nut butter inside it, cacao beans, fish oil.
Salad. This one has sheepsmilk feta on it. I'm not a complete nazi about avoiding dairy. Feta and blue cheese are a necessity to full enjoyment of life. Later I added some grilled fish to this meal.
Baked banana with 20g melted chocolate and nut butter. This is a brilliant way to make a little chocolate go a long way. Melt it and stir it into some fruit. The whole thing is about 350 calories which is pretty light for a dessert or treat. Most slices of cake, for example, are at least 500 calories and a restaurant mudcake could be over 1000. It's a scary, scary world out there.
Apple with nut butter. Half a Lara Bar, cacao beans, activated almonds.
Er.. It's actually two kumara and tuna patties sandwiched together with almond butter.
A Green Smoothie. This one has frozen spinach, hemp milk and raw agave syrup and represents this mornings breakfast.
I'm just finding my way into a more vegepacked, less neurotic foodie lifestyle, as you will know if you are one of the few readers that visits The Lab. So far, so good. I'm still not the slinky malinky that I want to be, but I'm getting closer with every day, every green smoothie and every psycho-spin class at the gym. More about that later...

Result!

So.. the day of the party dawned and I got together with Miss J for the final touches to our party piece de resistance. The result was truly photo-worthy, although all these pics are from my mobile and don't really do justice to the masterpiece.

Of course, we used organic cream and jam in the middle of our non-organic, wheat and sugar creation. It's important to exercise contradiction whenever possible.

It was hard to exercise restraint. It was tempting to just eat it with our hands.
My portion was an exercise in modesty. It was fab. I wanted more, but the moment passed without incident.
Happy birthday Mum! Next year we will add a third layer. And, in 14 years, rum!

Been cookin'

Er, I know this is a health blog, but part of making it work is knowing when to relax the rules.

Today I made a cake for my mothers birthday. Miss J helped me to decorate it and we are quite proud of the result. Actually, this is only HALF the cake. Tomorrow, as if it wasn't already a delicious maximus specimen, we are sticking two of these with cream and strawberry jam. If you are going to make a cake, make it good. ;)

Baby, you are mine

Sometimes I fear that I am becoming 'strange'. I worry that I am that person in the neighbourhood that people have a secret name for, like 'smelly cat lady'. I have evidence to support my worries.

Yesterday I was in the Liberty Market organic shop and heard giggling behind me. It was at this point that I realised I had been admiring a particularly lucious head of broccoli. I was holding it up in front of my eyes and had actually uttered the phrase 'ooooo baby' out loud.

You've got to admit though. Organic broccoli doesn't usually look like this, all firm and bright and bug-free:

It is a particularly fine specimen. Or, was. Now departed to the broccoli farm in my stomach.

****

In less wacky news. Exams are over for the year and I have a stack, a mad stack of emails to attend to and work to get done. If you are awaiting an email reply, fear not! I shall get them all squared away next week. Exams went quite well... I misjudged the first one by an hour - thought it was a THREE hour exam, but it was a TWO hour one, and that was not a fine moment when they sounded the '15 minutes to go' alarm and I had to scribble like a demented robot to try and get it finished! The second exam.. I got lost on the way to the venue and had to walk in late, all panicked and nearly in tears. I was one minute away from lock-out. Third exam, rocked it, but it's outside my degree. Fingers x's for the results.

Oooo look! A shiny thing~!

The information age has unleashed a massive globalisation of events designed to make you stuff your face. Perhaps it's the true cause of the obesity epidemic! When I was a kid, we did not even know what Halloween was. Now it is all over kids TV and you just can't escape it. Still, as kiwis, it's hard to get us to care about witchypoo stuff and this aspect of the Americanisation has been slow to catch on.

Last year I opened my door to trick or treaters for the first time ever and had to relinquish my precious organic chocolate mini-bars. This year I am READY. That's my stash in the photo.

However, as it's now 9.30pm and I've only had two small ghosts (with Dad in tow) materialise, I conclude that the level of trick and treating has dropped by a massive 50% and is probably on the wane for good. That having been said, I'm all for dressing up and celebrating the turn of the seasons, the time of harvest and other natural events but what exactly are we harvesting right now? Shiny chocolates. Ok, I get it. It's the agent pagan festival of the shiny chocolate harvest. Of course! Aren't you glad I'm here to impart historically accurate snippets like this? Don't thank me, just unwrap a shiny choc and partake.

I don't know if I likes or not likes...

Yesterday while poking around at Piko (which is a very 'poking around in' kind of shop), I found a little sachet of something called Teecino and was intrigued by the outrageous claims on the packet. Working in the supplement industry, I'm used to some pretty crazy rules regarding what you can and can't say on a label. For example, we once had to reprint 5000 labels because the TGA deemed that calling something a 'tonic' was an unproven statement.

Now I'm not sure if you can see what is written in the fineprint (because I was too lazy to change the wide-angle lens on my camera, so I'll just tell you. It says 'tastes just like real coffee'. I can see what they are so transparently trying to do. It's like saying 'just like real crack' to a drug addict. I had to buy it. Couldn't not.

The result was aesthetically pleasing and, I thought, not too bad tasting. It's kind of caroby with a hint of roasted chicory. I tried it on The Programmer and it blew his socks off, but not in a good way. In fact he sat there with his tongue hanging out, signalling desperately for me to make him a 'real espresso' to take the taste away. I guess I am more used to alternative things.

Conclusion:

The people that think Maya Teecino tastes just like coffee are fully decaffed yoga-junkies that have not had a coffee for fifteen years. They should just stop that 'this is like real coffee' joking around right now because it's not funny. However, the product does not fare badly if you are looking for a coffee substitute that enables the ritual of operating the Saeco espresso machine and makes the kitchen smell nice. Also, you can have one at 11pm and still get to sleep. Or, you could if you weren't completely addicted to blogging the minutiae of your foody adventures.

Slacky McSlackness

Please excuse my slack-arse blog behaviour of late. The thing is... I'm getting near the end of my first full-time semester and I've got exams in a few weeks. Then I'll be all yours again. In the meantime, be entertained with yet another cute cat pic. I just got home and found Mog looking very comfortable not on, but IN the bed. It's just crying out to be LOL'd.