No food blog today, too many leftovers to eat up.

Woosy Wednesday

Woke up this morning and decided I was eating too much. Nothing really appealed anymore and I feel too full. But this evening, slightly tiddly from sampling the Beech Leaf Noyau on the other blog I've made a huge dinner.



The aubergine fritters are stuffed with a yeast mushroom pate, onions and garlic which give the required unctuousness but I forgot I don't like mushrooms much! The sweet and sour sauce is made with lemon and carrot.

I'll diet tomorrow.

Tuesday Tastes

Missed breakfast this morning in a rush to get to the tip so treated myself to lunch from the chiller cabinet - ready made gazpacho which was tarted up with some chopped cucumber and some sherry vinegar.



Dinner tonight was an absolutely foul wheat and buckwheat burger picked up by mistake when I was still dazed after an overnight ferry trip. I loathe buckwheat but can't bear to waste food so tried to make it edible with extra vegetables and a red wine reduction sauce. It's gone now.

Maudlin Monday

It has rained and rained and rained today, depressing and inducing needs for comfort eating before crawling back into bed. The trouble is all the meals I know that are good for days like this are best made in gargantuan quantities, sufficient for 7 or more and take effort and inspiration to achieve.

So what I've done is fall back onto the old standby for the lonely single, the microwave meal. Except I have no microwave and must heat it in a pan.



It's actually quite surprising to find something like this on sale in a French supermarket - there are plenty of ready meals, the French aren't so backward as all that but one wouldn't expect 100% vegetale instant food to make the sales needed to keep it on the shelves.

A run down of today's menu follows:-
Breakfast was left over pizza from last night
Lunch; stewed apples. Actually they were more like boiled apples than the wonderful frothy applesauce puree expected by the British. I've yet to find a French apple that can do that but these local apples, variety Belchard are at least the last of the storage apples and travelled almost no distance to arrive on my plate which can't be bad.
Dinner, Lentilles au Tofu et Quinoa made by Super U. This is impeccably nutritious, packing 20g of protein into 360 kcal, relatively low in fat and high in fibre but it doesn't really taste very nice, definitely reserved for emergencies only.

I'm hoping for better things tomorrow, maybe even that chocolate pudding.

Sunday Surprise

Why surprise I hear you ask, well, it's like this, I was going to make a chocolate pudding but then discovered a lack of baking powder in the house. This is what I made instead.



Turned out nice although there is far too much there for one meal. Hand made dough (how I missed the Santos but 4.5 kg dough would have been more than too much for one pizza) with basil kneaded in, a topping of tomato puree, onions, garlic, chopped killer cucumber as a caper substitute, fresh tomato and mozzarella substitute made from (you guessed it) soy yoghurt and nutritional yeast. Lots of olive oil. The whole thing could have done with a lot more pepper but quite pleasing overall.

Oh, and I had a glass, strike that, two glasses of rose with it.

Sojasun Saturday

Today has been soya heavy as I've made extensive use of the products supplied by Sojasun, available in good chilled food cabinets everywhere, well SuperU and Leclerc, but only the one in Coutances.

Breakfast was two past their sell by date vanilla puddings made by Sojasun, lunch a potato and apple salad with a rather good dressing made of a small pot of Sojasun soy yoghurt with a teaspoonful of mustard stirred in and dinner was a Sojasun burger, served with the left over cold potatoes refried. O.k. I know I said I was improving my diet but it's Saturday alright, and I'm not going out and I'm all on my own. I may even have an alcoholic drink in a moment.

The burgers come in a range of flavours, I prefer the petits legumes one but this was the curried version. Frankly, since even an animal free food technologist in France has only the haziest idea of what constitutes a curry, I ignored this and served it with fried onions, a killer pickle and tomato ketchup anyway but there was a small sachet of something yellow in the box that was supposed to approximate to a curry condiment. I ate that as well. Oh damn! I forgot the lettuce.

The potatoes were of the variety Cherie, a waxy red skinned tuber sold here for raclette - no chance - but they make a good salad and refry quite nicely.

Onwards and upwards.

Tabbouleh tonight

Bursting with inspiration for the new project today's nutrition has not been at all bad. Breakfast was a fried tofu slice and marmite sandwich, lunch; a bowl of green leaves and a peanut butter sandwich followed by some biscuits and dinner tonight is shown below.



Quinoa Tabbouleh.

Take a handful of quinoa (for one person, about 60g), wash it well, put it in a small saucepan and then pour boiling water on it to cover by about a centimetre, there's no need for huge quantities. Put the lid on the pan and let the grain gently simmer for 15 minutes until tender.

Meanwhile prepare the vegetables. Finely chop a small onion, a tomato (save the juices for the dressing), a 5 cm section of a fresh cucumber and if you have any (I didn't so I used a lovage leaf in the dressing) half a small stick of celery. That's one stalk by the way. You might also add a little diced red or green pepper. Chuck them all in a bowl as you go. Then make a dressing from lemon juice and olive oil in roughly equal proportion, the grain will soak up the lemon juice so use at least one lemon, add plenty of chopped mint, parsley and any other leafy herbs you fancy. I have no basil plants here yet and coriander leaf is, as far as I can tell, unobtainable in France. It'll have to be grown. Add as much crushed garlic to this as you can stand and salt in the quantities appropriate for your health.

When the quinoa is cooked, drain in a fine sieve and rinse with cold water. Mix into the vegetables and dressing. It should be green with herbs and fragrant with lemon and oil. Arrange on a plate dressed with lettuce, nasturtium leaves, other lovely things, take a picture and eat.