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Sunday Evening Cooking

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Weekends, as I’ve mentioned before, are a great time to do a bit of extra cooking. Instead of having a quick, rushed breakfast it’s possible to take the extra time to prepare something a little bit more elaborate and time-consuming.

Sunday evening can also be a good time to prepare a tasty dinner as well as doing a little bit towards preparations for the rest of the week.

In my case that meant that instead of simply prepping vegetables for dinner I also used the prepped vegetables and a variety of leftover vegetables to make a tasty soup. Yes, I’m still “cheating” and using a soup maker, but the end results is damn tasty.

Chopping up a bunch of fresh vegetables and making a soup out of them is quite satisfying 🙂

So for the next couple of days I know what I’ll be having at lunchtime – homemade vegetable soup and probably a banana or some other fresh fruit.

Tonight’s dinner worked out pretty well. Chicken pieces with a load of vegetables and plenty of herbs.

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The vegetables were fresh, but unfortunately I’m currently stuck with dried herbs, as my track record with fresh herbs has been pretty bad (short version – they keep dying on me!).

 

Tracking Sexual Activity??

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Trackers and tracking apps. If you’ve got even a passing interest in health and fitness you’ve probably seen or used some of them. Personally  I’ve used a lot of them over the past few years and currently wear an UP 360. I’ll admit I’m not as good at tracking food as I could be, but I do try.

One of the more popular tracking apps for mobile is MapMyRide (which also appears as MapMyRun and a few other names, but is the same app). I started using it for tracking my cycling activity, but it can also track a very broad range of other activities including walking, hiking, running, weight lifting and a whole lot more.

However a friend of mine spotted one activity buried in the options that piqued our interest:

mapmyride-intimacy-tracking

“Intimacy”?

The only possible interpretation for that is that the app wants to track your sexual activity. Of course this opens up a whole range of questions like where on earth would you put the phone to track it and how would you even handle tracking it.

“Sorry darling I need to log this”

Talk about a buzz kill!

I’m not sure why the app developers put it in there, but at least they didn’t overthink it too much, because if you do attempt to track “intimacy” (and of course you would out of curiosity, wouldn’t you?) you will get a message about how it can’t really track it properly.. though it will try..

So you end up with this kind of event being shared with your contacts (if you share via MapMyRide):

tracking-sex-mapmyride

You can even add notes and share it via Facebook and Twitter!

 

 

How Many Calories Are You Drinking?

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When you track calories intake you probably focus primarily on food ie. solids. Sure, a lot of studies emphasise the importance of drinking water, so you might also record your water intake.

But what about alcohol?

Are you aware of how many calories are in that glass of wine?

How about that beer?

Women’s Health produced a very informative and frankly scary graphic to illustrate the calorie cost of common alcoholic beverages and how much exercise you’d need to do in order to burn each of them off:

think-before-you-drink-calories

 

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Resolutions For 2015?

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New Year's Eve dinner

New Year’s Eve dinner

Today is January 1st 2015. It’s the first day of a new year and I am spending it (mostly) on planes.

If there’s any truth in the entire concept of “starting like you plan to continue” then my choice of activity for January 1st is probably oddly appropriate.

In 2014 I got slightly more active. Cycling (a bit) is a good way to burn calories. Walking is too.

I did both in 2014, but I didn’t really do enough of either.

Will that change in 2015? Unless I push myself, no. And of course whether or not I can get myself motivated enough to push myself is another question entirely ..

I guess I’ll find out over the next few months.

So my resolutions for 2015? I’m not sure if I want to make any ..

Weekend Breakfasts

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omelette with pepper, onion and tomatoDuring the week it’s often hard to find the time and energy to prepare a proper breakfast. I often find myself misbehaving and grabbing a bacon roll. Yes, it’s not the “right” kind of start to the day, but it’s still better than no breakfast at all.

Come the weekend, however, and I can take the time to put together something more wholesome and healthy. Assuming, of course, that I have the ingredients to hand.

If I can I like to prepare a simple, yet tasty, omelette on a Saturday morning.

Omelettes, which I’ve mentioned several times in the past, are versatile. You can be as inventive as you like with them. It all depends on what you have to hand.

This morning, for example, I used:

  • 3 eggs
  • onion
  • green pepper
  • tomato

And served it with a hot sauce that I’d picked up on one of my trips to the US.

hot sauce

I’m not sure if it’s better or worse than ketchup, but I like the “kick” it adds to an omelette.

Washing the entire thing down with some freshly brewed coffee gives you a good start to the day 🙂

Cheese on Toast With Onion & Tomatoes

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10784854_313414535527325_480044253_nWhen I was growing up cheese on toast was a staple. However when I moved overseas in the early 1990s I stopped eating it.

Why? Well two reasons really:

  1. Sliced bread is common in the UK and Ireland. It isn’t in France, Italy or Spain
  2. Most cookers in France, Italy and Spain don’t have grills like Irish cookers do

Of course I currently live in Ireland, so I’ve no excuse. Pretty much every single cooker sold in this country comes with a grill.

So every now and again I will make cheese on toast.

However cheese on toast by itself is a little pedestrian.

To make it a little bit more interesting I like to slice up an onion and a tomato so that you get cheese and onion with tomatoes.

Preparation is simple – simply grill the bread on one side. When it’s done add your cheese, onion and tomato.

Grill until the cheese has melted. The tomatoes and onion won’t be fully cooked, but if you’ve cut the onion thinly enough it won’t matter.

You can serve it “as is” or add a bit of chutney.

Print

Cheese on Toast With Onion & Tomatoes

A tasty and easy to prepare snack or light lunch / dinner
Course Snack
Cuisine Irish
Keyword cheese, onion, toast, tomatoes
Prep Time 2 minutes
Cook Time 10 minutes
Total Time 12 minutes
Servings 1

Ingredients

  • 1 - 2 slices Sliced bread suitable for toasting
  • 50 g Cheese any will do, but cheddar is probably best
  • 1 - 2 Tomatoes one or two depending on how many slices of bread you're using
  • 1/2 Onion

Instructions

  1. Toast the bread on one side under your grill
  2. While the bread is toasting, peel and slice the onion. Slice the tomato.
  3. Once the bread is toasted on one side remove from the grill turn it over and add the cheese, onion and tomato slices
  4. Grill until the cheese has melted
  5. Serve hot with some chutney

Recipe Notes

You can make this "low carb" by using a lower carb bread

 

Irish Food Isn’t Boring

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If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the last couple of years it’s that Irish food is far from boring. Sure, you can choose to eat boring Irish food that lacks imagination, but if you want to you can find good and interesting cuisine on your doorstep.

Earlier this week a couple of us had dinner in the excellent 101 Talbot in Dublin. The restaurant’s been there for about 20 years, though I don’t think I’d been back there in the last 19 or so (I have vague recollections of eating there some time in the 1990s) until a couple of months ago.

Their menus are an interesting take on the potentially “boring” dishes that you can find in more middle of the road Irish restaurants. Chicken, for example, is served stuffed with black pudding. You can also choose to have slightly more exotic food, so I started with the pigeon:

pigeon

You can’t get pigeon on the menu in that many restaurants and it’s surprisingly good. It’s not like quail (caille), which I find a bit disappointing (due to the lack of meat)

Then moved on to the lamb, which was served in a tagine style.

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And since I was feeling “bold” I topped it all off with a quite exquisite dessert.

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The desserts are all made “in house”.

The ingredients are all sourced locally and I washed it all down with an Irish craft cider.

Price-wise it was pretty good value. It worked out around 40 Euro / head including starters, main, desserts and drinks.

Good quality well prepared fresh food is something I enjoy and I’m not going to apologise for that! Also, if you’ve spent the entire day on your feet, like we had, then being able to sit down and relax over a good meal is a good idea!