Amazon Delivery :)

After waiting in all day yesterday for the British Gas man not to turn up, this morning it felt like the doorbell was ringing non-stop! First my Grandma arrived with an offering of lunch in exchange for me teaching her how to use her mobile phone (after everyone else in my family had lost patience!!) and then within 10 minutes of her arriving, a delivery man came with our Amazon delivery, and the British Gas man finally turned up, phew! The Amazon delivery was mainly Graphic Design books for Liam, but there were a couple of things for me...I'll talk about them later...first the food I've eaten today!

Breakfast...porridge...delicious! :-D I got a bit stressed last night when Liam came home from the shops with loads of junk foods (expensive chocolate biscuits, chocolate trifle pots and the dreaded Nutella), none of which I ate because I got in a strop...sorry Liam!! Anyway, overnight I decided I would treat myself to a spoonful of Nutella on my porridge...but when I came to make my porridge after Liam had left for uni this morning, I discovered he'd hidden it to "save me from myself"!!!! It seems I made up for the lack of Nutella by topping my porridge with everything else in sight! Porridge made with mashed banana and cinnamon in, topped with dark chocolate drops, blueberries, golden syrup and peanut butter...

loving the sunshine we've had over the last couple of days!

this was so good! I haven't had golden syrup in ages...was very sweet but divine, so glad I couldn't find the Nutella...this was much nicer! :)

So for lunch, Grandma had brought a salmon and prawn bake from M&S...basically a 'posh' fish pie with but with sliced potatoes. Luckily I cooked some peas to go with it as by the time we split it between me, Grandma and the baby there wasn't much to go around! I actually had half of it which was the "correct" portion size, but still looked tiny to me!

this wasn't great if I'm honest, no nicer than a standard ready meal, and no where near as nice as fish pie I can make myself! Still, a promise is a promise, and I spent the next 1.5 hours trying to teach Grandma how to send and receive simple text messages! I think she finally got it...ish...I'll see if she still remembers when I see her on Sunday!

Mid-afternoon I found the Nutella jar - Liam had hidden it behind his gardening gloves on top of the (un-used) table top dishwasher! Oh dear...

I ate about half the jar and didn't even enjoy it! Kept it on the dining table away from me, but kept going back for another, and another, and another spoonful! It was way too sickly sweet and left a gunky feel on the roof of my mouth - I much preferred the substitute sugar laden porridge this morning...when will I learn!

As mentioned, a couple of things I'd bought from Amazon arrived today...

Paul McKenna's "I Can Make You Thin" and Jillian Michaels "30 Day Shred" DVD ... I will be slim and toned by my wedding, hopefully achieving more natural/intuitive eating along the way!! Has anyone read/watched either of these? Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to start reading the book until after the Nutella incident!!

I like the basic principles in "I Can Make You Thin":

• Eat when hungry
• Eat what you want to eat, not what you think you should eat
• Take the time to enjoy every mouthful
• Stop when full

Not sure how easy it will be to take time over my food (he recommends putting your cutlery down between each mouthful) when baby is around, but I will give it a go! Also need to override my "must clear my plate" mentality! It seems to make sense though, and hopefully will "allow" me to enjoy my food I like without feeling guilty :)

I decided to give the principles a try with dinner - pork&apple sausages, mashed potato, onion gravy and savoy cabbage...

I made sure to put my cutlery down between each mouthful (despite the baby screaming with tiredness through most of the meal, pour Liam was sat next to him this evening!) and really taste the food. To be honest, I didn't actually enjoy it as much as I thought it would - the mash was too watery, the cabbage a bit tasteless and the sausages had an odd texture. Still nice, but it didn't quite live up to the expectations I have in my head of this meal. That's the problem with family life though - sausage & mash is one of Liam's favourites so we will still have to eat this sometimes, I can't always eat exactly what I want. I left some of the mashed potato but ate all the sausages and cabbage...

I didn't feel full whist eating as such, but I did start to enjoy the food less a couple of mouthfuls before I stopped eating. I kept eating because I wanted to finish the sausages and cabbage - my favourite aspects of the meal. MISTAKE! About 5 minutes after I'd finished eating, I felt very full and bloated, a feeling which has so far continued for the rest of the evening, not nice. I should have stopped when I started to notice the lack of hunger...there will be other sausages and cabbages!! Looking back, I regularly feel full and bloated after my evening meal especially, just haven't really taken much notice of it before...need to start listening to my body!

I really do like the concepts of Paul McKenna so will continue to follow this. Tomorrow I get to choose what I really want for dinner as Liam is at work - at the moment I fancy a margarita pizza topped (by me) with roasted peppers and goats cheese, but I'll wait until tomorrow afternoon before going shopping to see if I change my mind!

30 Day Shred... I've heard that you really ache for the first few days of this, so I'm going to wait until Sunday to try it - I can already barely walk by the end of my full day working on Saturday, so don't think it would be helpful to be in pain before my shift even starts!!

Leftover Turkey = Yummy Curry!

After yesterday's 2nd "Christmas" Dinner, Liam and I spent most of the evening stripping the rest of the turkey for leftovers! We got lots...

I bagged this up into portions for the fridge/freezer (was clearly feeling organised for once!) and it made enough for 6 family size meals, plus there were already some slices in the fridge for sandwiches...yum...I love leftovers more than the actual roast! :)

On to this morning though and back to routine :( Liam starts work at 7am on Sundays and baby got woken by the alarm so it was an early start for all of us! After sorting out the kids' breakfasts I needed some fuel of my own to keep me going! I decided to do a repeat of yesterday's "pink porridge" with oats, Kara coconut milk and frozen black forest fruits...

topped with some dried papaya and a much needed blob of peanut butter!

to be honest the papaya was a bit unnecessary but the peanut butter was definitely a good addition...delicious! :)

Unfortunately an early breakfast meant I failed at the first hurdle with regards to no snacking. I need to buy some more fresh fruit to try to stave off the hunger/munchies! As it was I tried to prevent too much damage by having a Nak'd Cocoa Mint bar...

and then finished off the Nutella (luckily hardly any left!) and ate a whole 60g bag of dolly mix sweets...

bleurgh, I felt so sick after all of this junk! I've been really good at resisting the Nutella recently - admittedly because it's been so cold in our kitchen that the Nutella was solid until today so required chipping off and microwaving if you wanted it on toast!!

I bought this biscuit tin for Liam for Christmas, think it's more appropriate for me though!!

I filled it with Boost chocolate bars (his favourite) when I gave it to him and it's still more than half full...he has way more willpower/self-control than me!!

Anyway, back to today's food. I had no idea what we would be having for lunch as we were going over to my Grandparents to see my cousin who is visiting from Australia. They'd put on a buffet...

my main plate...

the mushroom quiche/tart was from Waitrose and really good, egg mayonnaise sandwich (I had another of these later), sausage roll (another couple of these found my way into my mouth later too!!), smoked salmon blinis and carrot sticks with dip. I also had one mince pie for pud and picked at some more of the carrot sticks and grapes. Lovely to see my cousin and nice food, only problem is that quantity of food wasn't huge but full of calories in form of pastry etc!

I had been looking forward to dinner all day...leftover turkey curry! :) I have to admit to cheating and letting curry paste do the bulk of the work for me. These were the ingredients...

2 small red onions, tikka masala curry paste, about 320g leftover turkey, tin chopped tomatoes and 2x 150g packs of mangetout, plus brown rice to serve with it. I have 5 more bags with the same amount of leftover turkey in for future use, so was pleasantly surprised to see how much turkey it contained once chopped up...

yum, can't wait til all the turkey inspired meals!! Anyway, back to today's curry! I first fried the finely diced onions in a little oil, added a couple of tablespoons of curry paste and the turkey, stirred all together then added the chopped tomatoes and another can's worth of water to get to this stage...

to finish the curry off I added the mangetout and once I'd taken the curry off the heat I stirred in a big-ish splash of double cream. This made a lot! I ended up having a bigger portion than I'd planned as I was worried about re-heating it again when it had already used re-heated meat, so had to eat it all up instead!

this was gorgeous, I do love turkey curry! :) does anyone have any suggestions for me to cook with some of my other turkey leftovers?? I have 5 more bags...I will definitely be making one batch of coronation turkey, and probably another turkey curry...so that leaves 3 more meals to come up with. Rest of the leftovers are in the freezer though so I have time for inspiration to strike!!

Once the kids were in bed, Liam and I couldn't resist some chocolate. We received a ridiculous amount of chocolate for Christmas, although worryingly a lot of it has now been eaten! Our baby "gave" our daughter a huge box of chocolates from Thorntons...

she had already opened them and eaten quite a few but tonight I had 4...or 5...must save the rest for her, although really I'm doing her a favour - her 4 year-old stomach would be sick on all that chocolate!!!

Liam and I then treated ourselves to a pud, he had his in a bowl but I had mine straight from the tub...

chocolate sponge pudding on top of half a tub of Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream...

this was so good! :) the chocolate pud stayed warm the whole way through which was great, made the ice cream all lovely and soft :)

I started off today trying to be healthy...it rapidly went downhill though and by this evening I was kind of thinking "may as well eat up the treats now so I can have a fresh start on Thursday"...we have so much rubbish still left in the house from Christmas! We gave quite a few boxes of chocolates away to people we've visited since Christmas but it doesn't seem to have made much difference...I will just have to learn to ignore it all I guess!

On the plus side I managed more than half an hour's reading this afternoon while the kids were playing happily together, so that's one resolution completed for the day! I was given a Kindle for Christmas which is great, has got me back in to reading and makes it so much easier to get back into a book whenever I get a spare 5 minutes. I used to love reading before baby #2 came along but don't usually manage to find the time these days!!