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Got an email from the website where I found the image of the girl I had for my background and they said they'd paid for it as a stock image and couldn't authorize me to use it. So, back to the Union Jack!
I'm calling the council today to try to find out something about when my citizenship ceremony will take place. Fingers crossed that I can get an actual human being on the line and get some answers!
I've been playing around with my blog design. This is kind of cool, I think! No, the girl in the background is not me; I don't think her look is completely out of reach, though. I sent an email to the website where I grabbed the image (www.boxingfitnessinstitute.com) asking permission. If they say no, out it goes, obviously!
So what do you think? Isn't she inspirational???!!
Right, I've done my Jari Love 'Get Ripped 1000' workout this morning and we are off to find a muffin tin and and a cast iron skillet today. Big time fun on a rainy bank holiday Monday!!
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Okay, we're back! I got the skillet and muffin tin--it wasn't easy! Apparently these are specialty items over here. Had to go to several shops. I also popped into a sports store and bought a new sports bra and shorts on sale. I'm very excited because the bra actually fits in the bust and is very comfortable. I'm going back ASAP and buy a couple more in different colors.
Tried a new recipe today and it was YUM!
Crustless Egg-Free Mini-Quiches
1 box silken tofu
1/4 cup soy milk
2 heaping Tbs nutritional yeast flakes
1 tsp cashew butter or tahini
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp turmeric
salt and black pepper to taste
2 green onions, chopped
1Tbs cornstarch
Combine above ingredients in blender or with hand blender (I used a hand blender).
1/2 red bell pepper, chopped
5 or 6 mushrooms, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
(or you could use small amounts of whatever veg is on hand)
Saute the above until done and add to tofu mixture.
Grease muffin cups with a bit of olive oil (optional) and spoon in the mixture until cups are half full. (Should be just enough for 12). Bake at 350 F for 30 minutes.
We just had this for lunch with steamed cabbage. Hubby loved them and said, 'Wow, this is real cooking!'
Thanks to SusanV at Fat Free Vegan Kitchen once again! Word of warning, she says she tried doubling the recipe and baking in a regular pie pan and it didn't work. Stick to mini-quiches until she fiddles the recipe a bit. Yum!
Plan for dinner? I'm making eggplant and vegan pepperoni pizza! Yum yum!
It's been a while since I recommended books and websites, so here are a few good ones I don't think I've mentioned yet.
BOOKS
Food Politics by Marion Nestle
This books unravels the tangled old-boy network that is the American food industry and the government bodies that supposedly protect consumer interests. It is an infuriating, terrifying and important read. It made me so angry at one point I threw the book down!
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
This book examines the nature of the choices we make when we choose what to eat: what drives us culturally, morally, ethically, environmentally, and physiologically. The point is, in the 21st century world of endless choice, many of them harmful indeed, we cannot afford to just grab something and eat it. But what's the thinking eater to do?
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio
Hungry Planet
This one's a little different. It's a humongous coffee table book with a message. The book is a series of portraits of 30 families in 24 countries, posing with their typical groceries for the week. The food is detailed in lists, with market value in US dollars. Each family has also offered a favourite recipe using some of the ingredients from their weekly shop. I found this book fascinating and pored over it off and on for a week.
Perfect Portion by Linda Gassenheimer
This is a wonderful guide. It's filled with full color, life-size photos of real food, in perfect portions, with nutritional breakdowns. The point of the book is to help teach you how to eyeball proper portion sizes so that you can wean yourself off point and calorie counting. You learn to use your hand, fingers and fist to judge portion sizes, as well as common household items such as a computer mouse. It's really interesting and useful! Even though the book is marketed as 'it's how much you eat, not what you eat that counts', rest assured that in the book the author goes to great lengths to promote high fiber, unsaturated fats and all the usual healthy choices we all know and love!
WEBSITES
Fat Free Vegan
This fantastic site, by Jackson, Mississippi resident SusanV, has a truly wonderful blog. You must take a look and be inspired! (See Ashley, some people from 'that part of the world' really do eat this way!)
The Post Punk Kitchen
This site supports a public access vegan cooking show and is maintained by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, author of the equally wonderful cookbook, Vegan with a Vengeance. It's mostly recipes and message boards about vegan cooking.
Ellen's Kitchen
Another goldmine of recipes and ideas for the vegetarian kitchen.
Look, even if you aren't vegetarian or vegan, the recipes found in these websites are absolutely fantastic--and what have you go to lose by trying a vegetarian meal a couple times a month, other than a few points off your cholesterol?
Happy reading!
(Name the film that is the source of my post title! Hint: takes place around a dinner table. Okay, and here's another line, 'Time for me to enter into creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need.' Although that particular line doesn't really apply, unless my Star Wars extravaganza caused more damage than I've been told!)
So I've taken away the blasting opening strains of the Star Wars theme. Everything's back to normal! Apologies to anyone whose eyebrows were blown off by it. 
9.10AM
Okay it's only 10 past 9 but I've called WCC twice and get an answer machine. Urgh! I bet they're just walking around with their cups of coffee being civil servant-ish.
Just finished Maximum Cardio Burn. I'll go have my shower and then try again.
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10.05 AM
Got disgusted and called the main number for Warwickshire County Council. The operator put me through to another number where I got a different answering machine, but this time it was a real person who identified herself (unfortunately too fast for me to write it down and I don't have the number because the operator put me through directly) but she said on the message that she doesn't work on Fridays and will return messages on Monday. I left another message, but guess what! Monday is a bank holiday and the office will be closed. So I suppose I will have to try the number again on Tuesday.
Argh!
On another note, a friend of ours is coming to visit us for the weekend. DH is getting home at 1.30 today and we're going to get food. It being a bank holiday, of course the forecast is rain, so I suppose we'll be holed up in here watching DVDs the whole time. Actually, we love doing that! And I have no doubts there will be lightsabres and flowing black capes involved.
(Hubby and the Groovy Gang--this blog's one-weekend-only design is for you. MTFBWY.)
...my lonely days are over....
and life is like a song...
Got home from work and there was this plain white envelope in the mailbox. I looked for a return address--meant nothing to me. 'Oh, please let this be it,' I said out loud. And it was!
My citizenship ceremony invitation has arrived! So tomorrow I call Warwickshire County Council Citizenship Ceremony Officer and find out what to do next!
After doing the happy dance and reading it over several times to make sure everything was okay, I called and left a message on the WCC answer machine and got in the kitchen and made seitan pepperoni (Fat Free Vegan--great blog!) put that in the oven and worked out to Jari Love's Get Ripped to the Core while it baked. It is now cooling on the kitchen counter.
Some people say, if you want pepperoni, why not just eat pepperoni. Why bother making fake pepperoni. If you're vegan be vegan and stop trying to recreate meat. Well, my answer is I'm not trying to recreate meat. Of course I could eat it, but I don't want to. At this point, the thought of animal flesh makes me sick. But that doesn't mean that I don't enjoy a variety of textures and that I don't like the flavors of fennel seeds, chili flakes and smoky paprika. It doesn't taste like meat--vegans don't want it to taste like meat. If it tasted too much like meat, it would make us sick. In fact, some vegans (particularly those who were raised vegans and never learned that chewiness was a desireable quality in food) are repulsed by wheat gluten products because they are too meatlike. But those of us who grew up eating meat do sometimes miss a chewy texture, and wheat gluten is an excellent source of protein. One-half cup of seitan delivers 26 grams of protein, 160 calories, 2 grams of fat, 3.6 mg of iron and 0 grams of cholesterol.
So anyway, that's why the vegan pepperoni.
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Update: I made pizza with a bit of the vegan pepperoni, red bell pepper, mushroom, onion and a jar of my beloved Sacla tomato and roast vegetables pasta sauce. Topped with nutritional yeast flakes, it was very nice. Next time I make the pepperoni, I will go heavier on the black pepper and red pepper flakes. I was afraid of getting it too hot, but the bites I got that had pepper in were nicer than the milder bites. DH and I had half a pizza each and were full. That's interesting, because when I make straight veggie pizzas, we each eat an entire pizza. I guess seitan makes it more filling!
Today is exactly two weeks from the date of my acceptance letter from the Home Office. If I don't receive my citizenship ceremony invitation today, I'm supposed to call and ask them to send a second copy. Ugh! I hope it comes today!
The other day I ordered some wheat gluten powder (also known as wheat gluten, gluten powder, vital wheat gluten or just gluten!) online. I forgot that a kilogram is 2.2 pounds, and so excited was I to see that a kilo cost only £2.30, I ordered four. Wasn't I surprised yesterday when instead of a small package of four pounds of the stuff, the delivery person comes lumbering in with nearly 10 pounds of it. It is dated for September 2008. I wonder if DH and I can manage to eat that much seitan in only a year! LOL I managed to peddle one sack of it to a work colleague who likes to bake bread, then I spent a good half hour printing off seitan/wheat gluten recipes to try. I intend to make some this weekend.
Ellen's Kitchen is a good source of wheat gluten information and recipes, if you're curious. You can buy it already made in health food shops, but it's so expensive! A can of mock duck is £1.99. I could make enough mock duck to feed the Buddhist population of the eastern hemisphere with all the wheat gluten I've got now! Ha!
Yesterday I went and bought a new scale, got it home, decided I like my old one better and took it straight back. (I think --okay, I know -- I'm too obsessive to have a scale that measures body fat, muscle mass and all that. I freak out enough over just body weight. I think --okay, I know -- a fancier scale would send me straight into therapy!) Anyway, after I got my card recredited, we had a stroll through the shops and I bought a dress! Yes, I found a dress that is actually small enough for me in the bust! It's a silvery gray sleeveless dress with a round standy-uppy 60s kind of collar. I will get DH to take my photo in it and try to post. (I did post one snap of me taken on Saturday in the green smocky top and baggy roll-ups. This is the outfit that the lady in ASDA commented on. I think it makes me look poochy in the belly. I'll be glad when smocks go out of style!) I also got a black skirt with big white polka dots on it. A skirt, people!
Anyway, now I need some black dangly earrings to go with the dress. I intend to wear it with black patent leather platform slingback and a thin black patent leather belt, so I thought some black earrings would look good. Maybe when I post a photo you can give me some input.
A major curiosity of British idioms is the seeming obsession with pee-pee. I think one of these days I'm going to count how many times in a day I hear someone say the word 'piss'. Here is a quick list of uses for this apparently all-purpose word:
'Taking the piss'
This means to make fun of someone or to be kidding in a rather unkind way.
Sample uses:
'Hey, stop taking the piss.'
'Oh, ignore him, he's just taking the piss out of you.'
'Pissing it down'
This means it's raining hard. (Raining hard is a relative concept. Having grown up in tornado alley, I always expect to see sheets of rain out the window, but often what is called 'pissing it down' here would just be a thick mist or sprinkling back in Arkansas!)
Sample uses:
'Don't forget your brolly, it's pissing it down out there.'
'Oh, great, it's pissing it down and me without my mac.'
'Get pissed'
This means to get drunk.
Varations: 'on the piss', 'pissed up', 'having a piss up'
'We went down the pub and had a right piss up.'
'Pissed off'
Same as American usage, angry.
'Piss off!'
This means 'get lost', 'shut up', 'stop that', 'go to hell', etc.
Sample:
'Piss off! You do not know Bono!'
'Oy, mate, piss off out of my way!'
I should probably add that this is not generally acceptable slang--I mean, you wouldn't use these phrases during lunch with the Queen. That would just be taking the piss! But if you are talking to friends, you do hear it.
If I think of any more, I'll post them. I swear, the British are all frustrated urologists!
(By the way, the post title is a play on the famous soap opera here, 'Coronation Street'...)
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Really Easy Stuffed Courgettes
I just made up this recipe tonight and hubby loved it. It's definitely not a new concept, but thought you might like it...
1-1.5 cups leftover short grain brown rice
1 jar Sacla tomato and olive pasta stir-through sauce (or any really rich, thick pasta sauce)
2 large courgettes (aka zucchini), sliced in half long ways
Place courgettes cut side down in skillet, pour water in to come half-way up the courgettes. Cover and bring to boil and cook for 5 minutes. Cool on a plate until cool enough to handle.
Meanwhile, combine leftover rice and jar of pasta sauce. Preheat oven to 180 C and pour a little olive oil in the bottom of a roasting pan or casserole dish. Set aside.
When the courgettes are cool, use a spoon to scrape out all the flesh. Drain the water away and chop the flesh. Mix this into the rice mixture. At this point, if you must, you could add some cheese, but it's really not needed at all.
Pack the rice mixture into the hollowed out courgettes, place in prepared roasting pan or casserole dish and bake in 180 C oven until courgettes are roasted and top of rice mixture is browned.
Serve with side vegetables of your choice (green beans, carrots and mushrooms would be good--maybe with pearl onions in!)
Quick and yummy.
"Dear Mrs__
" I am pleased to say that your application for British citizenship has been successful and you will shortly receive a letter inviting you to attend a citizenship ceremony. When you attend a ceremony you will be presented with a certificate of British citizenship.
"Please note, this letter is not an invitation to a ceremony. You should not contact your Local Authority until you have received your invitation. If you have not received your invitation within 2 weeks of the above date, you should contact the Home Office at **** *** **** to request a further copy."
So! Now I'm eagerly awaiting this invitation. Then I will call my Local Authority and arrange a private ceremony in my local register office (so I don't have to travel to Warwick, although this will cost me an additional fee of £35) and I will take the following oath:
"I (name) do solemnly and sincerely affirm that on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors, according to law.
"I wil give my loyalty to the United Kingdom and respect its rights and freedoms. I will uphold its democratic values. I will observe its laws faithfully and fulfil my duties and obligations as a British citizen."
New citizens are presented with their certificates of British citizenship and a welcome pack as well as a commemorative gift with a 'local flavour'. The national anthem will be played.
Then I get to apply for a British passport, which will cost £66 plus shipping charges and involves yet another interview. Still, it looks like I might be able to reach my goal of having a valid UK passport by the end of 2007!
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I felt so proud of myself yesterday. Before work, I did Super Body Sculpt, a 40 minute weight lifting workout. Then when I got home, I felt fine and decided to do a second workout. I chose Cathe's Basic Step, which I did on the 8" Club Step. I'm proud of doing this because on Thursday my rotation called for a weightlifting workout (Jen Carmen's evil Body Sculpt), but I just felt so knackered that I decided to skip it. Doing two in one day sort of made up for skipping one.
Tomorrow I'm doing Jari Love's Get Ripped Slim & Lean!
We had spaghetti for lunch and now I feel so stuffed and stodgy. This is why I hardly ever make spaghetti. I used Vegan Deli veggie mince, onion, garlic, cabernet savignon and a jar of Lloyd Grossman's tomato basil sauce on whole wheat pasta. To garnish I used black pepper and nutritional yeast flakes. It tasted great, but I bet I'll be retaining water tomorrow! For dinner it's definitely going to be vegetable stir-fry. I try to make it a practice to eat wheat only one meal per day. Today I had whole wheat toast for breakfast then whole wheat pasta and garlic bread made from whole wheat rolls. I'm wheated out! I can't believe some people eat this much wheat every single day. Urgh. Not only did I used to do this, but it was all refined white wheat as well. No wonder I was fat!
Guess what, someone in Sainsbury's (grocery store) today asked me where I got my top! She said it looked nice. That never happens to me! I guess all this clothes shopping I've been doing lately is a good thing. It's just, when I see myself in trendy clothes, I look to myself like I'm in costume, or dressing too young for my age. "Mutton dressed as lamb" as they say over here. Actually, DH took a picture of me before we went shopping. I will post as soon as his football match is over (Chelsea vs. Manchester United). My hair has grown out quite a bit since my last extreme waif pixie cut (aka Biafran refugee chic) but it's still really short!
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So how about another recipe?
Coconut Rice
(serves 6-8 and isn't low in fat, but that's okay!)
This recipe is so easy and it is absolutely delicious. It is delicious with a simple dish of stir-fried vegetables and tofu, or you can use it with any southeast asian dish, thai, Carribean or curry dish.
14 ounces thai jasmine rice
400g can coconut milk
8 oz water
1/4 tsp salt
finely grated zest of 1 lime
1.5 ounces dessicated coconut (the big flakes are best)
Combine first four ingredients in saucepan. Bring to boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer 20 minutes. Add the lime zest and fluff with fork. Remove from heat, cover and let sit 10 minutes more.
In a frying pan, toast the coconut, turning frequently, to golden brown.
Sprinkle the toast coconut over each serving of rice (or over the veg if you've put stir-fried vegetables on top of the rice). Garnish with a lime wedge if desired.
