Good morning everyone
It’s a lovely sunny day in Gloucester NSW – enjoying my relaxing weekend. Birdlife are out in force, country air so refreshing. Gardening rejuvenating – we’ve planted lots of veges for summer eating.
Made slow cooked casserole yesterday – healthy & delicious. Will try pressure cooker next time.
Cinque & LJoyce: after my carb load Friday, didn’t feel hungry till midday Saturday, then had dinner 6pm – feeling better today. Maybe these eat times would be better than ‘3 meals/day’ & ‘eating by the clock’. Cin – enjoy your FD.
LJoyce – looking forward to trying your pasta recipe – sounds tasty. I’ll also look out for Changs konjac noodles.
Thin: agree with good weight scales – on my old scales, weighed 3 times with a range of 400gm total, confusing. My Fitbit scales are much more reliable. Enjoy watching your new trees grow & the birds they attract.
The writer’s group consists of 3 writers & 2 listeners (1 being me & enjoy same immensely). My OH (an excellent poetry & short story writer) & 2 female friends, all write short stories about many topics eg times when growing up, current times, family events, life’s experiences – then read them out & get critiqued by the whole group. Each writer has plans to eventually have their stories in book form. We finush with healthy lunch & sometimes not so healthy sweet treats – have to say no to self from now on – lol!
GDay: monthly measurements work for me.
JJulie: so sad to see the news about your friend from the trawler incident – my thoughts are with you.
Off to visit Dad in Nursing Home – so miss having him at home!
Enjoy your Sunday everyone, whatever you’re getting up to.
Cheers.

Rant alert.

I’ve just been reading for the first time about the trawler JJulie. How sad for the sole survivor. All guys in their prime too. It looks like exhausting work for the police divers.

Please don’t give up! We can work it out. It might even just be one offending food type that you’re as yet unaware of. If nothing else, continuing with 5:2 will help shape your portion sizes and food desires over time. As GDSA has just realised with the sticky drink. One thing that I hadn’t realised was changing at the time was that I had gradually stopped buying most of those ‘food like substances’ that are typically stored in the fridge door.

Cinque, I hope you got your garden watered. Sometimes hand watering is relaxing, at other times when you’re time poor, it’s a real chore. We have water restrictions in WA as I suspect you might in other areas. We can only use our reticulation (how’s that for local vernacular CalifD/Penguin?, it means sprinklers) two days a week. Neighbours can dob each other in for incorrect use. In theory, this might sound sensible but it removes all common sense. Let’s say it’s forecast to rain on my assigned watering day. I do the responsible thing and turn off the retic. But the rain amounts to nothing so I turn it on the following day instead – and risk $100 fine! Madness.

We live within a few hundred yards of an Olympic size pool yet the local council places no restrictions on the building of new swimming pools. Our neighbours’ children can splash and bomb in their pools all day long, leave the covers off to allow evaporation yet I can’t water my plants on a controlled timer. I feel if we’re truly concerned about water use, every home should have the same allowance whether you’ve chosen a foliage or a concrete jungle. I believe we’re very water conscious due to having lived in California but I also believe that the greenery helps cool our home in summer. (Disclaimer: I’m also biased against backyard swimming pools due to excessive noise pollution).

🌶 I grow my own chilli. It’s very easy to grow. We always have more than we can eat but it looks pretty growing. I string up the excess and hang it in the kitchen window to dry. Then I crush some with a mortar and pestle. I remove the seeds from others and store them separately. I plant some of the seeds so we have a constant crop of fresh chilli. I sometimes freeze it but it becomes even more fiery after a spell in the freezer (there’s a chemical reason for this). If a recipe requires three small chillis, I know to add less than half of one of ours.

A few mantras that I learned from people on this thread: eat mostly plants; don’t buy anything that your grandma wouldn’t recognise and nothing tastes as good as being thin feels!

A quick hi, back from my daughter’s, helping while she did a big batch of cooking for the week.
I think I will go off and order a dishwasher next. So glad that I can.

LJoyce, it isn’t ‘Eat everything your grandmother ate’, it is ‘Don’t eat anything she wouldn’t recognise’. There is a great difference, ie exactly what you pointed out!

My wonderful Aunty Edie had a flour bin and a sugar bin. Wow, they might have fitted 40kg in them! They were in the country near Yarrawonga. Very important to keep the lid shut properly on the sugar so the ants didn’t get in. They were metal. (The bins, not the ants 😉 )

I find the portions on the plate useful too. I do things like think ‘I could eat 8 of those patties with my veggies’ and then realise that if I had it all on the plate it wouldn’t look balanced or well proportioned and therefore know that three patties are the go.

Maybe squeeze the fourth one on!

JJulie, keep hold of the thought that 5:2 is about longterm good health, and even if whoosh day doesn’t come for three months, you are doing such a good thing for your longterm health.

Thin, you do great rants! And obviously grow great chilies! I had a plant that lasted several years as the spot doesn’t get much of the winter cold, and it just kept growing. But it wasn’t particularly prolific. So good to know about the freezer making them hotter! I tend to buy several and just pop them in the freezer to keep.

Arelkade the writing group sounds lovely. My mum and my youngest sister were each in one (in different places) and I sometimes went along. It is not only good for writing, but good for practicing constructive criticism.
I hope you had a lovely visit with your dad.

Rained today, so no watering can business for me today. But I don’t think it was much rain so I might be out there tomorrow.

Well off to see if I can get a good deal on my favourite dishwasher. Bye!

Yes! Pale green! Was your grandmother called Edie? 😉

Also, I grew up on lamb, it was the cheapest meat then. We never had chicken, too expensive! I’m not sure how often we had beef, I think it was mostly corned beef.

I did buy a dishwasher that was on sale. It was $250 cheaper than my favourite one… so it became my favourite one. It does look a good one.

Time for miso soup. Whoopee!

Arelkade – hope you find those noodles without trouble. They are packed in water, not dry.

Cinque – no, but close, her name was Elsie. Well done with the dishwasher find. Enjoy your miso soup, I’m off to make a veg & konjac noodle stirfry to finish my FD.

JJulie – of course we are interested in your news.
I feel torn – sad that you and their families don’t have close, but I can’t help feeling just a glimmer of hopefulness that a miracle may still be possible. I hope there is an answer either way soon.

Thin – painting the pickets? If I remember correctly you only recently removed the paintbrush from the freezer from the last time you painted them!

LJ, you have a good memory. But that section of the wall and picket fence didn’t get painted due to the tree being in the way.

I couldn’t finish my FD dinner tonight. Probably because I ate the soup so late. It’s 7pm and I don’t feel hungry at all. I seem to be able to do no end of physical work on very few calories. But trying to do some simple mental arithmetic and I’m hopeless.

This morning my weight was very satisfactory. Today Son and family have arrived. As required by social custom I did the Sunday lunch thing: roasted half a cow, Yorkshire puddings, potatoes roasted in goose fat, masses of veg, red wine. OH made a lemon meringue,pie, which has been put on hold until everyone has some internal space. Tomorrow’s weigh in could be interesting.

Difficult news JJulie. <3

Elsie and Edie! Those were the days.
I hope you had a lovely end to your fast day LJoyce. Mine was good.

Although reading about the English feast was a bit mouthwatering! Hi Penguin. I bet you enjoyed every mouthful.
Hope the scales are kind in the morning.

What a day Thin! I hope you don’t ache too much this morning. But you must be proud, great work!

I’m hoping they’ll ring today and deliver the dishwasher tomorrow. but they promised ‘within a week’ so we’ll see.

My first cuppa has been good,

Best wishes all

Good morning all,

I am quite late this morning!! have been for my walk, then proceeded to make tomato soup as I have an overload of tomatoes from the garden and do not like to see them wasted.

Thin I read your rant!! I have not given up. In fact I did really well yesterday and had my thai beef salad for lunch as I previously said and last night’s dinner of roast chicken with vegetables was just perfect. The beetroot came from the garden as did the orange sweet potato. I bought the purple skinned sweet potato at the markets in Port Douglas and then added carrot normal potato and red capsicum. Drissled a little macadamia nut oil over the top with some italian herbs and baked in the oven. The chicken I cooked in an oven bag without any added fat/oil and I had a very small piece of breast meat with just a few of the vegetables. I was happy that this filled me up so I did not go back for seconds.

This morning I weighed myself after my walk and I was 79.5kg Therefore after 2 NFD I actually lost more weight than on three FDs in a row!!!

I have been trying to get through all the posts and just can not respond to all of them, but I was amazed to read about the roasted half a cow with yorkshire pudding etc. Reminded me of foods my grandmother would make, only the yorkshire pudding was poured into the roast meat fat and cooked in the pan. Not those nice little ones you see in restaurants, this was huge and you would cut a large slice of it for your dinner plate. I remember the flavour was divine but oh so much fat!!

I love getting into the garden too but as our temperatures are getting hotter and more humid now I am just doing a little in my vegie garden. I love a hard day in the garden and always spent my days helping my dad when I was young. Loved the dump trips to get rid of the tree prunings there was always something of interest in the dump!

And yes appliances these days are made to be replaced so as to keep the companys in business. Gone are the days when you bought a fridge and it lasted a lifetime!! I think I got 20 years out of my washing machine and this one is now only about 5 years old, still going but I am just waiting for it!! We bought a F&P fridge a few years ago that lasted to just out of warranty then seemed to loose it’s gas and would not get cold. The unit was fully sealed which meant you could not get into it to regas. This happened christmas eve and there I was charging to the shop to buy a new one and getting it to my house before I lost the christmas day food. Thank goodness there was a happy ending and of course did not buy that make the next time.

So today is a FD for me. I have made the tomato soup which everyone will have for dinner, then I will make a salad of tomato, cucumber and mizuna then cut up the remaining chicken from last night and make a type of caesar salad with chicken. I am going to go looking for some sort of salad dressing that would suit my FD to drizzle over it. The others will also have a poached egg with theirs.

have a great day everyone!!

Hi everyone

For those of you interested in Halloween I thought I’d post a couple of links. This is the site of a Sydney food & travel writer who also creates some good original recipes. (When I need a special occasion cake she’s the first place I go for ideas.) She seems to have an obsession for Halloween and bakes all sorts of crazy things at this time of year:
http://www.notquitenigella.com/2017/10/23/halloween-scary-recipes-hospital/
Frankly just looking at some of these foods makes my stomach roll over, I think I’d have to eat with my eyes closed to not be grossed out.
This centrepiece looks like a Halloween gingerbread house, but it’s actually a dolls house complete with furnished rooms. http://www.notquitenigella.com/2017/10/09/halloween-sugar-cookie-dollhouse-recipe/

Lindsay, how wonderful that your husband commented on your weight loss. Mine would not even think of encouragement even if he did see a change. Not that I am worried about it as we have been married now 29 years and nothing changes.

Julie it was nice to get the spontaneous compliment. Usually when I ask him if I’ve lost weight, he says he doesn’t know because he sees me all the time. Fair point. On the day of the comment I was wearing my black skinny jeans (the legs not the body within them haha). a long black top and boots with heels. If anything is going to make me look like I’ve lost weight, it’s that outfit. Shame I can’t wear it all year round. Congratulations on breaking the 80 barrier. How nice to be in the seventies.
LJoyce you are so right about jeans. Very unforgiving, if there’s an extra kilo or two lurking around. I only buy one particular brand and size, so can’t just default to a slightly more forgiving pair if the need arises.
penguin your description of your half a beast roast with all the trimmings took me right back to living in the UK. We used to go to a pub in the Lake District called the Wild Boar which served just the type of roast beef lunch you served your family. Happy times. Hope the scales were gentle this morning, particularly after doing such a lovely thing with your family.

Hi thinatlast. No, I’m Australian, but worked in London for a while and had a brother who lived in the Lake District, whom we used to visit often. Three cm from your calves is a huge amount! You must have very shapely legs now. And your husband sounds very diplomatic. When I ask my husband if I look fat, he says (carefully). ‘Well, you are a bit overweight – but then you know that.’ If only it really were ‘a bit’. Still I’ll soldier on – and hope for a good FD result tomorrow.

Today’s FD went pretty well. I started getting a cold yesterday and now it’s come on full force. Not good timing since I have to leave Tuesday morning for a business trip. I hope the worst is over by then. I hate flying with a cold.

LJoyce, thank you for posting that picture of the cockatoo getting a drink yesterday. That was a cute picture. Oh, and all the discussion about grandmothers in earlier posts, my grandmother’s name was Elsie too. That’s not a common name anymore, at least not around here.

Thin, you must feel good about all the work you accomplished in your garden over the weekend. That was a lot of work! Is it easy to dig holes for plants there? Here the ground is a lot of clay and rocks so we rarely plant anything larger than a gallon container in a new spot. I’m surprised that plants do as well as they do in the heavy soil. We do add a lot of soil conditioners and topsoil when’re we plant anything. This year we didn’t have watering restrictions, but we did for several years before. We could only water 3 days per week during the hottest months and only in the early morning and evening hours. We had a 4 – 5 year drought that didn’t really end til this year. But it rarely rains during the summer anyway.

Lindsay, how nice that your husband noticed your weight loss. My husband wouldn’t normally comment. I think he figures it’s safer that way!

Penguin, your feast with boar and Yorkshire pudding sounds delicious! A good reward after all your digging and moving rocks.

Cinque, hope your dishwasher gets delivered this week. We replaced ours last year. The old one came with the house and was close to 20 years old. The new one is so much quieter. It also gets the glasses cleaner.

Well, time for me to get some sleep. Have a nice evening and night everyone.

Penguin, I grew up with roast lamb nearly every Sunday but very rarely roast beef. So I didn’t come across roast beef with yorkshire pudding until I was an adult. I never really saw the attraction – probably because I wasn’t exposed to very well made yorkshire pudding.
Then I saw a Nigella Lawson cooking show where she made one large pan of yorkshire pudding (in the way you described). But she didn’t serve it with beef. She put a big hunk of it into a bowl and poured golden syrup and then cream all over it – and I thought “now you’re talking – might be worth making after all”.
I did do it as a family dessert once, but I think I enjoyed more than everyone else did and I didn’t know what to do with the leftovers – they do not reheat well. So I haven’t made it since.
I think if I’m going to make a batter and pour syrup all over it, why not make pancakes. And if I’m going to combine flour, eggs etc to serve with beef – I’d rather have dumplings or pastry. so I’ll leave the yorkshire pudding to those of you with history of fond memories of it. I hope those of you who like it, continue to enjoy it – occasionally.

GDSA – Well done on the weight loss. Looks like are going to have to do some careful juggling to squeeze the FDs in this week.
I don’t envy you having to handle the house sale. My sister and I had to handle the sale of our parents’ home when my dad went into aged care. They’d bought it in the early 50’s and it was the only house they ever owned. The clean-up to get it ready for sale took many weeks, because there was so much stuff “saved” in case it was needed later. Knowing it’s not the family home anymore is also a tough adjustment – when I go back to the Riverland I still still drive past the house I grew up in.
Something that I’d strongly recommend is that you talk to your mum about getting the paperwork for power of attorney done. It’s a difficult issue, but my dad’s GP told us we needed to do this and I’m so glad we listened. I kept the paperwork for 3 years before I actually needed to lodge them. Having this in place was invaluable when it came to dealing with aged care facilities, real estate agents, banks and doctors on his behalf and I did eventually have to take over all management of his finances when he no longer wanted to deal with it himself. We did the medical POA as well, which was extremely helpful whenever he went to hospital.
I hope your mum finds that a place becomes available soon. I know this can take quite a while when it comes to country aged care facilities.

Hi Bee11, glad to hear that you and your OH have found the 5:2 plan easy to do. Well done on that weight loss – I suspect your husband’s GP is pretty happy with his progress.

Quacka, There is a lot of shortening in these posts and sometimes it takes me awhile to work them out. (sometimes I dont work them out!!!)
But OH = other half …….. lol

I can tell you that much

Sorry, Good morning all.

I have been busy this morning.
Up early and organising breakfast for our homestay girl.
Then drive her into town to English school. Found a park and went to the bank to get money out of the atm. Then purchased yen for our next trip to Japan.
Walked around to my Japanese friend’s massage salon to purchase a voucher to give to a another friend for her 50th birthday this weekend, then on to office works for office supplies. Back home to finish off the BAS statement that is due in 4 days!!
Now sitting and having a green tea.
Weight this morning is still 79.5 and having another FD today.

Thin what an ingenious way to find out your calf measurement/loss. I used to ask my husband if I was overweight and he would say no. Sometimes I wish he was a bit more truthful back then because now I would not be “obese”.

LJoyce I remember asking my OH “do I look as bad as that person?” of course he would not want to say yes, but when I think back I probably was as bad as that person and should not have been critical about her.

CalifD, hope you recover from your cold quickly. I know it is not good flying with a cold. OH had to fly to Thailand once with a cold that I gave him (In fact the doctor tested my for whooping cough the day he left and I had to give him the bad news when he arrived) Results came back clear in the end but it was a really bad cold. He decided to get it out of his system by eating as much hot and spicy thai food as he could. It worked quite well and cleared his head for the return flight home.

Pengiun, thanks for the information about yorkshire pudding. I did not realise you could make it sweet. I just remember the flavour of the one cooked in the beef juices and how absolutely wonderful it tasted.

GDAY I think a big congratulations is due to you. I hope you did a little happy dance around the bed!!
I too have some of my mothers things from the kitchen. My mother was a great cook. I have some very old Womens Weekly recipe books. They are hard cover that is white with gold writing. I also have some of her baking tins. She used to make a wonderful Christmas cake that consisted of soaking all the dried fruit in alcohol for two weeks before you could even attempt to make it. Unfortunately with our temperatures here in Cairns I could not do that and like so many other things you can not do in the pantry. We keep flour in the freezer to keep it fresh and stop the bugs from getting into it.. Rice is put into the salt shaker to stop the salt from becoming hard…..and the list goes on. Therefore, what my mother used to do in Adelaide with her pantry items I can not do here in the tropics.
I am also glad your mum is happy to go into aged care. It does make it easier. But yes selling the family home would be very hard. I have been through that after my mother passed away and dad decided to come up to Cairns to be close to us. Now my cousins are going through the same thins as my uncle passed a few months ago and the property has to be sold to be split between them. They are finding it hard especially since a lot of the homes in that street have been torn down and the large blocks divided into two then the developers build two houses on them and make a huge profit. My uncle lived in Henley Beach which is a very sort out area from what I hear.

LJoyce, good advice about the power of attorney. Something a lot of people dont think is important until it is too late. My dad wanted to rewrite his will about 6 years before he passed. A friend who is a solicitor told me that she was noticing dad was getting forgetful and that it should be done soon before he could be diagnosed with dementia. Part of her service was with a new will a power of attorney was done for free. It was one less worry when dad had a massive stroke and I had to discuss everything with the doctors in the hospital. The first thing they asked was did I have power of attorney. And like you I also had the finance as well as the health. My dad went into aged care and we rented his house during that time, so having the ability to take control of his finances made that easier too.

Now I come to reading Bee’s post……Welcome Bee to this little group of friends. You sound like you are doing really well so far. Dont forget you can ask questions here if you need help. I am maybe not the one that could help much but there are other who have been here for a long time and have helped so many before. And dont worry if you think the question is stupid or may have been asked before.

Well this post has gotten long again, so happy fasting everyone!!

JJulie – had my dad’s GP not been so insistent (and she even gave us most of the brochures and paperwork), we probably wouldn’t have done anything either. I’m really glad we prepared them while dad was still thinking clearly. Having POA really helped with the financial and aged care, but I think the thing I appreciated the most was the medical POA. Because we knew exactly what dad’s instructions were and knew what interventions he wanted or didn’t want, not having to make those decisions at stressful times was a blessing. My dad developed dementia over the last 7-8 years of his life and he went into aged care about 6 years before his death. We had all of the POA paperwork prepared and witnessed before he was showing any visible signs of dementia.
About 3 years before dad went into aged care he was involved in a car accident and had concussion. The CT scan showed a great deal of shrinkage in his frontal cortex – usually a clear sign that someone either has alzheimers or will develop it soon. That’s what prompted his GP to have such an urgent discussion with us about POA. It was actually a number of years after that before dad’s short-term memory really started to deteriorate. This is the sort of forewarning that most people don’t get. I often give friends with elderly parents similar advice – sometimes they take it. I understand that these are difficult things to discuss, but it’s good to not have to do it in a panic. I also remember when dad started handing over unopened bills and bank statements and told me didn’t want to have to think about these things anymore, because of the POA it was a pretty easy transition for me to take over this responsibility.
The only other thing I’d say on this issue is that if one person has most of the responsibility, keeping other siblings up to date can help avoid problems. My sister and I shared POA, but because of where we each lived, she had the main responsibility for preparing and selling the house in the Riverland and I had the main responsibility for dad once he went into aged care – he wasn’t able to get a bed in the Riverland, so I found him a place near me in the Adelaide Hills. Once I took over dad’s finances, I kept track of everything in a spreadsheet and sent my sister a copy every month. This allowed her to take over more easily if I was ill or away, but more importantly this openness helped avoid the problems that can occur between siblings in this situation. I’ve seen too may many families fall out over finances, when just one child has POA. Unfortunately I also know of situations where the child with POA has abused that responsibility.

With all that talk of roasts yesterday I decided it was time for one. So I have roast lamb (marinated in yoghurt & tandoori spices) and roasted parsnip, potato, carrot & sweet potato for dinner. Can’t wait.

LJoyce. That sounds good. I am glad someone else roasts parsnips. They were the only thing I missed living in Germany, where the parsnip doesn’t seem to exist.

Hello Bee 11. Welcome to theNorthern hemisphere as well – there are a couple of us here.

GDay, it isn’t just the selling of the house, it is what you do with the contents. My father and brother died so Mum moved into a small old folks’ apartment near to us. Most of the furniture she liked wouldn’t fit into it. That was over 6 years ago and I still have some of Dad’s things. I don’t want or need them and they have no financial value but it feels wrong to get rid of them. Mum died last year and we are doing it again, the bulky stuff has gone but we have boxes of photographs and small ornaments that she valued.

It took so long to get he family out of bed and fed bacon sandwiches yesterday that we only had time for one of the shorter hill routes – about 5 miles but a very steep climb and descent. Everyone was suitably tired and in bed early. This morning my Yorkshire pudding induced two pounds have gone and the weight is back on track.

LJoyce, you have a very caring GP who keeps on you to make a POA. I am grateful to my friend who is also a solicitor who noticed Dad was getting to the stage that she could not witness him signing a document if she believed he did not understand. My father went to aged care straight from the hospital after his first stroke, and was there only 4 months before the next stroke. Some aged care is nice but others are not so much. All I can say is go look for yourself and go by smells.

Actually when you think about it I probably should organise this for myself. Now 60 with an old will and no poa in place.

I have just bought a leg of lamb to roast next weekend. All the talk of roasts makes me really hungry.
And I also roast parsnips too.
As well as the beetroot.
It just depends on what is available at the time.
I have been using as much vegies as I can from my garden. Today I picked a purple carrot to add to the salad tonight.

Penguin, how wonderful you have lost your yorkshire pudding and you are back on track!!
Although I am not seeing such a difference in the weight on the scales. I can say I do feel a difference in myself. I can now cut my toenails without that big roll in front hindering me (sorry for the bad scene this must put in your minds) but I also am finding that I can turn over in bed much easier. Maybe you can not see too much difference in me yet but I can feel it and am so much happier.

Have a good evening everyone.