Old Crow Medicine Show
Yes again. New record. This is from it..
All the while you been steppin’ out
somebody been easin’ in
every time you paint the town
drunk on women and gin
I’m trying to add the weekly song on This Is My Jam. You can find that here. Follow etc as you wish, if you’re using this let me know and I can find out what you’re listening to!
Week 3, this month has just flown by. I’m feeling much better about the goal setting (and achieving) this month, I think it’s because it’s September and even though autumn is coming and I’m not happy about it, I still feel like September is the start of something as it used to be when I was at school. Also there’s been a whole load of stuff (ok, I read this) in the papers about how September is a good time to make a resolution because you have Christmas to aim for, instead of the long slog of the entire year if you make them in January. It’s also been a kick up the bum for me to look at my 12 in 12 and panic slightly. More on that another time.
So goals for September, how am I doing?
1) One new vegetarian meal a week
Vegan Beer Stew – delicious, cooked and written about.
2) Monitor the booze intake.
Half a bottle of fizz on Saturday afternoon with Ma and and a gin and tonic on Saturday night. A glass of wine on Sunday. Two drinks on Friday. (There was no drinking at Sarah’s on Thursday!) All good, I think.
3) Four 10k walks in the month
I’ve walked a bit but I haven’t done anything about this at all. The most I’ve walked is 5k and I can’t see myself fitting this in over the weekend either. A big fat fail.
4) Some other form of exercise twice a week
I’ve rocked this. This week I’ve done 4 exercise classes (Dynamic Yoga, Body Pump, Pilates and Body Balance) at the gym and one cardio session. My work gym buddy is really fit and it’s amazingly motivating even if I’m the rubbish one at the back! It’s also helping stabilise my mood, which is a really good thing.
5) Clean the floors and hoover once a week
I still hate doing this and to be honest the only reason I have a score on this one is that I ran around on Friday night doing it because I didn’t want to have another fail for the week. It did get done though so I’m giving myself a gold star.
6) Set a bedtime and stick to it.
Better than it has been but I’ve been off a couple of nights, with lights out at 10.30pm rather than 10pm. I do think that the exercise is helping me sleep better and the wake up light is helping me get up on time so half marks again.
I made this for my birthday party and Jonny said that he thought it smelled like ‘summer in a glass’, so that’s going to be it’s name.
Like all good things, I can’t really take any credit for this. I copied it Back to Her Roots and she (or more to the point, her husband) copied it from a restaurant they’d been to. All I did was add a home-made maraschino cherry to it, which turned a great shade of pink, which is how cocktails happen.
A word on the fizz. Although the original specifies champagne, I’ve used a French fizz and a Prosecco both of which worked fine although I would go for the French for preference or maybe try a Cava.
What
1 oz gin
1/2 oz of sugar syrup
1/2 oz of lemon juice
maraschino cherry
fizz to top up
How
1) Put the gin and lemon juice in a glass and stir.
2) Add the cherry
3) Top up with fizz
4) Drink!
1) Old Crow Medicine Show new (to me, it actually came out in July) is really good, this makes me happy
2) I suck at Dynamic Yoga almost as much as I suck at Zumba
3) I still love Body Pump though
3) The correct way to get Tic Tacs out of the box…mind blown
I made some maraschino cherries for the birthday edition of Friday Night Cocktail and they were so good, I’ve been meaning to write about them here for ages. They feature in this week’s Friday Night Cocktail, so now would be a good time..
The recipe I used was this one, the only thing I wanted them to have was a bit more firmness. So I read up a bit and using the same ingredients, I slightly changed the method.
I pitted and washed the cherries and soaked them in the alcohol. The next day I put them in jars and made up the syrup, poured it in the jars and sealed them. I’m now going to leave them for 6 weeks. I’ve made maraschino, rum and brandy versions. We’re right at the end of the cherry season, so if you want to make some do it quickly.
Once you’ve used all the cherries, you can use the syrup in a drink. Tonic and a squeeze of lime worked really well with the last ones.
This week’s vegetarian recipe comes from Back to Her Roots and is Vegan Beer Chilli, but I’ve slightly adjusted the recipe so for here I’m changing the name.
At the beginning of September, Ma hired a car and we did a massive shop, we do this every 3 months or so to stock up on un-exciting heavy or bulky things like toilet roll, washing liquid and wine (ok that was just Ma!). I also use it to fill up the freezer and in line with my eating less meat plan I bought lots of beans (chickpeas, pinto and black beans). Which I cooked, bagged up and froze. So Vegan Beer Chilli was an ideal opportunity to use some of them.
The first thing I should have done was halve the recipe. Cassie did feature this recipe as part of her freezer cooking post and she clearly has a massive slow cooker, I do not , cue overflowing slow cooker.
Lesson learned and on that note, some UK conversions for a US recipe.
A 16 ounce bag of frozen corn is 500g.
It’s rare to find 28 ounce cans of crushed tomatoes in supermarkets in the UK, 4 x 400g cans of tomatoes blizzed in the magimix worked really well, alternatively you could use passata..
Cans of refried beans come in 215g and 430g (well if they’re made by Discovery they do) I used a 430g can but next time, I’m just going to make them myself and use the equivalent weight.
I did change some of the ingredients. I’m not overly fond of kidney beans and subbed them for chickpeas and pinto beans. I’m not a big fan of heat in my food so I didn’t put the japenos in and used less chilli and more cumin – hence the change of name to from chilli to stew! Finally due to the over flowing of the slow cooker and the lateness of the hour, instead of cooking on high for a couple of hours, I stuck this on low overnight.
Vegan Bean Beer Stew (adapted from Back to Her Roots)
What
3 bell peppers, chopped
2 medium red onions, chopped
500g frozen corn
10 cloves of garlic, crushed
4 cups frozen cooked black beans
2 cups frozen cooked pinto beans
2 cups frozen cooked chickpeas
4 x 400g cans of tomatoes
1 bottle of beer (I used the Brew Dog IPA)
2 tablespoons chilli powder
4 tablespoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons sea salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
How
1) Blitz the tomatoes with spices, salt and pepper in a blender.
2) Add all the ingredients to a slow cooker and cook overnight on low (for me overnight was 12 hours!)
3) You can eat it straight away or allow to cool and freeze.
4) I served it with greek yogurt and cheese – thus demolishing the veganess (is that even a word?) of it but it was very good.
Last week seemed like a hard week, I was so glad that the week was done with and ready to have a relaxing weekend.
Dev came round on Friday with wine. Selected because it was on special offer and he liked the label!
I generally don’t use the living room in the week, I tend to get home, camp in the kitchen and then it’s bedtime (this is one of the joys of having a kitchen big enough to have a table it it!) Friday night is usually the night I remember there’s another room in the flat. It wasn’t that cold but it was dark and for the first time this season, I drew the curtains and lit the candles…
Saturday I was up early and out of the house to trek to Jane’s for a much needed hair cut and catch up at least the sun was shining..
Lunch with Ma and a very dodgy photo
Home on the dreaded 65 bus. I can’t escape the need to use this bus and it was hot and seemed to take ages but the view was quite nice!
Time to change the nail varnish, blue this week.
Jen and Jonny have been married 25 years, they had a party to celebrate. I didn’t get many photos but this one is of their very talented boys, Harry and Joel, who gave a speech (Joel) and a poem (Harry). Both were funny and just very lovely.
Sunday was a very quiet day catching up on stuff. When I was a kid I was convinced that being a grown up would be about staying up late and eating ice cream whenever I wanted! As a ‘grown up’ and I use the term loosely, I realise it’s more about housework, laundry and getting to bed early so I’m fit for work! On that note, this weekend I gave into the change of seasons and set the wake-up lamp. I hate having to do that, winter is not a fun happy time for me and I have to work to be positive about this.
That was the weekend and now it’s back to work. This week is quiet and with the exception of dinner (and champagne!) at Sarah’s on Thursday, it’s all about work, exercise* having a gym buddy at work is really motivating and a little bit of prep for my holiday which is now only 2 weeks away!
Happy Monday people!
*this week’s plan is:
Monday – Dynamic Yoga
Tuesday – Body Pump
Wednesday – Treadmill and Pyramids
Thursday – Body Balance
Ta Douleur – Camille
I walked into Pret this week for porridge and this was playing and all of a sudden it was 6-ish years ago. Strange how music does that.
So Week 2 – feels like progress
1) One new vegetarian meal a week
That would be the Courgette Fritters.
2) Monitor the booze intake.
I’ve had a glass of fizz and a glass of wine wine I over the weekend. Then on Thursday 2 glasses of champagne for a work thing, on Friday, a G&T and a large glass of red wine. Apart from the Thursday lunchtime drinking, it’s been ok!
3) Four 10k walks in the month
I haven’t got one walk longer than 5 k in this month. Must try harder.
4) Some other form of exercise twice a week
This is going really well, I’ve done 30 minutes hard cardio followed by sit ups, a Zumba class and a Body Balance Class. I part of lunch time exercise club at work, which is very motivating.
5) Clean the floors and hoover once a week
That’s been done!
6) Set a bedtime and stick to it
Better progress this week, and it’s starting to pay off.
The Gold Rush
This is so simple, it’s basically a whiskey sour with honey instead of sugar syrup. As soon as I saw it here, I knew I was trying it, it’s perfect for the transition into autumn…and I was not going to feature this until the Olympics and Paralympics were done with…
It’s really good and because the recipe is for 2 drinks, make sure that there’s another person with you or you’re probably having two! But the joy of it is that it’s easy to scale the recipe up for more people…
What
3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons boiling water
4 oz (1/2 cup) bourbon
1 1/2 lemons, juiced, about 4 tablespoons
How
1) Put honey into a jar or cocktail shaker.
2) Add the boiling water and mix until you have thin syrup.
3) Add the bourbon and lemon juice. Mix together. (You can if you wish put this in a fridge for later!)
4) Add ice and shake.
5) Pour into rocks glass over ice.
6) Drink!
Nic Dempsey 