A life in lists

I go through phases

I used to love herbal tea. When I was pregnant with Teddy I went right off it, and couldn't really face it until I became pregnant with Jasper, when I suddenly couldn't get enough of the stuff. I suppose if we ever have a third child it will be lost to me forever, because I'm definitely not having a fourth just so I can get back to drinking herbal tea!

If you're not a fan but want to be, it's worth splashing out on some of the 'better' brands, like Pukka and Teapigs - their herbal teas are as different from the insipid watery things in the supermarkets as proper tea from a pot is from the lukewarm stuff you always get seem to get served in hotels.

My absolute hero at the moment is matcha powder from Teapigs. I started taking it because someone mentioned that it helped boost your metabolism (hey, I'll take all the weight loss help I can get), but I genuinely think that it has provided all the energy boosting, skin improving, life enhancing benefits that it claims to have. And even if it doesn't, 83p a day for a placebo that makes me feel this good seems like a small price to pay!

Incidentally, if anyone else is stuck in weight loss hell (I lose all will to eat sensible when pregnant, so have to pay the price at some stage and do the whole diet thing), I highly recommend the My Fitness Pal app for the iPhone and I think Android too. It's got a great calorie counting database, a lovely forum of supportive people and you can add friends who will congratulate you for keeping to your calorie and exercise goals (and it scares you into not eating too much in case they find out) and who you can motivate in turn.

List of the week

I've written at least once before on my love of menu plans. We're still big fans of them, although of late they have become rather move vague (i.e. seven days of 'cereal or porridge' for breakfast and a list of seven dinners. Lunch is basically whatever you can find). However, in the past week we've begun a bit of a health kick, broughy on partly by my determination to finally kick the last bit of baby weight and also by me completely failing to take care of what I was eating and ending up really very run down and rather anaemic a few weeks back (turns out that looking after two children is even more knackering if you don't watch your diet). Naturally, my boys are perfectly healthy, but I was spending so long rushing around making sure that they were ok and eating the right things that I wasn't spending nearly long enough ensuring that I was doing the same.

And so, after a short absence, sensible quantities of red meat, fish, duck eggs and fresh veg aplenty are back on the menu. And that menu is rather more carefully thought out for everyone in the family than in recent months.

Oh, and if you're thinking of having your own mini-health-kick, I got a lot out of reading Master Your Metabolism by Jillian Michaels and can recommend pretty much any of her workout videos (I particularly like Shred and Ripped, mostly because they're very short, so the pain doesn't last too long. I am not a fan of actual proper exercise, so I like it to last as little time as possible).

Deep and meaningful thoughts on salad

1. Adding more ingredients almost always improves a salad. There appears to be no upper limit to this. Best salad ever, constructed the other day, featured lettuce, tomato, cucumber, carrot, tinned sweetcorn, croutons (well, toast in small pieces), sweet pepper, coriander leaves, brie, cheddar (I needed protein), raisins and pine nuts. With toast and houmous on the side. Yum.
2. Salad dressing in my life consists of drizzling/sprinkling (delete as appropriate) red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper and sugar over my salad, and stirring it round a bit with my fork before eating.
3. Adam swears by adding redcurrant jelly to salad dressings. His salad dressings are always much better than mine, so there may be something in this.
4. Warm asparagus on a cold salad is very yummy. I do not normally approve of hot and cold food served together (no idea why), but this is an exception.
5. Adding a bit of melted butter to the asparagus makes it even better.
6. I made that salad up there (including melted butter) with one hand, while feeding Jasper. I am getting scarily proficient at these sorts of tasks.
7. I love salad all summer, can't stand it in winter. My body apparently wants to eat seasonally. This is fine.
8. My newfound-for-this-spring/summer salad love is helping me shed the baby weight reasonably efficiently
9. I expect the aforementioned one-handed feeding, combined with rushing round after Teddy, is doing more for my weight loss than any quantity of salad.
10. Especially as, for me, salad for lunch equals ice cream after dinner.

The cake of Christmas Past

We have a family Christmas cake recipe that I make most years. It was passed down from at least my great grandmother, and I normally make one for whichever bit of the family we're spending the holidays with (there are a lot of bits of family - both Adam's and my parents are divorced and remarried, before you even get started on the next layer of family). However, this year we're mainly staying at home (although we're seeing a lot of family members over the festive period), and I didn't really want to bake a heavy traditional cake to have kicking around here, so there hasn't been one.

I'm a bit sad, I love decorating the cake. Or, in the case of the one above (apparently from 2008. I have no memory of what I did last year), cajoling my sister to help me decorate. However, I'm philosophical, and I'm looking at this as an opportunity to try something new. I made this one (with a few modifications, including extra marmalade and more spice) recently for my birthday last week, and it was really yummy. I'm also tempted by Nigella's chocolate fruit cake, which doesn't seem to be on her website, but I think appears in a couple of her books. Or maybe I'll just make a few dozen batches of cookies and we'll survive on them...

Bake day

 

This baking project was as solo as I could make it for Teddy. His (no pressure, but he attempted them all, I think) tasks included:

1. Spooning out the ingredients into the weighing scales
2. Mixing them (with maybe a little help from the Kenwood Chef)
3. Rolling the dough (I had to do most of this to prevent inch thick biscuits)
4. Cutting shapes
5. Mixing icing
6. Decorating!

I've started really trying to make a conscious effort to leave Teddy to it a bit more when we're baking/crafting etc. The control freak in me wants to leap in every five seconds and do it my way (I had to really restrain myself when the sprinkles and silver balls were all mixed in one cup after carefully laying them out separately), but Teddy is so much happier if I just show him which step comes next, then only assist if necessary (like rolling out the biscuit dough so the cutter would actually go through it). The same seems to apply to things like painting and playdough, where I am trying to move on from him watching me play (something he did a lot as a smaller baby) to actually getting involved himself.

I have to say, I'm loving it. I feel I'm really growing into this mothering thing now Teddy is getting a bit older and more involved in everything we do (as I may have mentioned a few thousand times before, the whole helpless-baby-sleep-deprived-mother is all a little lost on me). I'm kind of hoping that I'll cope a little better (ahem) with number two baby as I'll be too busy trying to keep two small people alive and entertained throughout the day to break down in non-coping-hysterics too often.

Incidentally, it's taken me the best part of a day to produce this blog post. Our lovely shiny iMac is at the computer doctor's having a faulty card reader fixed, so I'm limited to my decade old (I do not exaggerate here. Macs go on for a long time) laptop, which is, admittedly, a teeny weeny bit slow. Ho hum.