T minus 1 ...

... and counting.

Tomorrow is my first ever 10k race and so I spent today resting and preparing.

I started my preparations with a visit to the beautician for a very relaxing treatment. Followed by coffee, brunch and some gentle shopping. Then it was back home for some internet surfing - with a brief interlude making some soup with what's left in the fridge - before carb loading with homemade vegetable lasagne from the freezer tonight.

The evening has been spent watching my latest addiction, Law & Order and making progress with my current crochet project. I've also been watching the Stephen Hawking documentary on Channel 4. All I can say is, I hope no aliens were watching. Far too many ideas on how to colonise the Earth!

In terms of proper preparation, I did my last training run on Wednesday and managed to crack the 10 minute mile for the first time.

So anyway, off to bed for an early night now. Wish me luck for tomorrow!

Wow, fridge surprise supper

I was pondering what to make for my tea tonight and was going to fall back on my old faithful stand-by dish of pasta with butter and black pepper. I thought before I started I would have a look in the fridge to see what I had - and more importantly what was close to (or more accurately passed!) its use-by date.

And that's when I found the beetroot and the goat's cheese. I remembered seeing a recipe for beetroot risotto in one of my cookery books. So I dug it out, read the recipe and then promptly ignored it and did my own thing regardless! Which is pretty much par for the course with my cooking.

Here are the results - a lovely rich looking, and even more fantastic tasting, beetroot risotto. I'm tucking into it just now and can safely say it was worth the extra little bit of effort. Which truth be told wasn't really that much. It took no longer to cook than it did to finish washing last night's dishes and required very little supervision. The trick with my cooking I find, is that, like my gardening efforts, it works best if it can survive a fair degree of neglect!

And for those wanting to emulate, the ingredients, put togethier in standard risotto fashion, are - arborio rice, cooked beetroot, chicken stock, red wine, crumbled goat's cheese, butter, black pepper and lemon thyme.

Mmm!


Now excuse me - I've got to dash and check the peaches and apricots that are baking in the oven (smothered in Cointreau so not as healthy as they sound) for pudding. Another Maxwell if in doubt faithfuls!!

The joy of cooking

I cooked again last night - to celebrate the start of the bank holiday weekend. Sadly I forgot to take a photo of the dish in question, but in my imagination it looked something pretty much like this!

In reality it was a bit less elegant, but still tasty all the same.

After one of the busiest weeks at work I can remember for a while, still not feeling great after my 'man flu' of last week, and at the end of not one of the best days, having sat in the late evening sun (yay for British Summer Time!) for a while with a glass of wine, I decided the best way to relax and cheer myself up at the same time was to do some cooking.

And a prawn curry was the result. Since I hadn't been shopping for a while I was restricted to what was in the cupboard/freezer for ingredients, but luckily I found some mushrooms and a pepper lurking at the bottom of the fridge that made up the bulk of the curry, with some frozen king prawns taking star billing. Rooting around at the back of the cupboard unearthed some ground almonds which, together with a generous dollop of natural yoghurt, helped to lift the dish from prawns in a tomato sauce with a hint of curry into something that, in all honesty, didn't actually look that much different from the picture above.

Mmm! Culinary adventures definitely lift the spirits.

And now, since miraculously the sun is shining on a bank holiday weekend, I'm off out for a tramp round Stirling with my camera. Watch this space for the evidence of my wanderings later.

Home cooked hand made

I'm so glad I took the extra time to cook dinner tonight rather than just slump when I got in (late!) from work.

I'd bought 4 sea bass fillets at the supermarket yesterday as they were on special offer and I vaguely remembered I had a recipe I wanted to try out. Unfortunately I didn't have the rest of the ingredients so it was another quick trip out to the shop for potatoes and mushrooms tonight after work before I could start cooking.

Ever the mistress of multi tasking I even managed to get some chores done while this was cooking.

So now I have a car ready to in to the garage tomorrow, a tidy flat, a full tummy AND 3 more portions to freeze for more dinners in the future.

And yes I am feeling smug since you ask!