So February finally saw me convincing Ian to help me lose weight for the wedding. He's always semi-supportive, but loves to cook unhealthy things and I love to eat them - so hammering home how unhappy I was with myself wasn't fun, but we've been looking for healthier things since, and it's been an interesting journey. We've had some good meals, and we've had some bad - but we've generally stuck with it. So far, I'm 10lbs down. I'm really pleased with the turn around, and I'm going to let you see some of the things we've tried - and I'm also happy to take any suggested recipes for us to try.
We started off just by trying to modify some of our existing meals. First we tried putting grated carrot into our meatballs - it lacked flavour and was a bit mushy, I ate it, Ian got takeaway. We swapped the cheese in our fajitas for guacamole, but the avocados wouldn't ripen - it was still good, but there wasn't very much of it. Also, Ian doesn't understand the concept of guacamole being cooling, and added lots of chilli to it!
We then decided that we'd spend some time on Sundays going through my food magazines looking for healthy recipes so that we could learn to enjoy some new things instead of stressing over changing our existing meals.
Here's the photographic evidence from week one!
This was a smoked paprika mackerel - it was quite tasty, but I wasn't so keen on the smokiness. The saute potatoes were nice though, and added more flavour to the meal (I usually just have my new potatoes boiled - slightly healthier than Ian's version, but pretty boring). We bought the fish whole so Ian got to learn how to gut a fish and I got to take photos of the heads to scare my friend with!
This lasagne was made using ricotta instead of cheese sauce and mushrooms in place of meat. It wasn't bad but the ricotta didn't melt very nicely and so it was all gloopy. Probably wouldn't have this one again.
We used a tikka masalla curry paste to make this prawn, pea and tomato curry. The best bits were the chunks of tomatoes but there weren't many of those cos they all disintegrated. I think I'd prefer this more if we used chicken (mainly because I think the prawn flavour isn't strong enough to come through once you add the curry paste).
Ian made this chicken and mushroom stir fry. It was pretty good, but I was having a nice nap and Ian woke me up when this was ready so I wasn't really awake and the mangetout was quite squeaky and hurt my head!
This was indian spiced potatoes, but we left out the ginger and onion, and it was super garlicky. I think it would have been better in a smaller portion with something else as opposed to an entire plateful of just this.
2 comments:
Ooh! Glad you've been finding ways to make changes so you feel happier with yourself.
Did you try substituting lentils for (some, say half) of the minced meat in dishes like spag bol or chilli? I did that once, and Alisdair loved it! Tasted pretty much the same, and a more interesting texture.
Also, spices / herbs etc are a nice way to make things flavoursome without adding calories etc. But I'm sure I'm telling you stuff you know here!
Happy experimenting...
Good luck! I hope to lose a little more weight before summer, too. Fish has been my favorite diet food by far. There are lots of good salmon recipes out there (check AllRecipes.com) and I pair it with a steamed veggie. Somewhere I came across a recipe for tuna on a slice of French bread with melted Havarti cheese and dill on top. I've been doing that minus the bread and it is amazing!
Post a Comment