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How much have I lost? How much salt do I eat? And more wonderful food.
Recipes
Tahini and lemon chicken salad with pomegranate
Sea Bass with Lentils alla Veneto and Salsa Verde
Spinach with garlic, chilli, and olive oil
Lentils with cumin-roast beetroot, lemon kumquat, black olives, and pomegranate seeds.
Squid with caramelised cherry tomatoes, garlic and chilli
Day 15:
I started the day with another pound gone (three in all), which was pleasing. I haven’t written my book to be a 'diet book' – there are more of those than fat people to eat them, and their main purpose is to keep the wolf from the door of starving writers, which I am heartily in favour of. I have just busied myself with making losing weight as gloriously foodie as possible, but it’s good to know that it can do the job without the help of an official diet.
And I am much looking forward to those lupine door-steppers getting their marching orders as a result.
For breakfast I made a chopped Middle Eastern salad, which I ate with an omelette and some particularly fine smoked streaky bacon. I do wonder if they put something in bacon to get me so hooked. I mean, should the drugs squad get involved?
And talking of bacon, after my investigation into salt recommendations a few days ago, I decided to take a closer look at my own my salt consumption – I did not want to discover that with all my banging on (not my words) about the importance of salt for taste and health, I was actually eating far more salt than I thought. So I measured out 12g onto a saucer (the quantity that Tim Spector* says is a perfectly safe daily amount) and took all the salt I used from the (not so) little pile. At the beginning of the day it looked like this:
*In Spoon Fed
And at the end it looked like this, and weighed 5g.
I made the Middle Eastern salad for three days, but ate some of yesterday’s salads, so it is a reasonably accurate record of my salt use, and even adding in the bacon, there would still have been more than 2g left on the saucer.
If health officials put as much energy into increasing the population’s vegetable consumption, and curbing food conglomerates’ determination to fatten people up for profit, as they use in persuading people to make their food tasteless, health outcomes would be rather better.
I ate my breakfast very late, so apart from a bit of fruit and some chicken, I missed out lunch.
For supper I made a salad with the last of the chicken, with tahini, lemon and pomegranate, and it was very good; I ate it with the remains of the spiced red cabbage, the fennel and orange, and a small baked potato – onto which I drizzled a couple of teaspoons of olive oil.
Tahini and lemon chicken salad with pomegranate
I used leftover roast chicken to make this. If I was starting from scratch, I would dice a chicken breast, toss it in salt, pepper, and a teaspoon of oil, and quickly sauté it in a pan.
- Cold chicken – about 150g
- Half a lemon
- Quarter red onion – or a few spring onions
- Pomegranate seeds – about a quarter of a pomegranate’s worth
- 1 red chilli – optional
- Parsley
- 1 tablespoon tahini
- 1 tablespoon balsamic
- A little water to dilute
- Salt and pepper
- Roughly dice the chicken.
- Finely dice the onion and lemon (not together).
- Deseed the pomegranate. Finely slice the chilli. Roughly chop the parsley.
- Put everything apart from the chilli in a bowl, season well with salt and pepper and mix really with your hands.
- For the dressing, mix the tahini and balsamic, and add water to thin it a little. Add salt and pepper till it tastes good.
- Pour it over the salad and mix well – with your hands.
- Add the chilli, and mix with a spoon.
Day 16:
Another delicious breakfast. The ultimate easy lunch. A simple Venetian fish recipe.
The day started with seeing the scales move again, bringing my weight-loss total to 4lbs – Semaglutide eat your heart out.
It continued with my usual 5-star breakfast – scrambled eggs with cured salmon and grilled peppers – which made me ecstatically happy. Breakfast always makes me ecstatically happy. You may not know this, but there are people out there who say things like, ‘oh, I never bother with breakfast’ or ‘I grab a bit of toast’, or ‘I just have a bit of fruit’.
It is terrible to think of such suffering in the world.
Lunch was very cursory – and not only because I was watching the cursor while I ate it: half a pointy cabbage dunked in olive oil and salt, and eaten like an apple. It’s the ultimate no-prep lunch, and surprisingly good: if I was Italian, I would call it pinzimonio.
Although, if I was Italian, I would have myself arrested for crimes against lunch. Italians do not eat half a cabbage at their laptop for lunch.
Supper was a great improvement: sea bass with salsa verde and lentils alla Veneto; spinach tossed in garlic, chilli, and olive oil; cumin- roast cauliflower, cabbage, and kale, and a baked potato, which was delicious.
Although, the lentils weren’t a great success owing to the fact that a bit of my ceiling had fallen into them. Will not include fallen ceiling again. Apparently if you put a lid on things, bits of ceiling literally can’t fall in. Who knew? So shall do that in future. Or move somewhere where the ceiling stays in the place god intended.
Sea Bass with Lentils alla Veneto and Salsa Verde
Serves 4 – 6
This is a wonderful Venetian combination, which is delicious and very easy to make.
You can either use lentils alla Veneto, or if you are in a hurry, just boil some up with the usual peppercorns, cardamom and coriander seeds, adding salt and olive oil at the end.
For the Lentils alla Veneto
250g lentils
Peppercorns, coriander seeds, and cardamom seeds taken out of the husk
Salt
Boil the lentils with the whole spices for 20 – 30 minutes. Add salt at the end.
For the soffritto:
- 1 small red onion
- 2 carrots
- 2 sticks of celery
- 4 cloves of garlic
- A few sprigs of thyme
- 4 teaspoons / 20 ml olive oil
- Salt and pepper
- Chilli – optional, and quantity depends on how hot you want to make it
- Very finely dice all the vegetables – the Battuta – and mix in a bowl with some salt and 2 teaspoons of olive oil.
- If the thyme has woody stems, strip the leaves off – a fiddly job so use a skivvy if you have one to hand – and add to the diced vegetables.
- Heat the remaining oil in a sauté or chef’s pan. You don’t want it too hot – just warm enough to let the Battuta know it’s about to get cooked. Tip it in and cook at a low temperature with the lid on till they start to soften. Then take the lid off and continue cooking till they are a tiny bit brown and fully cooked.
For the Mustard Dressing
- 3 tablespoons / 45ml olive oil
- 3 tablespoons / 45ml balsamic vinegar
- 1 teaspoon of grainy mustard
- 1 teaspoon of honey
- Salt and pepper
Put the honey, mustard and a pinch of salt in a jar; stir them up together, then add the oil and vinegar. Put the lid on the jar and give it a good shaking.
Add the soffritto to the lentils and pour over a couple of tablespoons of the dressing. Mix well. You can eat it hot or cold.
For the Salsa Verde
You can make this in advance
- A large handful of parsley
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 4 anchovy fillets
- 2 tablespoons capers
- Balsamic vinegar
- 4 teaspoons olive oil
- Salt to taste
- Wash the parsley and peel the garlic, then chuck everything except the oil, vinegar and salt in the food processor and pulverise.
- Add the vinegar and oil. The amount of vinegar you need will depend on how loose you want the sauce.
- Add salt at the end – you may not need much because the anchovies are salty.
For the Fish:
- 6 sea bass fillets
- A little olive oil to cover the pan.
- Salt and pepper
- When the lentils and salsa verde are ready, season the sea bass fillets with salt and pepper, and pan-fry for a couple of minutes each side in a little olive oil.
- Put them on the warm lentils and spoon a little salsa verde over them.
Diva Notes
Type of fish
If you can’t get hold of sea bass, this works very well with any white fish.
Dicing the Vegetables
They need to be very finely diced, which takes time and can be tricky to get them uniformly fine. However, if you chuck them in the food processor and pulse them until they are fine enough, it takes about 5 seconds.
Day 17:
More sea bass, cumin-roasted red cabbage, Italy's national spinach dish... and bicycling
Today I went from a substantial breakfast – today’s was omelette, bacon, and Middle Eastern chopped salad (the tiny pieces of lemon and pomegranate seeds are so delicious with the pepper, tomato, and cucumber) – to a very good dinner.
There was a moment when I had a choice between lunch, or pedalling over to Dulwich to see an exhibition. I can never resist getting on my bike and going somewhere, so the exhibition won. But for next time, I would like them to remove the substantial hills that you currently have to scale in order to get there. I do not approve of hills when I am on my bike.
For supper, I had sea bass again; this was not because I like sea bass – although I do – but because I saw the sign, 3–for–£12.00 at the fishmonger, and failed to notice that one cost £4.00. However, a surfeit of sea bass is not a source of anguish, and I decided to make it lemony.
It’s not quite ready to qualify for a recipe yet, but it was very easy and rather delicious: I put the juice of a lemon (having zested it first) and half a chopped-up, small red onion into the small bowl of my food-processor, and pulverised it.
Then I added a couple of teaspoons of sugar, a pinch of salt, and 3 teaspoons of olive oil, and pulverised it a bit more. It turns a rather pretty pink, and tastes really good.
I intended to use it on the fish after it was cooked but while I was cooking it (a scant 2 mins each side in a pan with a teaspoon of oil) I decided to pour some over the fish where it sizzled and quickly caramelized.
I really liked it, and will try it a few more times, see what works best, and report back.
I served it with spinach with garlic and chilli – Italy’s national spinach dish – and I continued with my cabbage fetish – this time roasting some red cabbage with cumin seeds.
Roasting any vegetable is usually a wonderful idea, and cabbage is no exception – cut into chunks, tossed in a little oil, cumin seeds, and salt; mixed well so that the cabbage was well-coated with oil, and then onto a baking tray and into the (200º/180º/gas 6) oven for about 30 minutes, turning halfway through.
Spinach with garlic, chilli, and olive oil
A wheelbarrow-full of spinach cooks down to an amount that would feed two people with a small appetite: you always need more than you think – about 300g per person. Wash it really well and put it straight in a pan (no water) with some salt and cook till wilted – a couple of minutes. Remove from pan and drain really well, pressing the water out with a wooden spoon. Finely slice 2 cloves of garlic and a red chilli, and sauté them in a couple of teaspoons of olive oil until they are thinking of turning golden, but before they actually do so. Put the spinach back and toss it around in the garlic and chilli till it is heated through.
Day 18:
Sunday lunch
Salmon baked with ginger, lime and garlic
Flash-fried peppers
Lentils with cumin-roast beetroot, lemon kumquats, and pomegranate seeds
Fennel
Baked potatoes –
Green salad
Sunday lunch is my favourite cooking part of the week.
As I often do, I baked some salmon – very easy – and then got on with doing nice things to vegetables. Starting with a new idea for red peppers – suggested by a dear and foodie friend, Sarah King. As you know, I am stern on the subject of peppers and their need for thorough cooking and how horrid they are if not, but this idea involved rather scanty cooking and then dousing them with vinegar and a little sugar.
The crunching you can hear in the background is me eating my words. They were delicious.
Here they are:
Not yet a recipe, but if you slice the peppers* into thinnish strips (one pepper fed two with some over), put them in a bowl, add salt, a teaspoon of olive oil, and mix them well; put another couple of teaspoons of oil in a pan and fry them at a high heat for a few minutes until they are softening – and perhaps a bit brown; then slosh in some wine vinegar and a teaspoon or so of sugar; and boil to reduce a bit, I think you would be pretty pleased.
* Do not use green peppers if you wish your life to be long and happy.
Then I sliced up some fennel, added a grinding or two of salt, and tossed it in a little olive oil. It is surprisingly good. To be strictly honest, I actually made something much more complicated, which wasn’t nearly as nice.
N.b Tahini and fennel do not go.
And then I made lentils with cumin-roast beetroot, lemon kumquat, black olives, and pomegranate seeds, which I really like, plus baked potatoes and a green salad.
If you can’t find lemon kumquats – they seem to be marketed under the name ‘lemon snack’ (whoever came up with that must be spending a very long time on the naughty step) – the ordinary ones would work very well, or dice half an unwaxed lemon.
Lentils with cumin-roast beetroot, lemon kumquat, black olives, and pomegranate seeds.
Serves 4
- 250g lentils – le Puy or black beluga
- a pinch of peppercorns, cardamom (de-husked) and coriander seeds
- 1 large cumin-roasted beetroot
- ¼ red onion
- 10 black Provencal olives
- 3 lemon kumquats
- A handful of fresh coriander or parsley
- Seeds from a whole pomegranate
- ½ – 1 red chilli (optional)
- A small sprig of rosemary
- 2 – 4 teaspoons olive oil
- A dash or two of balsamic vinegar
- Salt and pepper
For the Roast Beetroot:
- Preheat the oven to 200º / 180º fan / gas mark 6
- Peel beetroot and cut into thick chips.
- Put in a bowl, and add a teaspoon of honey, cumin seeds, and 2 teaspoons of olive oil. Mix well together with your hands to coat the beetroot completely.
- Roast them in a hot, but not too hot, oven – you want the beetroot to cook through before it burns – for about 40 minutes, turning from time to time. Allow to cool.
For the rest
- Cook the lentils with the whole spices – about 20 – 30 minutes. Add salt at the end.
- Thinly slice the onion, kumquats, and chilli.
- Very finely chop the rosemary.
- Roughly chop the olives and coriander or parsley.
- Deseed the pomegranate – do it over the lentils to catch all the juice.
- Add everything to the lentils apart from the chilli. Mix well with your hands. Adjust the seasoning till it tastes good. Then add the chilli.
Diva Notes
Mixing beetroot with your hands
Mixing beetroot by hand is a messy business but it is much the best way of making sure it is evenly coated with the oil and spices.
Beetroot is not recommended for messy eaters, the wearers of white dresses, or people who don’t like beetroot.
Black Provencal Olives
If you can’t find them, then whatever sort you use, they must be bitter to contrast with the honey and beetroot.
And in case you are worried, I had an omelette with Middle Eastern salad and bacon for breakfast.
Day 19:
The pudding stomach – why we can't resist pudding, even when we are full
Yesterday, after my usual to-die-for breakfast and a few leftovers for lunch (lentil salad, fennel, cabbage), I went out to dinner. Now mostly eating in a restaurant, it is reasonably easy to be restrained: you take your pet duck to feed your bread – look, my grandmother used to keep one in a London bathroom during the war; it can’t be that difficult – you order the fish – or whatever has the least cream and pastry and the most vegetables – and you’re slimming pretty.
But then the waitress turns up and enquires if you would like to look at the dessert menu. Yes please, you yell, trying not to bounce up and down with excitement, and hoping you won’t let yourself down by ordering two puddings and one spoon. And if you manage to squeeze out a ‘no thank you’, you feel smug – and miserable – for the rest of the evening.
So why can we so readily tuck into a bowl of cream and sugar, when if the same waitress enquired if we would like another steak – or even another bowl of chips – we would look at her as if she had taken leave of her senses.
According to Giles Yeo, the genius geneticist at Cambridge University, it’s a bit of our cave-dwelling behaviour – part of our ancient, death-defying need to build up fat reserves.
The idea goes something like this: in order to get fatter you need to eat more than you can burn throwing spears at a woolly mammoth. A brilliant way of doing that, is at the point you think you can’t eat another thing, you eat another thing. But as you are full, it needs to be small in volume but high in calories, and easy to convert immediately into fat. Ta-da: pudding.
And before you think this is all rather far-fetched, we are not the only creatures to do this: bears do it too. When they are getting themselves fat, ready for the winter hibernation, if they gorge themselves on salmon, the last few they eat only the skin and the fat; i.e. the densely calorific part. Personally, I’d rather Panna Cotta, but then I am not a bear.
The tragedy is that at the time when humans needed their pudding stomach, there was no pudding. And now that the last thing we need is a pudding stomach, the world is awash with puddings, and people paid to urge us to eat them.
So next time the waitress turns up waving fudge sauce and chocolate mousse and spotted dick under your nose, challenge your inner-caveperson to a duel.
N.b. Do not get confused and challenge the waitress to a duel, no matter how much you’ve had to drink.
For the record, I had a whole plaice, lots of vegetables, and no pudding. I didn’t especially want one, but the waitress didn’t offer one either. So I don’t know if I would have virtuously looked as if I never touched the things, or dived headfirst into the nearest pavlova.
Day 20
Did somebody steal my hunger?
Yesterday was a strange day, food-wise: I turned down the kind offer of breakfast from the friend I was staying with, thinking I would grab something later – I had taken the day off, and was meeting friends at a café, where I thought there would be perfectly good downsizing options. I was wrong. They were no longer serving eggs et al, and the offerings were all cake and croissant. I might have tucked in – nothing is banned: I just aim to eat a lot less of things like that and a lot more of other things (a finely-tuned scientific approach), but on the penultimate day of my downsizing challenge, I didn’t want to risk any temporary increase in weight. But also, I wasn’t actually very hungry. This has happened a few times in the last three weeks, and it’s quite a surprise – as a rule, I am always, always hungry. Have I had a gene transplant while I slept? Have the body snatchers removed all the ghrelin* from my insides. Not that I am complaining: I am much better at exercising willpower when it’s not needed.
*Hunger hormone
So I left having had a lot of coffee but still no breakfast – and still strangely not hungry. As I drove to the next exciting event in my day, (picking up a second-hand laptop) there was a program on Radio 4 about things that help people lose weight, including the newly licensed weight-loss wonder-drug, Semaglutide.
As its best known poster-child, unsurprisingly they had David Aaronovitch on the program. He talked about having very little appetite, which he didn’t find a problem, but dropped casually into the conversation – as if it didn’t matter much – the fact that it was difficult to eat enough vegetables, because he never felt like eating anything in quantity.
So, many of the things that are essential for a long and healthy life – fibre, vitamins et al, antioxidants, would be in very short supply. But perhaps worth it to lose weight quickly and efficiently. Except he was not: he had lost a stone in five and a half months – about half a pound a week.
Had he done it by eating lots of healthy food, that would have been an excellent way of going about it. But to lose weight extremely slowly by eating practically nothing must be because the body has slowed its metabolism* – which means as soon as you start eating normally, far fewer calories will be needed to fatten you up again. And indeed there are reports of very rapid gain when people stop the injections.
*The body does not like anyone messing with its fat stores: the minute it gets a chance, it grabs back the weight and stuffs it into all the nooks and crannies that had been hollowing out nicely.
So he was talking about not feeling hungry, hardly eating, and losing weight very slowly – and paying quite a lot of money for the privilege – while I was driving along, not feeling hungry, but usually eating piles of delicious food, having lost 4lbs in 2 weeks. For free. Apart from the piles of food.
I went for a lovely long walk (10k) to think about it all, and eventually got back to London and cooked a very quick but delicious squid dish with lentils and spinach, garlic and chilli.
- 2 good handfuls of cherry tomatoes
- 4 cleaned squid
- 2 teaspoons olive oil
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 1 red chilli
- Salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar
- Chop the tomatoes and put them in a bowl. Season well with salt, pepper, and a pinch of sugar.
- Finely slice the garlic and chilli.
- Heat the oil till it covers the base of the pan, add the garlic and chilli and cook them gently until the garlic is thinking of colouring.
- Add the tomatoes and turn the heat up high. Cook until the juices have run out and are on the point of caramelising – about 2 – 3 minutes. Depending on the water content of the tomatoes, you may want to turn down the heat after you add them to the pan – you are aiming for caramelised, not burnt.
- Add the squid and and cook on a high heat for a couple of minutes.
Diva Notes
Cooking Tomatoes
Watery, undercooked tomatoes are revolting. They must either be cooked very fast over a high heat, or slowly over a medium or low heat for about 20 – 40 minutes, or sometimes longer. Do not wishy-washily assume that you can cook them for a short amount of time on a low heat. You know they are cooked when the flavour is intense and sweet. If it is not, they are not.
Day 21
The results
For 21 days I have eaten my own recipes, or food created along the same lines; I have not calorie counted or followed a diet, I have just based my eating on low-calorie-dense food – and, using a teaspoon rather than shovel for anything calorie-dense like oil, butter, sugar etc, made it as delicious as possible. At least, I did this when I was at home, and did my best when I wasn’t.
My best rather depended on whether there was any White Burgundy in the room…or Negronis… or – well the list is quite long and you haven’t got all day.
But it turns out that my best was enough: I piled my plate high with lovely things to eat every day, ate a stonking cooked breakfast each morning, and lost 5lbs; a bit over 1 ½ lbs a week – and three times more than David Aaronovitch on the new dieting wonder-drug, Semaglutide. If I kept it up for a year, I would lose 5 ½ stone. That’s not a bad return for stuffing my face on fabulous food.
I am feeling rather pleased.
And more than just pleased: the arthritis in my hand is markedly better, as are some patches of psoriasis. It’s too early to say whether it’s directly linked or whether it will continue, but it’s more than possible. Over the last three weeks, I have eaten an enormous variety of plants – in the last 3 days alone, I ate over 33 – so the improvement to my microbiome must be stratospheric. If Tim Spector (patron saint of microbes) hears about it, I think he’ll give me a sticker.
And the thing about the microbiome dancing a jig, is that it is very good for inflammation.
So if you have been doing the challenge too, I would love to know how you got on – and if you are thinking about giving it a go, I heartily recommend it.
And if you are worried about your cooking skills, remember that low-calorie-dense food helps you lose weight whether you make it delicious or not. Obviously your life won’t be worth living if you don’t, but you do not need to be a good cook to make it work
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