Recipe x 2: dinners for dieters

As I've said before, I'm a huge emotional eater, and food is never far from my thoughts. I'm so envious of people who say they "forget" to eat, or lose weight when they're stressed. I can't see that happening to me, somehow - I'm pretty sure that even if I lost all my family and friends in a house fire or something, I'd stop eating for about half a day then cope by finding new family/friends in the shape of CUPCAKES.

Emotional eating is like any problematic coping mechanism - you need to address the behaviour at the same time you address the issues that caused you to resort to a coping mechanism in the first place. So, I'm dieting while also trying to sort out other aspects of my life; otherwise there would be no point.

Don't tell me not to diet - platitudes are annoying. (Also, don't try twattering on about exercise - I already live with a sanctimonious fitness freak.) I'm a bit of an all-or-nothing type in general, so the whole "just eat sensibly!" thing doesn't really work for me. If I'm not keeping strict mental notes about calories, I will invariably eat 12 biscuits instead of one or two. My aim is for controlled eating to become a habit after a while, thus making precise calorie counting unnecessary and freeing up my brain for Nobel prize winning, etc.

Today I had cake in the afternoon so my dinner consisted of smoked salmon, salad and vegetables, which was delicious if not exactly filling. I did have a couple more appropriate ideas for diet dinners earlier this week, though, which I now proudly present to you.

Both these meals serve 1 and are around 500-550 calories. If you're not on a diet you can increase quantities and/or eat them for lunch instead. No pictures, sorry - I'm weak from undernourishment and wasn't able to pick up the camera. =)

1. Salmon, red onion and avocado pasta with balsamic dressing

Ingredients:
40g pasta (fusilli is always good)
60g smoked salmon trimmings (half a 120g packet)
Half a red onion, chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
Half a small avocado, chopped into smallish pieces
Pinch of chilli flakes
Pinch of mixed herbs/dried basil or oregano, whatever
Salt/pepper
A squeeze of balsamic dressing (mine is Deluxe brand, bought at Lidl, and is made from balsamic vinegar plus 'concentrated grape must', whatever that is)

Boil pasta while frying onion in olive oil until browned/crispy. Turn off heat then add salmon trimmings - that way they will get just a little bit cooked, which is nice. Season with chilli and herbs then mix with pasta and top with avocado and balsamic dressing.

2. Chicken, green bean and olive couscous

Ingredients: 
50g leftover cooked chicken or 80g raw chicken (thigh/leg is fine - breast is dry and screams "I'm on a diet!" to me)
A handful of green beans
Half a red onion (you can tell I like these), chopped
2 cloves of garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil
8 olives, quartered/halved, whatever
Pinch or two of capers
Pinch of chilli flakes or 1 small fresh chilli (yep, chilli should be in EVERY recipe)
Pinch of mixed herbs
Salt/pepper
75g couscous

Fry onion and green beans (and chicken if raw) in olive oil. After a few minutes add garlic. Cook for 10-15 minutes then add chicken (if cooked), olives, capers and seasonings. Make up couscous with hot water and serve.

Recipe: halloumi-stuffed sea bass with roasted garlic and rosemary paste, chick pea and artichoke salad, and roast asparagus

I'm warning you now - this is an expensive, decadent dinner for special occasions and/or showing off. Feel free to mix and match the bits you like most (the salad, the paste, the idea of stuffing fish with fried halloumi).

I pretty much made this up, but I'm happy to say that it worked. For food nirvana, make sure everything has enough salt (my attitude to salt is the same as this lady's). Picture:

Ingredients (serves 4):
4 whole sea bass (or any white fish really), cleaned and gutted
8 slices of halloumi (not too thick, but thick enough so they won't fall apart during frying)
12 asparagus spears, trimmed
Olive oil - um, quite a bit...
4 whole heads of garlic
Several sprigs of rosemary, chopped
2 lemons
Salt and pepper

For the salad (apart from the chickpeas and artichokes, everything else is 'to taste'. Be sure to taste the salad while mixing in order to get the balance just right):
1 can of chickpeas (approx. 400g), drained
3 artichokes
(Optional) 2 bay leaves, a few garlic cloves and slices of lemon for boiling/steaming artichokes
Baby plum tomatoes
Black olives (pref. kalamata)
About half a large red onion
Dried mixed herbs - I used 'Greek mix'
Hot chilli flakes (go easy!)
SALT (again, go easy, but then again it really brings out the flavours so make sure there's enough) and pepper
Olive oil - ahem, again lots.

Pre-heat oven to 200C/gas mark 6.

Firstly, I have to say that artichokes are the most irritating, fiddly, time-consuming vegetable I have ever come across. However, they are worth it because they taste divine. So - the first thing you want to do is trim your artichokes and put them on to boil/steam. Here is a guide - if you don't have a steamer or steaming basket, you can just boil them in water with the optional lemon/garlic/bay leaves. Either way, cooking time for average-sized artichokes should be about half an hour. When they're done, leave the artichokes to cool for a bit.

Then put your garlic heads on to roast. You can find out how here (400F is equivalent to 200C or gas mark 6).

Meanwhile, prepare the fish and halloumi. Wash the fish if necessary to get rid of any excess scales. Fry the halloumi in olive oil until both sides are lightly browned, then stuff each fish with two slices. Cut off both ends of one lemon, slice into eight and stuff each fish with two lemon slices.

When the garlic heads are done, leave them to cool for a while (I'm impatient so I'm happy to get burned fingers) then squeeze out the browned pulp and mash into a paste with the juice of your other lemon, rosemary, olive oil, salt and pepper. Spoon/rub this paste all over the four fish.

Prepare the salad by mixing together everything other than the artichokes (which need special attention - see below). Now put the fish on to roast for 20 minutes at 220C/gas mark 7. Put the asparagus spears, rubbed with olive oil, salt and pepper, in the oven when the fish has 10 minutes to go.

Now for the artichokes. These need a lot of fiddly preparation - refer back to the article I cited. As it says, apart from the heart of the artichoke which can just be chopped, you'll need to individually scrape off the edible part of each petal - I use my long thumb nails, although some might consider that hygenically questionable. It's quite time-consuming, which is why I suggest preparing the rest of the salad before you put the fish in the oven, so you can have 20 minutes of pure, unadulterated artichoke fun.

When artichoke time is finally over, SERVE! You can put a poncey extra sprig of rosemary like I did in the picture if you want - I do love frivolous garnishes.

Why I love the Eurovision Song Contest

I am just crazy about the Eurovision Song Contest. I haven’t missed a year since 1996. There have been a couple of disappointing years, with not enough eccentricity or nonsensical song lyrics, but generally I feel it can be relied upon to provide one to three evenings of superlative entertainment come mid-May (depending on whether you watch the semi-finals as well). Why am I so enamoured of this seemingly trivial sideshow? Well, firstly, Eurovision is funny.

Humour is our most universal, pervasive coping mechanism. Most funny things relate to naivety, confusion or embarrassment, whereas jokes about deeper human suffering like bereavement or political repression are known as “dark humour” or “gallows humour”. Perhaps it’s an expression of an awareness, in the collective unconscious, of the ridiculous arbitrariness inherent in how we live. (The more you believe that human behaviour isn’t arbitrary, and actually makes perfect sense according to some belief system, the less of a sense of humour you have.)

We might say that the silliness of Eurovision reflects a buried awareness of how equally silly were previous – bloodthirsty – attempts by Europeans to compete with their neighbours. Check out this map for a summary. So many years of suffering and wasted lives, just so we could end up prancing around in feathers trilling at each other.

Pretentiousness aside, here are my top five mirth-inducing Eurovision entries (in no particular order):

1.       Ping Pong - Be Happy (Israel, 2000) Lyrics here. This band used their Eurovision appearance to promote peace between Israel and Syria – they wave both the Israeli and Syrian flags at the end of the performance. They were disendorsed by the Israeli Broadcasting Authority and had to pay to enter Eurovision themselves. The song is about a bored, miserable, apparently sexually frustrated woman who lives on a kibbutz: “Here comes the Sunday depression... I want a cucumber”. Then the woman gets a boyfriend from Damascus, who solves all her problems, and she wants to “do it with him all day long”.

2.       Eric Saade - Popular (Sweden, 2011) Lyrics here. Well, if there ever was an example of laughing at ridiculous arbitrariness, this is it. Eric likes a girl and is determined to do what it takes to impress her: “I will be popular, I will be popular... I’ll get you when I’m popular!”

3.       Guildo Horn – Guildo Hat Euch Lieb (Germany, 1998). Lyrics here. Guildo loves you - so much he’ll “come over and sing songs for you”, send you “nut cookies and raspberry ice cream” and climb all over the fixtures to prove it.

4.       Serebro – Song Number One (Russia, 2007). Lyrics here. A typical example of ESL (English as a Second Language) music, an amusing satire on the concept of the ‘femme fatale’, or both? “Oh! Don’t call me funny bunny, I’ll blow your money, yummy, I’ll get you to my bad ass spinning... I got my bitches standing up next to me”.

5.       Michalis Rakintzis – S.A.G.A.P.O. (Greece, 2002). Lyrics here. “Sagapo” means “I love you” and this could be a song about how to love one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, er, multi-faceted film characters. “If you want to get my love, if you pray for me and hope, give the password”.

Also, because I watch it every year without fail, Eurovision serves as a bittersweet life-barometer. Some years I’ve watched it in company, laughing and drinking. Other years I’ve watched it by myself, with a tightness in my chest and a thinness in my day-to-day life. May is a heady month anyway, with that psychological awakening that many feel comes along with light, warmth and the promise of summer; it is well-chosen, too, as the month to hold general elections. It’s the start of the ‘silly season’, the time for holidays and languorous drinks with friends – or, if you’re poor and/or lonely, for watching the rest of the world have fun without you.

So, if you get as much out of Eurovision as I do, I hope you get the chance to enjoy it with your chosen companions. If not, I’m sure it will happen some other year; the last time I watched it alone was 2005 (and I’ve never missed it, of course... but that’s just me!). Here’s to laughter, hope and summer dreaming.

Binge eating, books and black humour

I’m still unemployed and feeling useless and inadequate. Especially after taking a look at journalist Johann Hari’s Twitter feed, which seems to me a pretty good induction into the world of Things That Really Matter.

So, yesterday I decided to just let go - behaviour approved by spiritualists, apparently. I did something I hadn’t done for a while. I went to the supermarket and purchased the following items:

1 x 150g bag salt and vinegar crisps

1 x 150g bag cheese and onion crisps

1 jar garlic mayo (for dipping)

1 x 450g tub crème brûlée flavour ice cream

1 x 120g bar Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut

1 iced lemon Madeira cake

1 packet salted caramel brownies

1 ‘two buttered slices’ snack pack Soreen malt loaf

This was straight after having been to the library, where I took out the following books (a bit random, as Lewisham library is too small to have much of a selection):

The Life and Death of Democracy by John Keane (“A gargantuan feat of erudition” – Guardian)

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

Exuberance: The Passion for Life by Kay Redfield Jamison (“That rare writer who can offer a kind of unified field theory of science and art” – The Washington Post Book World)

Pathological Altruism, edited by Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, GuruprasadMadhavan, and David Sloan Wilson (“A scholarly yet surprisingly sprightly volume” – New York Times)

After some time spent chomping and flicking through my selected volumes, I began to feel marginally better. I took all the food I hadn’t eaten downstairs and left it in the kitchen with a note for my flatmates:

FREE FOOD!

Regrettably, due to the conjecture that I am a fat, useless waste of space, I today took the decision to purchase numerous items of junk food and contribute to the phenomenon of ‘binge eating’.

However, since I have now cheered up a little and no longer wish to commit suicide by self-inflicted explosion of my fat, useless stomach, I wish to offer the leftover portion of these items to you, my dear flatmates.

Please either consume, or remove and hide, your desired items by tomorrow morning – otherwise they will be thrown away.

x

“Black humour was my saviour”, says Rae Earl, author of the hilarious My Fat, Mad Teenage Diary. “I had to find a way to cope with my head”. And perhaps I am writing this for one of the same reasons she eventually published her diaries; that “pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain, and if you can do that, you can be released from it” (a James Baldwin quote I found on, you guessed it, Johann Hari’s Twitter).

I ate those things because I wanted to forget for a while how sad, disappointed and scared of life I am. I took out the books because I still hope every day that I can change – learn to focus, concentrate, build arguments and use them in some helpful way.

In case you’re interested, here are some things I have learned from my erudite literature picks, in the limited amount of time I’ve spent reading so far:

• The first self-governing assemblies were actually in the Middle East, not Ancient Greece as is popularly thought. The Ancient Greeks liked to pretend they invented democracy, and this myth persisted because of the confirmation bias of Europeans, who regarded Europe as the cradle of civilisation and anti-barbarism (the arrogance of people from a young country –just like Americans now think they invented “freedom”).
•  “Democracy required that people see through talk of gods and nature and claims to privilege based on superiority of brain or blood… It implied that the most important political problem is how to prevent rule by the few, or by the rich or powerful who claim to be supermen”. (NB: people understood this in 2000 BC.)
• The word ‘enthusiasm’ comes from the Greek ‘en theos’ – a god within.
• Pathological altruism may be a factor in why depression is diagnosed more in women.Due to evolutionary biology/socialisation/let’s not start an argument, girls play more of a caregiving role that requires heightened empathy towards others. All children think the world revolves around them and events are within their control so, when they cannot soothe other people’s pain(e.g. in an upbringing which involves excessive parental criticism, or depressed parents the child cannot cheer up), very empathetic children suffer anxiety, sadness and guilt. Towards adulthood the anxiety and guilt become internalised, leading to negative thought processes/interpretation of events. This is a huge risk factor for adult depression.
• I’m very empathetic. Hooray, I’ve found explanation #1,247 for my underachievement! ;)
• I can’t say I’ve read much of On Liberty yet, but read this amazing dedication:

“To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings—the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward—I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful examination, which they are now destined never to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one-half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom.”

P.S. By the way, garlic mayo on its own is not that great for dipping crisps in. It needs something herby, and something crunchy to give it a bit of texture.

My life in underachievement, part 1

Hi, I’m Hannah and welcome to my blog. I am 27, live in London with friends, and am an underachiever by most standards. Kenneth W. Christian, a psychologist who has gallantly crafted his career out of other people’s underachievement, writes that the more gifted a person is the more likely they are to fall far short of their potential - a statement that, if true, would definitely raise the likelihood of me being a genius. (Actually my IQ is about 135, which wouldn’t comfortably allow me admission to Mensa but is almost as high as Madonna’s, apparently.) 

Some of the things I have done in my life include solo travelling in Central America, Mexico, the USA and Europe, being engaged (to one man), married and divorced (another man), volunteering as a part-time lead cook in a homeless shelter, and owning three pet rats. I’ve had numerous low-paid jobs in admin and service, have lived at nine different addresses since the age of 18, and have thrashed out my troubles to approximately seven different counsellors. Oh, and I’ve managed to spend five years at university without graduating.

How might I explain myself, then? Just a workshy, self-pitying brat? I’ll start at the beginning, and please forgive all this self-absorption.

Memory is a notoriously fallible thing; but nevertheless, I’m sure I remember being at playgroup, nursery and starting school. Other recollections I have from around the same time include the fall of the Berlin Wall (I was impressed by all the graffiti on it and watched it fall in a spirit of general excitement, because it was nearly Christmas), Margaret Thatcher being prime minister (I thought it was great to have a girl prime minister, until my mum informed me she was horrible) and Nelson Mandela being let out of prison (my mum forced me to stand up and be silent while observing the news item on TV, which I thought was stupid).

Anyway, as far as school goes, I remember feeling uneasy about it from the very start. I was cripplingly shy and self-conscious as a child and would tend to run to the corner with a book, or curl up inside a coat to play with imaginary friends (who were usually composed of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – not that imaginative). On the whole, I viewed authority figures with contempt and disdain; I did not like being patronised, told who I was, what I was, what I would/could be, or what to do. I felt different from other children, who all seemed to find life a cakewalk, so the idea of competing academically was quite agonising. It was gratifying to be praised when I did well, but if someone else did better I would be overwhelmed with envy, shame and feelings of inadequacy, which I found difficult to cope with.

This, combined with resentment at having to follow teachers’ instructions and difficulty focusing because I was always daydreaming, meant my primary school experience was less than straightforwardly happy – and I often resisted doing my work properly. I had also been moved up a year at the age of six, which meant I found the teacher less patronising but also increased my sense of social alienation among “older” kids (I was born in September so they weren’t actually very much older, but it seemed that way at the time). “The negative tone of this report reflects my frustration at seeing a child with Hannah’s ability fail to thrive in the school environment, and I hope that as she enters year six she will become more positive about herself and her work,” was one teacher’s end-of-year verdict.

Then I went to a large mixed comprehensive - or should I say one of those schools that called itself comprehensive but actually had a selection test - and didn’t thrive there either. The pattern continued, with more than one teacher commenting that I was the oddest case they’d ever come across and that they just didn’t understand me. When I was 13 I decided it was finally time to buckle down and give schoolwork a proper go; it had got to the point where that would cause less hassle and stress than being told off all the time. Plus it was being impressed on us that getting bad GCSEs would be a catastrophe for our future prospects – much in the same vein as becoming a teenage mother or contracting HIV.

Sporadically making a bit more effort still didn’t stop me writing rude, bitter, hair-raisingly scornful comments in my school books. The girl who, aged ten, included such words as these in her final school project ‘My School Years’:

“I hope these accounts have managed to paint a picture of a teacher who cared little for the children in her care, and a teacher who cared only for her salary.”

“Mr B said he wouldn’t have minded if I’d said he was stupid, but calling him a liar was too much. Well, now I’ll say it. MR B IS STUPID. And he will be, forever more.”

…was still going in her early teens:

[from my year 9 maths book] “I cannot do exercise 2I or the 5 questions, because I don’t understand removing brackets. This is because I was not listening in Wednesday’s lesson, which in turn was due to the fact that I was catching up on my beauty sleep (through no choice of my own – it is a reflex reaction when one is BORED to high heaven). Add this to my inability to do maths beyond about level 3, and there’s a good reason for you.” (The teacher crossed out “level 3” and wrote “Change to level 7 at least”.)

“14a. Please check this question as it’s complete b******s. We should not be subjected to sad losers with hangovers writing any old thing.”

“Pythagorian Triples. NB Don’t ever get the impression that I’m doing this because I want to. It’s just slightly – VERY slightly – less boring than staring into space during maths lessons.”

[from my year 10 work experience diary] “I do not want, need or expect to learn anything. This is half the reason why I didn’t bother with that Key Skills s**t. The other half of the reason is that Key Skills and Targets, in any form, belong at the bottom of the garbage bin of most patronising, ridiculous, STUPID, pointless, mind-numbing ideas ever. I mean I can REALLY see myself in 10 years’ time going to work thinking ‘Hmm. Now my ‘application of number’ needs a little work, but I’m quite confident about ‘improving own learning and performance’’. I will most likely be thinking, ‘What shall I have from the vending machine today?’”

Nevertheless, after about a year of catching up, I began to excel – for a short while, in humanities subjects. I unravelled again at 15 and spent a lot of time scratching my arms with a compass in the school toilets, but managed to do enough to get all my GCSEs at grades A or A* - other than a B in maths, a subject that (as you can see from the above extracts) I despised with biblical fervour. I had wanted to go elsewhere to do my A-levels but ended up staying on in the sixth form, as I was shy and unconfident, it was the path of least resistance and I had a handful of good school friends (incidentally, said friends are now a doctor, a pharmacist and a senior economist).

Sixth form was better in some ways; I finally got contact lenses after years spent walking around unable to see because I was too vain to wear glasses, and I got my first boyfriend (who broke my heart, but as I had previously thought I’d die a virgin, this was a small price to pay). But after the first term or two, when the novelty wore off, my work habits were an abject disaster. I woke up every day with the intention of doing my best, but procrastination had me in an iron grip. During my GCSEs I had learned the unfortunate lesson that I could still get an A just by waffling at the last minute with a few big words thrown in; in sixth form the temptation to do this grew ever greater, and I sailed closer and closer to the wind.

Deep down, I just didn’t see myself as a competitor for the kids I was at school with – the outgoing, well-put-together offspring of doctors and solicitors, for whom success seemed a given. I had hazy, idealised daydreams about what I might want to do in the future - namely saving the world - but didn’t grasp then that no-one ever saved the world by being vague about it. I couldn’t really picture myself as someone with a great career, so I suppose I lacked a crucial source of motivation that others had. I also never read anything too highbrow because this would make me feel insecure and uncomfortable – worried that I didn’t have the intelligence of the author, or of other readers’ interpretations. (I still feel like that when I read, but these days I try to suck it up.)

Despite all this, I actually gained three A-levels and one AS-level with straight A’s - I can show you the certificates if you don’t believe me, haha. These grades are entirely deceptive and owe much more to the fact that I chose soft subjects (English Lit, Sociology, Psychology and Philosophy if you must know) and played the system (which was less than academically rigorous, much as it pains me to agree with the right-wing press) than to anything approaching hard work.

I left school at 17, in 2003. Looking back, a metaphor comes to mind of a girl starting out along the wide, open road of opportunities – yet shackled by weighty baggage. I was highly confused, insecure, ill-educated, lagged behind in terms of social skills and was poleaxed by many years’ worth of ingrained bad habits (not least eating habits; I have always struggled with my weight, too).

Part two – which covers what has happened in the decade since I left school – is a little thorny. But I promise I’ll upload it sometime soon.