Definitely getting old...

[denny]

...I'm going to join a gym this evening. It's a sad day when you have to acknowledge that your body is going to fall apart rapidly unless you do some maintenance work.

Virgin Active have opened a place within a few hundred yards of my flat, which is close enough that even I can't claim it's not convenient... and I'm starting to think that I could see quite an appreciable improvement in my leg if I did some regular exercise with it. On NYE at TG I noticed that my ability to dance is still slowly coming back, and as dancing is the only exercise it gets at present, I can only presume that a bit more exercise might well help it recover more quickly. It'd be really nice to be able to dance all night again...

Anyway, membership is going to cost me 65 quid a month, so I guess I'd better take it seriously. Anyone want to offer any advice? I'm already aware that I'm going to have to eat more, but help yourselves to any more detailed digs at my diet, I know you want to :) I'm sure there must be other things I haven't even thought of as well.

Oh, and obviously I'll be going over things quite carefully with both the personal trainer they assign me, and the physiotherapist I've been seeing, to try to make sure that I don't do myself an injury with this.

Comments

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I figured you'd be first in :)

So where's the likely intersection point for 'eating properly' and 'minimal time and cooking skills'? What are my easy(ish?) options for improving my diet?

I'm guessing fresh pasta is probably going to be my best approach... I like it, it's easy to cook, and you can have it with various things (?) that might contain some kind of nutritional value.

[kelemvor.livejournal.com]

So where's the likely intersection point for 'eating properly' and 'minimal time and cooking skills'?
Two words:
Stir fry! A few minutes to prepare, and (usually) no more than ten minutes in the wok. (Unless you're me, in which case the majority of my time management skills go out of the window...) I used to cook a chinese style beef stir fry at uni, if you ever want a meal cooked for you.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I think my strong dislike of peppers is usually the stumbling block for all stir-fry recipes I've seen, but I suppose you can throw anything in there in theory?

[kelemvor.livejournal.com]

Peppers are optional. You can stir fry pretty much anything. Also, it's important to remember that (with a few exceptions) recipes are guidelines, and most things can be substituted for others.
If you like tuna, there's one that my Mum taught me which is pretty much egg-fried rice with tuna and onions, flavoured with soy sauce or oyster sauce. It also takes about five minutes plus the time to boil rice to prepare.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Don't like onions, don't like soy sauce. :) Not that keen on rice either, but I can eat it if it's got some kind of flavour...

The whole concept of substituting in recipes traumatises me :) I like nice precise instructions that you follow and you get consistent results at the other end... I swear I gave up on cooking the first time my mum used the phrase "a splash of milk and a dob of butter".

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Don't I remember you being quite enthusiastic at the fried-rice Marcus cooked last time you were here? That had both onions and soy sauce in. The trick with onions is to chop them finely enough, so you get the infused sweetness of them, without the acidity.

I'm afraid most of my recipes are fairly imprecise, as the usually start "Chop some of all the nice looking vegetables you have in the fridge until you have so many they won't fit in the pan..."

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I passed on that meal, because it looked to be full of things I wouldn't eat. Or was that a different stir-fry thing?

Chopping onions finely (and indeed chopping anything else) sounds like more work than I'd like to do before eating, unless the result is going to be really impressively tasty. Pre-chopped veg for me maybe :)

[kelemvor.livejournal.com]

But that's part of the joy of cooking! A lot of it comes down to the contents of the cooking vessel looking, smelling, tasting or sounding right.
OTOH, there are some recipes that must be followed religiously, or disaster results. Royal icing is one that comes to mind, and if it goes wrong you get left with either glue or concrete.
A while back, someone mooted the possibility of writing a database that held a kitchen inventory, a list of recipes, a list of ingredients and valid substitutions. As long as you kept the first table up to date, it would then modify the recipes according to what you had in stock. (I had a go, but got bogged down in data relationship problems. Might have another go...) That would take some of the guesswork out of it!

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Soup is good too - the fresh soups you can get now are really tasty.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Raw food - fruit, salads. That's got to be your first thing. And take unsalted nuts, dried fruit etc to work to snack on instead of chocolate and crisps.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Fruit is nice, and I suppose if I was eating it every day it might stop going off before I get around to eating it, which is what usually seems to happen when I pick some up while shopping. Also, work have occasionally started getting fruit in for us all to snack on... one of my bosses is almost as worried about my diet as you are :)

Salad is boooooooooooooooring... I blame this mostly on lettuce, which is highly tedious. Cucumber is quite nice, but a bit dull. I don't really like tomatoes, but I can eat about half of one before I start pulling faces. After that I get lost... what else do you put in salads?

I'm sort-of allergic to nuts, so I'll pass on that one. Dried fruit is unpleasant to eat... a texture thing, I think. I have lots of weird texture things about food.

Remember I told you that I consider myself a fussy eater, and you said you couldn't see it personally? ... :)

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Some lettuce is nicer than others - iceberg is pretty dull, but romaine has more flavour to it. Green salads are more interesting if you add things like avocado, asparagus, cheese (feta or fried haloumi are good), sliced sausages, olives, bacon, chicken, sundried tomatoes, antipasta generally(found in jars, in the same bit of the supermarket as the olives) etc.

Grated carrots with sultanas and a squeeze of orange juice is nice, or just batons of carrots (which you can get ready cut if you can't be bothered, and dips.

Rice salad is slightly more effort, but brown rice with cucumber, tuna, olives, and a lemony dressing is nice.

You could try doing pasta with things other than tuna from time to time. Use a jar of ready made sauce and add a few extra vegetables.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

The last one is my best hope, I think... I've got no objection to cooking various other things with pasta, if they're claimed to contain some useful nutrient that I need. Depending on what they taste like, of course.

Brown rice is as nasty tasting as brown bread... needs more refining to make it edible ;)

Throwing lumps of meat in salads would never have occurred to me, that could make them more palatable :)

I'm not generally keen on 'interesting' cheeses... I only really eat cheddar and similar things. I know I don't like feta cheese, never heard of the other one. Fried cheese? Oddness.

Avacado is okay, asparagus is quite bitter iirc? Carrots are good, I'd forgotten about them.

Olives are foul :)

[hilarita.livejournal.com]

You can always pour lots of dressing over there. I usually make my own balsamic vinegar and olive oil mix (this takes about a minute). Mayonnaise is unfortunately full of fat, but does make lettuce about 1000% more interesting.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

OK, there are still plenty of salady things you can do. I don't like lettuce-based salads on their own either.

Try couscous with lots of chopped herbs, greens (baby leaf spinach is good) and cucumber with some lemon juice and pepper.

Of course, you might not fancy salads much in the winter, but you can try finely slicing vegetables and cooking them for a few minutes in vegetable stock or miso soup. It's lovely, and if you cook some noodles at the same time, it can be nicely filling.

[fiona-kitty.livejournal.com]

Rocket, watercress and spinach salad is not boring! :)

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

You're a Very Strange Kitten.