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

[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!