Steptoe & Daughter

I am really really happy with my band at the moment. Have I told you that already? Well, I really really am. I am restricted really well, and have been dreaming of this happy happy state for a looooooong time.

I love what I can/can't eat these days. Yesterday I wasn't feeling too great after wading back through my journey from hell, it kind of puts the dampeners on really, but everyone's comments really made me see that if I can get through that, I can do this for sure!

If my band had a name, and could talk and think and voice its opinions, I think it would not have been be too happy either. I think it would have moaned and groaned about the ignorant twit it was paired with and how every other band out there had a great person attached to it who followed the rules. It would moan on about how the other bands were having a nice easy ride kicking back and being tight on their persons guts - and then complain that it was having a hard time in the workplace , being worked too hard, and under appreciated because their person was being sick, blowing it up, letting it down, blowing it up again and giving it a horrible time and slagging it down to boot. My band, like me, would also have a heck of a story to tell.

I can picture Mr. Band being a right moaning old goat like the Dad from Steptoe. This could easily be a picture of me and my band were we to be personified.

So, thinking about it... here is a picture which completely summs up how I had been feeling about my band since its instalation:

But, just like Steptoe & Son, deep down we love each other really. So, we need to just rub along together. He will always be a cantankerous old sod with a history, and I will always be wondering what's coming next. I am going to name my band Steptoe. I can't think of a more apt name.

So, Steptoe and I are being nice to each other. I am giving him much better working conditions and a pay increase. This picture is a much better summing up of our closely bonded state right now. Long may it continue!

Last night we watched a new series called FlashForward and it was BRILLIANT. It was so engaging, that the time slipped by. I like to nibble while I am on the sofa watching TV, so its good to avoid it really, but olives are still my saviour. Yesterday i only had 1 protein shake, and my dinner, so in the evening sitting eating a jar of green olives stuffed with pimiento was great. I find they are brilliant with Steptoe, and he has no trouble digesting them at all. They are little, juicy and savoury too. Low in calories and full of nutrients.

If you don't like olives, take heart because neither did I. I only started eating olives about 4 years ago. I had tried them, but found them bitter and disgustingly salty and they made me shudder.

Its a bit like cigarettes or beer... they are an acquired taste, and one you have to persevere with if you know what mean! My Mum is convinced that I like strong flavours because I have ruined my taste buds through smoking, but I am pretty sure I haven't, being that I gave up 5 years ago and am only 33 anyway. What I DO think is that i like strong flavours and that added to the reason why I liked the taste of tobacco. I don't really think about it, but I love strong coffee that you can stand your spoon up in. I have a very expensive and sexy machine and I only ever drink real coffee at home. I order my coffee in bulk from The Netherlands too, I will drop dead if it ever packs up. I even polish it sometimes *sniggers embarrassingly*. I lurve my coffee.

I love red wine. Strong oaky cask ages wines. I love port too, and also hot spicy foods, rich foods and sauces and things like that. I seriously wish I had taken the 20 olive challenge years ago. My friend used to put olives into a pasta sauce, and it was scrumptious. They are the very dark black semi dried Greek olives that, on their own, would taste like you are going to die of salt over load. I do not suggest starting with them, but they make a great flavour to a tomato sauce. They swell up and let their aroma flood out. Sue, our lodger, HATES olives, but begs for the pasta sauce because its the best she has ever tasted because of the olives. She even says "I hate olives, but I love your pasta sauce with olives". We both agree this is mighty odd.

My friend said that if I ate 20 olives in a row, then I would then like them. I thought this was utter rubbish, but thought... ok, bring it on - I can do that for a dare. So I lined up 20 green olives and began.

The first one was salty and tart and yucky and rubbery and horrid. It got worse, and worse until about olive 10 I thought that I was going to puke. My mouth made such contortions that I could have given an Olympic Gurner a run for their money.

Then came a sort of saturation point. It just didn't get any worse. It didn't get better either, and I finished the 20th olive and gulped down a glass of wine to wash the gross flavour away. I was adamant that I would never eat another olive in my life, they were wrong, and my job there was done.

Then a couple of weeks later I was at a party and they had nibbles, and I just kind of thought... I wonder... and plopped an olive in my gob. It was salty but sweet, they cloying dryness wasn't present, yet it was the same type that I had gobbled on the Olive Death Run just a fortnight before. Not bad. Piquant possibly. I put a few of them on a plate and ate them as I sipped wine.

Olives and Wine are Divine. Oh yes. It progressed until I was buying the occasional jar of olives, and finding that different olives tasted different. I don't like the soft black olives. I like the green ones stuffed with red paste (pimiento) or garlic, or marinated ones. I DEVOUR Kalamata olives... a Cretan olive that is kind of elongated, pointed and purply in colour. They are the best, and my most favorite.

So, for a tasty, low fat, low calorie, nutrient rich little snack, I suggest taking the Olive Death Challenge if you haven't 'got' olives yet.

My son, also now likes olives through the same challenge, but my DH doesn't want to give it a go. Sue won't do it either. Nor my parents. But, I am a little crazy and I love a challenge. DH's view is that he has done without them his whole life. Why stir things us now. Well, I guess he's right, but I am glad I tried them as it gives me a nice safe treat to eat that wont kill me or make me fat.

Oh, and just as a little aside... last night I made a curry with my new pressure cooker. We bought that frozen cubed beef that cooks like crap if you just boil it, but is amazing and soft in a pressure cooker, and all the fatty stuff melts away and you just get nice meat. So I cooked that up and made a sauce to go with it. I boiled some rice and found to my horror that some idiot had poured the ends of a bag of different type rice into my rice jar. I have my serious suspicions... and I am sure they were meaning well... but basically my rice takes 10 minutes. theirs takes 25. So guess what. We had rice mush and hard crunchy rice in the same dish. Yummmm. It was like eating curry and rice pudding with twigs in. BLEUGH. So now I have to throw away about 2kg of rice because it is thoroughly mixed with a slightly darker shade of rice, and has therefore ruined it. I could be anal and pick it all out, but I am not sad and tragic enough.

DH said I could make rice pudding with it, but to get the other harder grains of rice to the same texture, my rice would literally be white gooey slimy water akin to wallpaper past.

So its in the bin. GRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Meddling lodgers. Pah!