7 days to go

Today is my first day back after having spent 6 days at Minehead Butlins Resorts. Boy, am I glad to be back. It was a genius idea to take with me jar of homemade fried onions and a jar of fried chunky tomato. I have used them for breakfast lunch and dinner. When they ran out, I set off to Morrison’s and got some jars of olives & Garlic, char grilled aubergine, sun dried tomato all conserved in sunflower oil or olive oil. I had also made some oatbran biscuits that I took with me they helped too.   

When I weighed myself this morning, I had lost the extra pounds I had gained during the first two weeks of my extreme vegan lent. That is probably due to the fact that I may had skipped few meals from the restaurant at the resort.

We are now only 7 days to the end of my experience and I am really looking forward to start drinking full fat milk again, drinking coffee and eggs and the rest.

 I didn’t go to work today and that gave me the time to produce this beautiful thing that I made for brunch (I had a lie in). This is a plain rice cake topped with fried onions & thyme, chopped chestnuts and sun dried tomato washed down with some sugar free ginger tea.

Then I popped to the dentist to spend a whopping £220 (how do they get away with charging so much for our grinders?).

Or dinner I made a nice little chilli con carne with soya meat and accompanied with some pearl barley.

Chilli con Carne ingredients (two portions): 1 tin of kidney beans, 1 tin tomato, 1 onions, garlic, ½ red and ½ green pepper, 1 tea spoon cumin powder, 1 tea spoon of coriander powder, a bit of black pepper, soya meat balls (20 medium ones).

Start by soaking the soya meatballs in boiling water for 10 minutes. Then squeeze out the water and cut in smaller pieces.

In a hot pan, fry your chopped onions until brown; add in some thyme and then your soya meat. Add black pepper and salt, then fry so the meat can absorb all the flavour (5 minutes should suffice).

Now add your chopped green, yellow peppers and the tomato cook for about 10 minutes. By this time, there should be very little or no juice from the tomatoes. Now add in your cumin powder, coriander powder and kidney beans plus 250 ml of water or vegetable stock. Then cover and leave to cook for another 20 minutes stirring from time to time.

For the pearl barley: measure 1 glass of barley, rinse it to remove the power that is covering it. Then In the cooking pan, place the barley in the pot with two glasses of water and one table spoon of rapeseed oil. Leave to cook for 15 minutes without covering the pot. Once the water has reduced, stir to separate the grains, cover and reduce the heat. The rest of the cooing will be by team.

Done.

I added, some freshly chopped parsley to my barley just before serving.

Voila!

I have also just posted the blogs from my week in Spring Harvest at Butlins Minehead. Do check in and have a read...

Thank you for reading and for keeping up with me. Remember to post a comment.