Being spoiled

For the last two days my amazing boyfriend has taken care of the cooking with the aid of the slow cooker and a couple of recipes I chose. I do feel very spoiled as I have been able to get home from the gym and dinner is in the pot, smelling amazing and all I need to do is cook some veg and we're done. I do love cooking, don't get me wrong, but it is nice to feel treated sometimes. Both last night's lamb and Wednesday night's pork were meltingly tender and beautifully flavoursome from the long, gentle cooking. These are the first two recipes we have tried out of the slow cooker book I bought a couple of months ago, and I have to really use it more often and try some other recipes as it is simple and worth the bit of effort in the mornings.

As I am being left alone for a week while Jel goes off to Barbados for a week (work? yeah, right! hehe), I have to ponder this weekend what I am going to cook next week. I could do one big pot of something and eat it all week but that does tend to leave my tastebuds feeling rather bored and subsequently they may go on strike by the end of the week. So I'd rather do a couple fo meals and maybe do potrions for 2 and then I can eat one and save one for later in the week, but I won't be in a food coma from the same thing every day. I have experienced this food coma phenomenon before, when I attempted the Special K 'Two Week Challenge'. Thought I'd give it a go to try and lose the Christmas punds that had crept on courtesy of the seasonal over-indulgences. When I'm at work I can normally manage to eat whatever is going - I don't think about it too much, and I then make dinner my main enjoyment-meal, so I didn't think it would be too hard. Week 1 was ok, but in week 2 my tastebuds were just sooooo bored of cereal that they craved, demanded some variety. So thats when the 'cheating' happens and I'd end up eating too much again for the sake of variety. So needless to say that the cereal is now simply for breakfast and today was carrots, peppers, pita bread and hummus for lunch. Still fairly healthy and a lot more interesting.

Tonight I am off to John Lewis to try and find myself some muslin cloth as I have a 'healthy' cheesecake recipe which calls for yoghurt and cottage cheese to be strained in muslin cloth for 24 hours. Sounds like fun and its certainly not something I've ever tried before so I am looking forward to trying my hand at it. And hopefully I'll be left with some muslin for the next time a recipe calls for a 'bouquet garni'.