The Toad Blog

Hurah for Daylight Saving and welcome British Summer Time! I woke up at what I thought was 5:30am and was totally unable to get back to sleep. I decided to post a blog entry as I have been a bit quiet over the last couple of days and I am always at my most creative first thing in the morning. I turn on the computer at 5:45 and the PC tells me it is actually 6:45 which is what time I get up during the week anyway. So now I don’t feel like a total insomniac freak tapping away on the computer at an unearthly hour on a Sunday as the clocks have changed.

Well, as you can tell from the beautiful post TuT wrote about me sleeping, things haven’t been so brilliant over the last couple of days. I have just felt so depressed and fed up. Things like the depo provera injection and my weight gain and inability to shift the pounds after a valiant first week’s effort just gutted me more than words can say. It really fed into my Borderline thinking and I was pretty mentally unwell. I didn’t shower, the housework got put to one side – including the cooking and laundry and TuT had to put up with a lot.

Saturday dawned yesterday and I still felt the same and didn’t want to get out of bed. My energy levels are at all time low – I have some sort of coldy bug thing, only a slight snuffley nose, but enough of a bug to sap my energy levels. Eventually I was out of bed, showered for the first time in two days (disgusting of me I know) and going to do the weekly grocery shopping with TuT. TuT was wanting to do the shopping online, as you can see from his earlier post, but we haven’t got around to setting it up and I am not confident that I would manage to write a fully comprehensive shopping list that would include all we needed. So often in the supermarket I’ll see something that we need, but I would have neglected to put it on the shopping list. I am sure at some point we will trial an online shop, and thanks so much to Kate for her email giving advice and her experiences about Tesco and Sainsbury’s deliveries, it helped a lot.

We went around Asda, I am still avidly watching ‘Delia’ on Monday nights and wanted to get the Asda mushroom risotto. I’ve got her book so when she does the recipes on Monday night I can find out from the cookery book where to source the ingredients from. After much searching of the freezers we did find the said mushroom risotto – priced at practically £3! TuT with our trusty cardboard “points wheel” worked out each portion was four points. That seemed a lot for a relatively small portion, and Delia jazzed hers up with dried porcini mushrooms and some sort of wine, and I can’t imagine myself at lunch time going to such an effort of reducing dried and fresh mushrooms down with wine and adding them to the frozen risotto. TuT doesn’t like risotto really so if we’d bought it I would have to eat on week day lunches when TuT’s at work. I decided against it!

Delia’s use of frozen mashed potato is something we decided to use and I think it is brilliant. Mashed potato was the bane of my childhood eating as my mum adores the stuff and would eat it with every single meal. We didn’t have it with every single meal, but it wasn’t far off, there weren’t many meals she could fit mashed potato as the obligatory carbohydrate into. Her mash was lumpy and sometimes almost “grey”. I would try anything to disguise the taste and texture, once when we had gammon and pineapple I even poured juice off the tinned pineapple over it – anything to try and make it bearable to eat. Incidentally – don’t try the pineapple trick – it was disgusting! Into adulthood and cooking for myself and TuT, as you can imagine, mashed potato has not made many tea time appearances. When I have made it however I have found it a pain as I want it totally smooth – no lumps, and creamy – but keeping an eye on points from butter and milk. TuT was not overly impressed with the results when I used the stick hand blender on the boiled potatoes and made an almost potato puree – whoops! But frozen mash is ace – 5 minutes or so in the microwave, no peeling or boiling or mashing, and the resulting stuff is very nice. Creamy, no lumps, and if mash had tasted like that in my childhood I would have eaten it no problem!

Today we are going to a science show called ‘Brainiac’ in Brighton, so we decided to have Sunday dinner on Saturday night. I spoke to my younger brother on Friday afternoon and he was cooking a shoulder of lamb in red wine and shallots with his housemates and girlfriend on Friday night, as opposed to them all getting a bit too drunk and lairy at the beginning of the weekend, so doing a roast on Saturday night was inspired by my brother, and not being able to do one today as we are out for the afternoon. TuT wanted mash and roasted potatoes with his beef – no problem there with my trusty frozen mashed potato! And I am afraid, despite trying the Nigella tip of the use of semolina my homemade roasted potatoes are nothing to write home about, so I use the Asda healthy range frozen roast potatoes which are perfectly acceptable and take no time to cook whilst the meat is resting and I am doing everything else.

At 7.15pm we sat down to roast beef and all the trimmings, one thing I don’t cheat on is my Yorkshire Puddings – Toads! – I make them to the Nigella recipe, using four eggs per recipe, getting the tin as hot as possible and putting them into the hottest oven, they rise unbelievably into lots of sand castles. I am quite proud of them when I put them on the table!

The rest of the evening passed nicely. In my desperation to find out about when I could expect to start losing weight at a reasonable rate when I come off the injection I decided to post on the Weight Watchers forums if anyone else had experienced a big gain whilst being on the injection and how long it had taken to start to lose weight once its effects wore off. Thank you to all that posted a reply. It was so nice to find out that my gain of four stone is not unusual, others were reporting large gains, and that once you come off it, following Weight Watchers, a loss of 2 pounds or so a week is possible. Thank you so much to the lovely Gemma that posted a reply and wrote me a lovely email, it has made such a difference to hear from you! I’d like all of you reading this to feel free to mail me with any thoughts, questions, or advice; just follow the link on the top of the page.