It's the weekend! Still had to be up early though because we were off to London for the day.
In bed/trying to wake up: Green tea with pomegranate.
Breakfast: Porridge with organic oats, Alpro almond milk and vanilla pouring yoghurt, banana, strawberries, chia seeds and a handful of Jordan's tropical fruit granola. Plus a coffee made with two espresso shots and steamed soya milk.
Snack: I had a meet, greet and tweet with the other members of the Zest Alpro challenge that's happening in June. If you fancy joining us, you can sign up for the 5k or 10k adventure race too!
This is the course - the blue line is the 5k and the orange line is the additional 5k to make up the 10k! I'd like to think after Helly Hansen Beauty and The Beast I could handle anything but the mention of slippery walls and tyre crawls is a bit spine-tingling! I'm looking forward to the water slide though.
Alpro put on a lovely spread for us - I had a cup of tea with almond milk (interesting - it's better in coffee, I think) and a cherry Alpro yoghurt with blueberries, almonds and some dried fruit.
Late lunch: It was now pouring with rain! Tom and I practically ran through Soho to my old favourite lunch haunt when I was interning at Cosmo last year, itsu. We shared a vegetable dumpling udon noodle soup and a miso soup - it's definitely been the week of miso soup, hasn't it?! I really love the stuff. And it was so, so cold and just what I felt like to warm me up.
Exercise: Power walk all over central London - we parked the car in our old neighbourhood for a walk down memory lane, quite literally. It's about 1.5 miles on foot from our old place to Oxford Street. Such a shame it started pouring! With all our extra mooching around, we covered a good 4 miles all up I'd say.
Snack on the drive home: A Jordan's Blueberry Frusli bar. I prefer the apple and sultana flavour but my Tesco didn't have that one, so I thought I'd give this flavour a try. Really liked the generous amount of dried blueberries in the bar.
Dinner: After our drive home it was freezing cold outside and still lashing with rain, so it was comfort food all the way.
I made chilli chickpea and sausage casserole with mint and horseradish lazy mash (ie: I left the skin on the potatoes!) and steamed green beans. I made the casserole pretty much as described in the recipe but I put in some fresh fennel I had lying around too which made it even more delicious.
This meal was just perfect - so comforting, warming and delicious. Just the right amount of spice from the chilli and paprika, sweet chunks of leek, nutty chickpeas, inky spinach. We ate all the sausages but we had quite a bit of sauce/chickpea stew bit leftover so I'm going to save that for Monday night's dinner and we'll make either some brown rice or a baked sweet potato to go with it.
I opened a bottle of red to use in the casserole, so we had some with the meal when it was ready. It was a Waitrose own brand Fruity Spanish Red...I got put on to it after seeing it mentioned in The Guardian a few months ago, praising its delicious and surprisingly complex taste given its bargain price and I agree wholeheartedly! It's a really nice red. I enjoyed my first glass of it but found it hard to finish my second (I think I was just tired) so I froze the rest in an ice cube tray to add to a pasta sauce or stew later in the week.
Dessert: Tom insisted (!) so we had some chocolate. I had two squares of my old favourite.
I'd forgotten how much I love that casserole! Already looking forward to leftovers on Monday :)
Stay tuned for the final instalment of food what I ate.....