In Apology For Lunch, And In Praise of Dinner

Blood yesterday was 6.0 by the way. Didn't remember to take my blood this morning, because I took a glorious herbal sleeping pill last night, woke up at 10.30 this morning, and we went for brunch at the Harvester.

In an attempt not to be boring, and not to have the same thing as usual, I chose some lamb...thing. All the while, I was counting up the calories - 350 for the meat, about 110 for the potatoes, roughly 110 for a dry bread roll, 150 for a simple soup, 150 for a smoothie and so on. Worked out that the meal in total would suck up about a thousand calories of whatever my daily allotment should be. Don't actually know what that allotment is, which makes the whole thing moderately meaningless, but I generally aim for 1600 calories or less...

Ah! Just done a little quick research. Average healthy calorific intake for a man is 2500. To lose a pound a week, they say you should reduce calorific intake by 500 calories a day - so presumably for a two pound loss, you should reduce by 1000 calories, which means my half-arsed pseudo maths is frankly not bad...

Anyhow, lunch would have sucked about a thousand calories out of my day...which would have been OK, if it had been good, but it wasn't. Somehow, that annoyed me - like I say, spending the calories is fine, so long as the experience is good, but when you've spent the calories and the experience was bad, you feel short-changed, in exactly the same way as you do if you spend cash on something that turns out to be disappointing.

Came home, moved the office around as I'd intended, and then took to the bike for an hour and ten. Managed to claw back 600 calories, pedalling as though I was apologising to the calorie-gods for the travesty that had been lunch. 600 is not, all in all, as many as I wanted to pedal, but will have to do on a Sunday night, ahead of an UberCommute.
Then d served dinner.

Phenomenal stuff, this dinner. Simple ingredients, treated with stunning respect to make something far more impresive than the sum of its parts. Brined pork, flavoured with cloves, black pepper and a pinch of chilli. Cooked apples. Brussels sprouts. And mashed potato, with sweet onions and an egg mixed in to lighten it.

Can't tell you how good that was - even I, Mr Wordsmith, can't do it justice in something as clunky as words. My wife has some serious skill. And eating it, I didn't count calories, didn't care what it cost. Whatever it cost, it was beautiful.

I'm still hoping for a positive result on Tuesday, but dinner tonight was a reality check - every now and then, you have to get in touch with what makes the experience of being alive different from the experience of just surviving from day to day. Top Tip for the day - Be married to a culinary genius, it really helps you reconnect.