My husband is all mopey. We’re in the last week of his diet and he’s starving hungry. Only 1 kilo to go now and three more days to achieve it. It’ll be touch and go, but the heavy lifting (hehe) is done know. 1 kilo either way isn’t going to hurt.
After church this morning I sent P back to bed. He was far too grumpy to put up with any longer, and I had to clean the revolting house. Several preserving tasks also sat there making me feel guilty.
Once I have produce picked there is the pressing need to deal with it – lest it goes bad and is wasted. I had bought 6 kilos of oranges and harvested the 2.5 kilos of edamame on Wednesday, so something really needed to be done with both.
First I cleaned the house. Shock horror.
Then I set to work making the cordial generally according to this recipe. Because I doubled the batch this time I was struggling to find enough jars to hold it. I decided to cut down the amount of water I added. This just made a stronger concentrate, and I’ll mix it up with more water when we drink it.
Processing Edamame
After dinner tonight I processed the soybeans. They had been sitting in the fridge since Wednesday, so I couldn’t leave them any longer. I set my large stockpot on the stove with heavily salted water and put on high.
While the water heated I washed the pods and prepared some large bowls of iced water. These were to refresh (cool rapidly) the edamame once they came off the boil.
Once the water reached a rolling boil I dumped half of the pods in, stirring quickly to make sure they cooked evenly. I continued to boil them for about 2 minutes, or until a few of the pods start to spilt open. Quickly I strained the pods out and dumped them into the iced water to cool them quickly.
I repeated the process with the second batch, re-using the same boiling water to conserve energy.
Once the edamame were refreshed I put them into the salad spinner in batches to remove excess water, then poured them straight into large zip-lock bags before putting them in the freezer.
When I want to serve the edamame, I can just throw a handful into boiling water for another minute to heat and cook slightly more before draining and (optionally) sprinkling with salt.
One of the easiest and most popular snacks ever for the kids.
Weight loss meal #8
Tonight P was longing for something substantial, even after last night’s lapse of willpower on my part. Unfortunately I was missing a critical ingredient of the meal I planned (Chicken and Konnyaku hotpot), so I needed to throw something together quickly. We had:
Thai Red Prawn Curry
I don’t think I’ll publish the recipe for this (it was a little ad hoc) just the tips for cutting the kilojoules.
I started by frying some onions at fairly low heat in only a tiny bit of oil. I added some garlic, cooked a little longer, then added some prepared red curry paste, avoiding the pool of oil that you typically get in the jar. Once aromatic, I added 400ml of low fat coconut milk and 200 mls of water.
I then roughly diced some pumpkin and added that to the pan with a few tiny new potatoes (for the kids and me only). There is significantly more energy in potato than pumpkin.
I simmered this until the pumpkin was almost cooked , then added a handful of mushrooms (halved) and 400g of frozen green prawns. Fresh would have been infinitely better, but that’s all I had.
Once the prawns were cooked through I tasted for flavour, then added sufficient quantities of lime juice, fish sauce and palm sugar to taste. Because the kids are chilli wimps I couldn’t use enough curry paste, so I needed to enrich the flavour of the curry. I used a bit of oyster sauce for this purpose.
Due to using low fat coconut milk the sauce was quite thin so I thickened with tapioca starch. I threw the green beans in just before serving over (small amounts of) white rice.
Despite all the weight-loss tricks (low fat meat, low-fat coconut, pumpkin instead of potato, lots of vegetables), portion size is still king when you are serving a meal like this. It is too tempting to load yourself up on a huge bowl of rice because you’ve made the curry fairly light.
My preference personally is to make the full-fat (delicious) version and have half as much, but you need to play to your audience, so to speak. P was hungry. Quantity was going to win. You just need to know what you are dealing with and work with it.
I’m hoping I’ll be back tomorrow with the cracker of a Japanese recipe I’ve been promising for days.
500m2 in Sydney 