Man Vs Belly – Fatchelor Life 02 (Avoiding morning soup)

The video for Parklife always makes me think Damon Albarn’s a cunt. Which he may or may not be. But that amzing insight is rather tangential to the subject at hand. Day two, supplies are running low, the other survivors are looking at me with I can only call “speculative ill intent”. The weight of the machete I hid in my luggage is the only thing I can trust. Ahem. Well I set an alarm today in an attempt to pull back my morning. I woke up a minute before it went off, but only got out of bed an hour after waking up. Still, beat yesterday by two hours if I keep that up I’ll be up at a human time by Thursday or so.

Unfortunately by the time I was up I was either having a very late breakfast or an early lunch. Instead I opted to have neither and decided to make the layered salad that eluded me yesterday. This took a little longer than I expected, partially because it was a bit more involved than the recipes I culled it from lead me to believe and partially because I got roped into housework in the middle of it. I combined a few different recipes for it, but all of them seemed to have their vegetable ratios slightly askew. Either that or I bought the world’s biggest fucking courgette’s. I ended up with a fair bit of left over courgette, which I may use to make courgette crisps (I did this with sweet potato and they were lovely) or I may feed them to the voice that lives in the bin. By the time I finished making the salad (and popped it in the fridge to compress) I sort of hated it. In the end I had a lunch/breakfast combo.

There were some enquiries about how yesterday’s food turned out. The homemade burgers were lovely, they’re always nice after just being made but they’re actually nicer a few hours/a day layer when they’ve had a good chance to really firm up. The brocoli was fine, I like roasted brocoli, I decided to go with Cajun seasoning but I think I’ll switch back to crushed chilli’s because it isn’t hot enough for me. The biscuits were disappointing at first but I tried them again late last night and they were nicer after cooling, still a bit too bland but serviceable for late night snacking. The slow cooked apple and oats turned out pretty well. After letting it cool down it had a weird jelly like consistency this morning. But I mixed it with a little milk and bunged it in the microwave and it was pretty nice. I could certainly see it becoming a staple breakfast. The detox water was the thing I was most worried about, largely because I wasnt sure if I liked the flavour of cucumber. The cucumber flavour does come through but its cut by the other citrus flavours and the mint. Its pretty refreshing and the spherical ice-cubes do last fucking ages. So a pretty successful first day.

So today’s plan was:

Breakfast: Slow cooked porridge
Lunch: Homemade burgers & salad
Dinner: Roasted brussels sprouts & teriyaki fried chicken

Tasks: Make layered salad, make oatmeal muffins, make smoothie icepops

Now that plan was a non-starter since Sunday night when Tesco’s denied me the sprouts I so richly deserved. It then got further fucked by having breakfast for lunch. So lunch got bumped up to dinner and dinner will likely get bumped to a bowl of cornflakes for supper. Have to use those weight watchers points somehow. Much like yesterday I have no inclination to type out any recipe’s, if I keep this up I may make a recipe compilation post over the weekend, so here’s some more pictures.

Lunch/breakfast – Ham sandwiches (I used to hate bagels because of the stupid fucking hole, which I still dislike but I quite like the taste, even these slim ones are pretty nice) and slow Cooker, Apple Cinnamon Steel-Cut Oatmeal (not particularly visually appealing, but tastes lovely, especially with soy milk)

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The ingredients for my layered salad, if I do it again I’ll be using more carrots (or certainly less weedy ones), more onions and probably only one courgette

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Here’s the layered salad a few hours later, not as compressed as certain misleading recipe pictures lead me to believe

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Here’s it on the plate. To ruin any suspense, I was not super happy with how this turned out. In terms of flavour it was fine, I generally don’t mind salad when it comes to flavour. My issue with salads is mainly a mechanical one, the plate to mouth issue as it were. You can never get a proper mouthful and it’s just so messy, I find it irritating. I was hoping this layered salad would let me serve up, well, basically a salad cube. It did not, when it came to the eating it went the way of all salad. So, not worth the hassle to make again. At least the burgers and jelly were fine.

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Here’s a super shaky picture of the entire thing

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