In my belly

It's been about twelve weeks now since I started concentrating seriously on eating healthily and exercising regularly. If we knock out the two-and-a-half week break I had over my birthday whilst I was holidaying in Perth (there's no way I was going to give up Little Creature's chilli mussels or the wines of the Margaret River!) then we're talking about nine whole weeks of allowing myself only one treat meal a week. For someone that was used to having three or four... or five... such treat meals a week, this was a radical change in food perspective!

As such, I find myself fantasizing, reasonably often, about the foods that I would love to shove into my mouth by the truckload and stuff myself stupid on until I resemble a giant elephant that has swallowed the world's biggest blimp whole. Some of them I think about a lot, others are old staples in my old, unhealthy diet, that I find myself longing for every now and then. Rather than making me stare longingly into the fridge for hours on end, I actually find thinking about these treats quite cathartic. So, I did what any... Ok, I did something stereotypically me... I made a list!

The top ten foods I think about... a lot:

1. Hot jam donuts covered in sweet, sweet sugar. The jam piping hot so that you have to blow furiously on it to get it below red-hot-magma levels. The donut steaming so that you can't even think about picking it up in your hands. Nope, this is a bowl and spoon job all the way.

2. 10kg of hot, crunchy, thick cut chips. But that's not all. Cover them in around 20kg of chicken salt, and then give me two big bowls - one filled with smokey BBQ sauce and the other with delightfully creamy mayonnaise, and I shall take my 10kg of chips showered in 20kg of chicken salt and dip each one of them in both bowls several times!

3. Lemon and prosciutto pasta. This may not sound like a real treat meal, as it's reasonably healthy, but believe me, this dish is to die for. Originally made for me by my dear friend Donna, this combination of prosciutto, tagliatelle, rocket, olive oil, and lemon juice (plus other ingredients if we feel like it) is a dream sequence for your taste buds.

4. Milk chocolate rocky road from the Margaret River Chocolate Factory. Their chocolate is oh so creamy, and with fluffy marshmallows, nuts, and jubes all rivaling for a place in your mouth, their rocky road is just divine.

5. Approximately one ton of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. I first discovered this taste sensation in Plymouth, England, at the movies, where I treated myself to a scoop of cherry garcia with a scoop of chocolate fudge brownie. This was closely followed by my friend Mara and I devouring a whole tub of phish food (sans bowls - just spoons in the tub!) on my return to London. Oh my stars you have never had ice cream this good!

6. Hot, hot, hot, just out of the oven bread rolls, in a variety of delicious gourmet flavours (olive and sea salt,  walnut sourdough - you get the picture), ripped apart with your hands then thickly smeared with creamy, melty butter. Sprinkle a few salt crystals on top and you will just about swoon from the pleasure of it.

7. Piping hot, chunky apple pie cooked with lashings of cinnamon and cloves in sweet pastry, served with a giant dollop of too-thick-to-fall-off-your-spoon cream. Team this with a delicious dessert wine and you have one of the best reasons to unbutton your pants at the table.

8. Plain and simple, crepes with lemon and sugar. My most enduring favourite meal of all time.

9. A giant cheese platter including brie, stuffed with rosemary sprigs and baked in it's wooden wheel, strong blue cheese, goats cheese rolled in ash, quince paste, lavosh, crusty white bread, and a selection of pates from Maggie Beer.

10. Fried chicken! When I was in London, just ten minutes walk from my front door, was the best fried chicken shop I have ever come across. Their spicy fried drumsticks were like a party in my mouth (and the accompanying chips were scoffed down in a fashion closely resembling item #2 on my list) and it wasn't unheard of for me to have a meal of fried chicken two or three days in a row! I suspect that it was around this time that my jeans started to fit quite snugly...

Make myself

A while ago I downloaded the Nike Training Club (NTC) app on my iphone, not quite sure that I'd ever use it, but thinking that it had the potential to be handy.

As it turns out, I love it! I tried it for the first time yesterday and was pleasantly surprised at the level of effort I had to put into the half hour toning workout. This morning I've woken up feeling achey in all the right places - man I love being sore after a workout!

The NTC is designed for women, and has four categories of workouts to choose from - Get Lean, Get Toned, Get Strong, and Get Focused. Yesterday I chose the Body Remix workout from the advanced section of Get Toned and holy sheep snorkles, did you think I could keep up with it?! I may have to drop myself back to the intermediate level for tomorrow and stick with that for a wee while until I build up some stamina. Who knew you could hurt so much with just a set of 4kg dumbbells? From the other routines I've flicked through, it seems most can be done at home with just a set of 3-4kg dumbbells and a medicine ball, so I may be scooting off to a sports shop sometime in the near future to get myself the latter. In the meantime, improvisation is key.

Look, you even get little badges you can stick up on your Facebook wall as rewards to show off how many minutes you've worked out!

This little fellow means I've done thirty minutes of training. Woot!

The app is free, and I highly recommend it, so any gals out there looking for a little personal training in the privacy of their own home should definitely go and snap it up! Here's an example of what you might find yourself doing in the near future...

Water water

It's a cold, cloudy, and rainy weekend. Perfect for sitting outside on the patio in the swing-chair, wrapped in a cozy blanket, drinking cups of tea, and watching the rain fall.

Also a good opportunity to play with my camera lenses too, as it turns out.

Now that the weather is decidedly turning wintery, my thoughts are starting to fill with things like hot chocolates with Bailey's and warming soups served with hot, crusty bread fresh out of the oven. Meals cooked in a slow cooker and porridge served with cinnamon and a dollop of cream for breakfast. Damn winter and it's delicious comfort foods!

Friday

Today I:

- Excitedly bought the just released Seeker Lover Keeper album on iTunes! Twice. The second time was as a surprise gift for my good friend Yak but unfortunately, despite the time difference between us and Yakmum telling me she was still asleep, she had already woken up and bought it herself! Fail.

source

- Got a little obsessive with the above album and, after discovering I'd accidentally had the album on shuffle and, after stopping and starting the music a few times, noting that this had resulted in some songs having been played twice whilst others were yet to be played, sat down and sorted the album by the "plays" column and proceeded to ensure that all songs had been treated fairly and equitably. I am pleased to report that now all songs on this lovely album have each been played exactly three times.

- Ran 6km in my Vibram's for the second time ever, and recorded my second best ever time for the distance, according to my Garmin Forerunner 310XT. These two items are inspiring to run with. The Vibram's for the natural running style they promote that causes less jarring up through your body, and the Garmin for being able to get all geeky with my running data once I'm back home! Seriously - I need to know what my heart rate was like at the 24.3 minute mark, and what my elevation and speed were at the same time! And, just getting back to the Vibram's, I just want to say that I am so proud of my calf muscles! When I first ran with these on, I ran 2km on a treadmill and then couldn't walk for three days afterwards due to the pain! Now look at me go :-)

- Came across this article on the top five regrets people have on their death beds, and thought that I know a couple of people who may suffer from these, including myself. I will try to remedy this.

- Saw the below lovely blanket on Etsy in Verity Kizek's shop, the light garden, and wished so much that I could make one myself. But, apart from the fact that I have never crocheted in my life, the cost of buying the yarn for such an endeavor means that I'm really better off just buying one!

- Decided that my dancing shoes have not seen anywhere near enough action since my return to Australia. So, I put them on and did the Jitterbug Stroll and the Shim Sham in my dining room.

Two presents in two days

Over the last two days I have been lucky enough to receive two belated birthday presents in a row! Both from my long list of favourite things on Etsy.

The first to arrive was this beautiful screen print of birds and branches from PoetryAndCloth in New Zealand. I was about to go out to run some errands when I noticed a big red and brown box sitting outside by the front door! The box was promptly ripped open to reveal the lovely parcel wrapped in brown paper and string (these are a few of my favourite things!), and the print was, within the space of a minute, in pride of place above my cream leather lounge.

The very next day I visited the post office to check the mail and lo and behold, there was another box waiting for me! The customs form told me the box, which had travelled all the way from the USA, contained books, so I knew straight away that my three vintage, black, hardcover books from ErieStreet, were nestled safely inside!

These babies are now sitting happily on my coffee table, which sits in front of aforementioned cream lounge, right next to a vintage vase that was hand painted by His Travel Romance's great aunt, a jar containing three of my birthday moustaches, and some candles. Love. If it wasn't already, the lounge is now most definitely one of my most favourite places in the whole house! I may even sit with a nice cup of tea and do some knitting there later today.

Sought for, loved, and keeping

Over the space of the last two weeks, from the moment I first heard Light All My Lights on Triple J, I have been in the process of falling completely and utterly in love with Seeker Lover Keeper - the collective effort of Sarah Blasko, Sally Seltmann, and Holly Throsby. So much so, that I just had to share their three debut videos with you, each starring lovely Australian actors. If you haven't already dipped your ears into the deliciously shiny sounds that these three ladies produce, please pour yourself a lovely cup of tea or a glass of your favourite wine, sit back, relax, and enjoy...

Slow lane

Life has hit the slow lane and I feel like I'm crawling along at a mundane pace where the scenery doesn't change very often. That's not a complaint, it's just where I am, and why I don't have a terrible amount to say lately.

I've started looking for work, but the fact is that there are no jobs on a par with what I was doing back in Perth. In fact, there are relatively few jobs full stop. In the month and a bit I've been looking (where we define looking as searching on Seek every day) only two roles have come up that I would even consider applying for - one of them I'm still waiting to hear back about, and the other I got an immediate rejection for which I can only assume is because the role was filled prior to it being advertised but, being a governmental role, they had to advertise anyway. I assume this, because I ticked every single box they wanted ticked, in pretty multi-coloured pens, folded the checklist up and created a beautiful origami crane with it, and then the crane came to life and flew around the room leaving rainbows in its wake. I can only say that frustration levels were rather high when an application that should have hit right on the recruiter's dream list didn't even warrant an interview.

My fitness and nutrition regime continues, although I'm starting to look at challenging myself a bit more now. It's been nearly three whole months since I've had a cup of coffee (excluding the traditional black coffee with rum in it on Anzac morning prior to the Dawn Service), and I'm still not sure why I'm avoiding it other than the fact that I have been for so long now. His Travel Romance and I visited Cofield Wines last weekend where we discovered a new red we'd never heard of before - the mighty Durif - which was described to us, most accurately, as a Shiraz on steroids. Delicious. This weekend we made a quick trip to Melbourne where I obtained my Responsible Service of Alcohol certificate so that, if I decide to, I can try to get some casual work in nearby wineries. I also remembered how much I love the city of Melbourne...

Beautiful buildings, an amazing atmosphere, cozy little lane ways full of the most amazing cafes and shops, museums and art galleries you could spend weeks wandering through... It's enough to make a girl want to go back again next weekend for the  Good Food & Wine Show AND the Melbourne International Jazz Festival which are both on at the same time...