No news is no news

Not quite sure what happened there but I appear to have blinked and found myself in October.

When I sat down to write this, I tried to figure out why I sometimes feel that I have less to say nowadays.  I'm certainly not eating or cooking less.  I've realised that one key difference is that I am a much more confident cook than when I started blogging seven (seven!) years ago.  Although we still meal plan, the plan tends to be more fluid.  Both of us abhor food waste and will often tweak things to a greater or lesser extent in order to accommodate leftovers, or ingredients that look set to lapse from sadness to inedible at any given moment.  Some of the nicest meals that we have eaten in the last few week have been just thrown together.  And I always feel a bit of a cheat, blogging a dish if it is full of splashes and dashes rather than properly measured ingredients.  But I'm not sure why - Nigel Slater, a food writer whose prose I adore even if I do find his TV persona a little grating, has built an entire bloody career on such a methodology.

So, I am going to try and be better about putting up posts that just describe a successful coming together of ingredients.  Something less formal than a recipe, just a vignette.

Of course, the ability to freestyle more is almost certainly a result of me not following any sort of formalised diet plan.  I think the last time that I was a paying member of Weight Watchers was a good eighteen months to two years ago (I'm sure that a quick trawl back through the archives could tell me if I really cared to know).  Interestingly, I am certainly no bigger for forsaking my membership and probably a little smaller thanks to some initial success on 5:2.  But, as every catch up post that I have done recently seems to repeat, after a good couple of months I seem to have spent the rest of the year trying to reclaim the 5:2 mojo and failing, for various reasons.  Sigh.

Still, I am in a good mood today and unwilling to get too introspective about things.  It's been a beautifully calm weekend of reading, baking and Strictlying.  There's a pork belly joint being pressed on the dining room table ready to be served with braised lentils and a punchy caper sauce.  The cat is chasing a fly. Life is full of quiet, Sunday pleasures.

Very Sunday