Saturday evening – 2 Fast 2 Falafel (or: The Final Chowdown)

Here we come to the final entry in the blog, ending with my last meal based on rice and beans. I think after this I might take a little holiday from those types of meals and expand out into the wide-open horizons of “almost literally anything else”.

Still, this meal didn’t have too much riding on it. Breakfast was a disappointment, and lunch was (still in my opinion) the greatest meal of all time, so dinner was inevitably going to fall somewhere in between regardless of how well it went.

For the final food, I thought I should revisit the food I had so slanderously called falafel earlier in the week (when in fact it was just chickpeas and oats). Hopefully this time I could make a better version of that – which, again, is like setting the bar for the high jump by laying it on the ground.

I decided to use this recipe (https://gourmandelle.com/chiftelute-de-naut-healthy-vegan-falafel/), mostly because it had the word “healthy” in the title, and meant that I didn’t need to deep-fry anything. It also looked relatively straightforward – blend everything in a food processor and then fry it.

Of course, to add a small complication I don’t actually have a food processor. But I do have a hand blender which eventually did the job, after lots of stops to scoop out mush from where it got stuck behind the blade. (This time the mush was comparatively tasty, though, so I didn’t mind).

Since the picture is slightly unclear, this is in a white mixing bowl, not a very large white plate. We're not going to go all The Dress here.

Once everything had been smushed up, and following a couple of substitutions (garlic granules for actual garlic, ordinary flour instead of chickpea flour [got to get some extra gluten in there somewhere] and smoked paprika for sweet paprika), everything was ready to fry away.

Come fry with me, let's fry, let's fry away...

Turns out the mixture makes about twenty falafels, and I only planned to eat four, so the rest have gone into the fridge (and most eventually into the freezer) for another day.

This meant that I got the “beans” part of the “rice and beans” in there. To get the “rice” part in, I decided to make rice. This did the job admirably. I also decided to pad it out with some broccoli, because broccoli is my favourite vegetable and I had one I accidentally bought late last week that I wanted to use before it expired in my fridge.

Pictured: rice and beans and friends. The perfect triple act.

As expected, this meal landed comfortably between the two others of the day taste-wise – but definitely enjoyable, and much of an improvement on the dinners of previous days. So that's my meals for the day.

In terms of my energy levels throughout the day, mine have still been fluctuating quite a bit. I think it’ll take a few more days to property readjust to eating properly and to having the usual number of calories. I lost around 4 pounds over the course of the week, which was rather careless, and I may have to look into trying to replace them.

And so concludes my writing about the Mean Bean challenge. I’ve mentioned a few times how grateful I am for all the very kind donations I have received – that’s mostly because I really am very grateful and very humbled at how generous you’ve all been, so one more round of thankfulness is probably called for. I’m also very thankful for everybody who’s read this blog – it’s given me something to do during the week, and it wouldn’t be nearly as fun to write if nobody was reading it. I’ve been doing this in a Word document and the word counter tells me I’m at a little under 14,000 words (excluding picture captions), so probably thanks is due to my keyboard as well for not collapsing under the additional strain of the week.

I’ve very much enjoyed writing this, and hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading this too. If anybody has any suggestions for other challenges I could take on and write about, do let me know!

 Note: The Mean Bean challenge has now finished, as have the expanding blog posts. Thanks to your exceptional generosity, Tearfund will be getting £460. If you have enjoyed this blog and feel able to donate to get that figure even higher, the link is here.

Saturday lunchtime – Come Salad Way (or: Lettuce Be)

The visit to the supermarket was very exciting. There’s something quite nice about wandering around looking at food and knowing that if I wanted it, I could just buy it and eat it. I had to stick to my list, though, otherwise I might have seriously considered going to customer services and asking how much it would be to buy everything, just so I had some choices.

Out of my list of recipes to start with, there was one that bizarrely seemed to be right at the top of my list, to the point where I had a huge craving for it yesterday as I was sleeping. Wanting a recipe isn’t that unusual; what was unusual is the fact that it was a salad bowl. Here is the recipe I was looking at. Technically it’s a buddha bowl, rather than a salad bowl. I’d never heard of this before; apparently it’s so called because the bowl should be so full of food that it expands out a bit at the top like the stomach of the buddha. Otherwise they’re just a medley of different foods, usually vegetables and other healthy-style foods which are designed to be nourishing and good for the soul – perhaps a more charitable interpretation of the “buddha” part of the name.

It met the criteria of involving rice and beans, so was definitely viable for my Saturday meal, but it contained so many other things that looked so delicious when compared to rice and beans that I think the selection of flavours was too much for my brain to cope, and it passed out whilst spamming “Yum!” to the rest of my body.

I can now divide the world into two types of people. People who think this is the most delicious thing they've ever seen, and people who are wrong.

The centrepiece of the dish is the “taco chickpeas” – essentially chickpeas cooked in some chopped tomatoes and a bunch of spices. I think this is one of the reasons I love chickpeas so much – they’re really good at absorbing flavour. By themselves, they’re not quite so interesting.

The rest of the ingredients present in the dish were:

·         Lettuce. Classic space-filling salad vegetable. Doesn’t really taste of too much, but for some reason that didn’t faze me too much. It’s almost like I have some recent experience of that.

·         Avocado. I keep forgetting that avocado exists – I quite like it but I don’t very often remember to cook with it. I bought a 3-pack today, though, so hopefully that will spur me on to greater avocado dishes.

·         Rice. I forgot that I’d put this on and burnt it slightly, but only a little bit. The rice in the dish tasted fine, but the washing up will be a bit more interesting.

·         Tomato. There’s nothing quite like a fresh tomato. Mostly because a fresh tomato is dissimilar to lots of things in a lot of ways, that’s not really a comment on whether it’s good or not. But it is good.

·         Radish. I don’t think I’ve ever had a radish before (at least not knowingly). I ate the entire bowl and still don’t really remember eating one, so either I have a small mouse hiding behind my bowl stealing radishes when I’m not paying attention, or it’s just a relatively unremarkable food.

·         Sweetcorn. Sweetcorn reminds me of Switzerland, in that both are relatively neutral to me. I’ll happily eat it, but wouldn’t usually think to buy it or add it to things.

·         Cucumber. This wasn’t in the original recipe, but I love cucumber more than the average person (I usually get through a whole cucumber every three days or so) so it seemed like a good addition to the salad bowl family.

·         Cheese. This also wasn’t in the original recipe, but if you think I’m going to go two meals in a row without having cheese when I have the option of having cheese, you’re crazy.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that I haven’t eaten a proper meal for a week, but I think this bowl might be the tastiest thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. Fortunately, I have lots of all of the ingredients so can make it again tomorrow with minimal effort. (Or this afternoon if I get peckish). In any case, this was definitely a much better meal than the porridge for breakfast.

It was also very filling. I can’t work out if that’s because there’s actually a fair amount of food in there or if it’s because my stomach is still slowly waking up from its temporary hibernation. I suspect I’ll be doing this a few more times in the future, so I’ll probably be able to work it out from that. Perhaps in the future my buddha will become more well-fed – at the moment he’s comparatively thin.

It was also really nice to have a full-flavoured meal for once. It’s already done wonders for my energy level (as may the decent quantity of sugar that’s come from finishing the bottle of Coke that had been sitting in my fridge for a week). One of the things I hope to make use of for as long as possible is the fact that food with any flavour is deeply appealing at the moment; in particular, dishes like this that are really healthy (perhaps sans the cheese, but I’m only human), so hopefully this will spark a reasonable length of time of eating stuff that’s good for me and enjoying it.

I have my rice and beans-based dinner dish already planned out, so join me this evening for the final blog post of the Mean Bean challenge.

 Note: The Mean Bean challenge has now finished, as have the expanding blog posts. Thanks to your exceptional generosity, Tearfund will be getting £430. If you have enjoyed this blog and feel able to donate to get that figure even higher, the link is here.

Saturday morning – Berry Good (or: The First Meal of the Rest of Your Life)

I survived! I made it through five days of really dull food and came out the other side. I stared into the unblinking eye of blandness and held my ground without blinking myself. (Metaphorically, of course. I actually blinked quite a lot during the week.  When somebody invents the Slink Blink challenge to not blink for a week, I will definitely accept the opportunity to sleep for five days).

It was a little touch and go, though. Last night I was again extremely hungry when I went to bed, which noticeably affected how long it took me to get to sleep. The clock definitely ticked past midnight before I drifted off, and I did consider using the “Technically it’s Saturday” loophole to order approximately all the food in the world. But somehow that didn’t feel quite right – going to sleep hungry on the Friday night seemed to me like part of the challenge, and so I managed to hold off.

But this morning, nothing would hold me back from enjoying my first meal of freedom! What should I choose? What exciting dish would break my fast?

Oh yeah, I’ve already agreed it’d be porridge. Bummer.

I really do genuinely want to like porridge (as I think I’ve mentioned before). The problem is that at the moment I really don’t (as I know I’ve mentioned before). So I was really hoping that, by making this porridge in the best possible way, I would have discovered that over the course of the past week I’ve learned to love the meal I was stuck with, like we were the two main characters in a Richard Curtis romcom.

Alas, it was not to be.

Excuse me, waiter? Somebody seems to have put colour in my food. Isn't all food supposed to be vaguely off-white?

I did pretty much everything I was supposed to. I made it with milk instead of water. I added a liberal amount of honey. I even put in some berries I had in the freezer before I microwaved it to give it additional depth.

And sadly, porridge is still just uninteresting sludge. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news for those who love it, but it just isn’t a good food. The only difference between the porridge of today and the porridge of the previous week is that today’s porridge was sweeter, slightly creamier sludge. Which admittedly was better, but only in the sense that when somebody is repeatedly sledgehammering your face, when they switch to hitting your leg instead it’s a refreshing change of pace.

Sadly, then, this may be my last porridge-based meal for a long time. On a related note if anybody would like to give a good home to a well-endured, half-consumed bag of porridge oats, you are more than welcome to begin the adoption process. (I’ve never given away porridge before, so I assume the process is like giving away children).

So my first post-Mean Bean meal wasn’t especially exciting. But that’s OK – I have meals planned for the rest of the day that should be a step up.

On Thursday evening (and this is an indication of what the challenge does to you), I found myself surreptitiously perusing a Buzzfeed article of meat-free dinners, to prepare myself for today. I ended up deciding that I really wanted to eat at least half of them immediately, and I expect that over the coming weeks I’ll make all of them at one point or other. But I have in particular picked two out to make for lunch and dinner, and my plan for this morning is to pick up the ingredients (my fridge currently resembles Winnie-the-Pooh in that it’s a little bare) and then slavishly wait for lunch to come around.

One slight challenge for today is to not overdo the eating. Having dramatically cut my food intake for the past few days, I suspect it’ll take a couple of days to get back to my usual level of consumption, and already I can tell that my body isn’t completely sure what to do with the porridge I’ve just eaten. I have a strange sensation of simultaneously feeling quite full and very hungry, which I wouldn’t have thought was possible before. So let’s see how that develops over the rest of the day.

 Note: The Mean Bean challenge has now finished, as have the expanding blog posts. Thanks to your exceptional generosity, Tearfund will be getting £430. If you have enjoyed this blog and feel able to donate to get that figure even higher, the link is here.