Breakfast: Vogel’s cafe style light muesli & lite milk
Lunch: slice of Vogel’s 12 grain bread, olive oil spread, cheese, tomato, mini cucumber, red pepper, grapes
Afternoon snack: chicken noodles
Dinner: spaghetti bolognaise
Supper: fresh pineapple 

Well, I’ve now moved to the other side of the world and have found a house and a kitchen. Our goods arrived by ship and were delivered the day after we moved into the house and I have set about putting my kitchen to rights, deciding what goes in which cupboard. I have a much better kitchen than the one I left behind in England. Well, it could hardly have been worse, really! 

Although I have visited NZ three times before, and fed myself each time, cooking in a proper kitchen in which I am staying put, rather than in a succession of backpackers, is a very different thing. I am discovering many subtle differences. 

Pork pies are not like UK pork pies (but I knew that already – my kiwi brother had raved about English pork pies when he visited many years ago). 

A standard large loaf in the UK is 800g. Here it is 720g. This means that slices are smaller. 

In the UK milk comes as ‘ordinary’ (I can’t for the life of me think what it is called) which is, if I remember correctly, 4% fat; semi skimmed which is 2% fat and which I usually bought; and skimmed which is 1% fat and is tasteless and unpleasant.
Here milk is standard (I think), lite and trim. I keep forgetting which has more fat, lite or trim. I know they have less fat than the UK semi and skimmed. There is also calci-trim. And probably others that I’ve yet to encounter. 

Supermarket meat is a better quality than I expected and they generally have a good selection of fish and seafood. Fruit and veg are generally more expensive than I had expected and have been variable in tastiness (so far). 

I feel that my weight is creeping back up so I have given up the L&P and Tim Tams and am photo-dieting again.
Nearly all the brand names are different so the calorie charts for bought foods that I already had are of no use. I shall have to start over again with a spreadsheet.

What I ate today:
An airline meal (Delta – Milan to JFK): Chicken with risotto and almost raw brocolli. I also ate the cheese and crackers that came with it but not the salad (I made the mistake of putting the rather nasty dressing on it), nor the roll. Are cattle class airline rolls ever edible?

An airline egg and tomato roll: this was given to me as breakfast on the first (BA) flight from London Heathrow to Milan. I didn’t eat it at the time – it did not look nice and I just couldn’t face it. Rik kept it for me and gave it to me later. Despite being a textureless bap type piece of bread and some egg and tomato chopped so finley you could safely feed it to a small baby, it didn’t taste too bad. I wouldn’t want one again though!

After getting to our hostel, too tired and jetlagged to to any further, we went into the second eatery we stumbled across. This was the Palacio Azteca at 1374 York Ave (between 73rd St & 74th St) New York, NY 10021 (212) 249-7313 (no web address found).

I had a rather nice piece of steak, some shrimp (prawns) a tasty salad, served wtih green salad, Mexican rice (as far as I can tell it just means it has some tomato in it) some guacamole and a bean thing that was far nicer than it looked. It was a lovely meal in a small cafe-type establishment. No drink licence but you can BYO and we were directed to a beer shop a few doors down. They were also happy to bring us tap water and we got complimentary chips’n'dip while we waited.
Rik’s meal was similar bbut with spicy prawns and no beef.

The travel blog for the day can be found at
http://www.offexploring.com/jacqiandrik/blog/uk/heathrow

I realised that it was a perfect time to record the food choices I made, the food choices available to me, and the different places I ate. I’ll be travelling for nearly three months between leaving the UK and arriving in New Zealand. All but two of those weeks will be in the United States. We’ll betravelling from New York to Los Angeles. Then we’ll have two weeks in Rarotonga int eh Cook Islands.

So I decided to get the camera out at mealtimes again. To choose the ‘heathy choice’ where there was one, and not to worry too much when there wasn’t. I’ll photograph the food and, when I can, the place in which it was eaten or bought.

I missed photographing a couple of the meals on the first day or so as I’d not yet decided I was doing this.

We are moving to the other side of the world.  Which is why I’ve been too busy to blog.

We’ll be doing some travelling first so, between the middle of October and the beginning of January I will be eating all over the US and in Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. Once I get settled in a new house in New Zealand I promise to show and tell about lots of interesting food. Then I will be  blogging about the new and different foods I encounter there.

Wish me luck!

We had lots of mushrooms left from our trip to the farmers’ market last week. I’m off to Turkey later today and wanted to use them up. I knew my SO would probably not use them. There was a bag of spinach as well.

I took some raw prawns from the freezer and threw them in a dry pan on a low heat to start the thawing process.
Meanwhile, I chopped half an onion, three-quarters of a red pepper lurking in the fridge, and peeled the mushrooms. (You don’t have to peel mushrooms but I just do).

After removing the thawing and just-starting-to-tinge-slightly-pink prawns from the pan and setting them on some kitchen paper in a bowl, I wiped the pan and heated some oil.

I fried the chopped onion and peppers, then added the mushrooms.
While they were colouring I put some spinach in a pan with hot water and a little salt and put the lid on it.
I threw the prawns back in and cooked them through.
Finally I put in a good spoonful of the chili jelly we bought at the farmer’s market and melted it in, ensuring everything was covered and the jelly (now a sauce) was warmed through.

I put the prawn & mushroom quickie on a bed of the spinach and served it with a Marks & Spencer garlic & parsley butter ciabatta.

It was really nice. Quick and light. I’ll definitely do it again.

Serum lipids: total cholesterol level 4.0 mmol/L
serum triglycerides 1.8 mmol/L
Glucose level: serum random glucose level 4.6 mol/L (3.5-5.6)
Doesn’t mean anything to me but apparently translates as ‘cholesterol is fine, glucose is within normal range’. I hope the NZIS MA is happy with it.

I’ll have to go back to dieting after today because (a) I have to wait a week to see if my blood is ‘blood lite’ or ‘full fat, high sugar’ – till I have passed the the NZIS MA’s satisfaction, I can’t be too silly with food – I don’t want to be the cause of us not being allowed to emigrate.
(b) I still need to lose weight anyway.

Now that the plan is to go in September I could get down to a decent weight (just at the high end of okay) by then if I try really, really hard.

So what’s in the pictures?
Breakfast: Special K bar (in the car, after I no longer needed to fast) follwed by two hot cross buns in the office. No spread in them as I didn’t have any with me.

Mid morning: someone brought these in to the office – banana and malteser muffin. It was rather heavy and stodgy – not as tasty as the muffins I make!

Lunch: pasta with spinach and pinenuts (and oil – most of which Ileft at the bottom of the container – not a low-calorie lunch!)

Mid afternoon (really shouldn’t have needed it): hot cross bun and three sweets

Dinner: Jacket potato & mince (half with carrots, half as bolognaise)
I cooked the potatoes in the combi-oven – the fisrt time I’ve used that function in the three years or so I’ve owned it. They came out really well.

In the evening: the last of the choccies!

If you think there is more food than usual in the ‘daytime’ shot that’s because there is. The plan was for me to go to the gym or swimming pool before work this morning. It didn’t happen that way (but that’s another story). I prepared ahead and packed some Nairn mixed berries oat biscuits to eat on the way there. I think exercising on an empty stomach would be stupid. I ate them almost as soon as I got to work. They were delicious.

Dinner may look unappetising but it was actually very tasty. My SO cooked this evening – although I had chosen and bought the meal. The sad, aneamic looking lump is a Marks & Spencer smoked haddock and bubble & squeak cake and was actually very tasty, with a good chunky texture. The instructions say fry or oven bake. Obviously I’m not going to fry it so in the oven it went. It looked undercooked to me when SO served it up, but it was hot inside so I guessed it was okay. I tasted really good.

I hadn’t planned on having potatoes but he’d bought some for himself so I asked for two small ones. I figure it’s what you put on them that does the harm. That, and wanting to eat way too many!

Oh, and I weighed myself this morning. I know conventional wisdom is that you shouldn’t weigh more often than once a week but I need to know that the regime is working. According to the scales I have lost three pounds since Monday. I doubt it. I don’t even feel one pound lighter. Waistbands certainly not looser yet. Still I’ll keep going for a bit and see what happens.

It’s certainly easy to pack my food bag for this diet. The same everyday. Adding an apple t my morning food – eaten on the way to work – has helped get me through the morning. Putting the blueberries and raspberries (taken out of the freezer the night before) on the luchtime cereal makes it more interesting and gives me a ‘sweet boost’.

I can’t go from lunch at 1pm to dinner at about 6.30pm with nothing in between so I’m having a small tin of pineapple rings in the afternoon. My choice of tinned fruit was governed by my having lots of small tins of pineapple in the house as I bought some at Costco. The small tin is enough to give me some extra food without being too much.

Dinner was a Marks & Spencer microwave meal. Not ideal but right now Ineed something that I can just throw in the oven or microwave and be eating very quickly. If I make my own food I will eat too much of it. It was nice enough. There was quite a bit of veg (25%) and the rice okay. The chicken tasted like chicken in all microwave meals – artificial. The sauce left a lingering chemical taste in my mouth later that evening. But I’ve had worse.

SO had been to Costco and bought, as well as a twin pack of Special K, some bananas, apples and a huge box of grapes. I can eat a standard box (400g?) of grapes in one sitting. Fortunately, this box was so big – 1.8kg (I just checked) – that I was able to just weigh out 200g to eat now as my brain, and even my tummy, knew that I could not eat them all at once so didn’t even think about trying to.

But now I have to start thinking about food for the weekend, and for Friday when we go to aqua aerobics straight from work and traditionally go the Chinese chip shop on the way home. I had toyed with the idea of making somekind of chicken and vegetable dish in the slow cooker, so it would be ready as soon as we got in on Friday. I’d asked the SO to get some carrots, and some mushrooms for the prawn stir-fry I’m planning for Saturday but he didn’t find any.

Limiting my food intake when I have to carry it away from the house is one thing; restricting my food intake when I’m at home with a full freezer, fridge and cupboards is a whole different story. I popped into M&S Food at lunchtime (there is one a couple of minutes walk from my office) and bought some spinach and three ‘Count On Us’ (ie diet version) beef lasagnes. Why three? they were three for £5 makeing the third one cost not a lot (I don’t remember the exact price of buying just one). I decided that we can have them when we get home from water aerobics on Friday. I’ll have to wait 40 minutes though (30 mins cooking plus time for the oven to heat up). I guess I could try setting the oven to come on so they are cooked when we get home. Then I realised that doing a 45 minute aqua aerobics class on about 400 calories is just not going to work. Should I have a meal at lunchtime and cereal after the class, I wondered? I decided that something hot to pop in the microwave at lunchtime was a must, and that I would still have a hot meal (the beef lasagne and spinach) after the class. I can still keep within the calorie limit. I’ll let you know how I get on.

I remembered some fruit today (well last night, when I took the raspberries out of the freezer and the pineapple (not shown) out of the cupboard). I also put the cereal in a much smaller contain and it seemed to be more filling – it must be true that our eyes inform our tummies about how much food they think we are getting.

I was dismayed (probably too strong a word) to discover boxes of cakes in the office kitchen this morning, must be someone’s birthday. But I ignored them. They are not for me, I am dieting.

I had to get the bus to work as SO had an osteopath appointment at about 9ish. I knew that I woul dneed to eat before I got to work so put an apple in my bag. I then had the first lot of cereal once I got there.

I try to take my lunch break between 1pm and 2pm. That way the afternoon is shorter and home time seems to come more quickly. However, I was very busy today and barely had tome to stop. I too twenty minutes at 1.40 and had athe second lot of cereal with the berries that I have forgotten earlier.

During the afteroon I was quite hungry, but not as much as yesterday (well I had eaten more today – an apple and 60g of raspberries more) and kept drinking water.

This didn’t stop me from feeling hungry by home time (though not as badly as yesterday) and I had a can of four pineapple rings (which I forgot to photograph) just before I left the office for the 25 minute walk to SO’s office.

Dinner was more runner beans (I do like them) with a Marks & Spencer COU (Count On Us) sweet & sour chicken with vegetable rice microwave meal. I’d love to cook something instead but know that I will add too much oil or make too big a portion if I do. I’m sticking to prepared food for a couple of days and am looking forward to a home-cooked prawn stir-fry on Saturday.

Tuesday evenings is the pub quiz at our local and we go with our next door neighbour. I was going to have orange juice and diet lemondade but wondered ‘is there more calories in orange juice than lager?” So I had lager, but two halves instead of two pints.

When I got home SO asked me to cut him a piece of cake (left over from last week’s party). It smelled good but I resisted and had a tin of peach slices in juice instead.

Nutritional data:
Calories (kcal) 1351
Protein (g) 51.9
Carbohydrate (g) 222.6
Fat (g) 11.0
Fibre (g) 19.8
Fruit & Veg 10.5