Pancake Day

It seems that I can't win with my sleep pattern. We were so tired after our walk on Monday that we were both in bed for 8.30 pm! I slept straight through until 6.30 am too. I love sleeps like that, I don't get them too often. Well, not where alcohol hasn't played a huge part, anyway... and alcohol has been knocked on the head for the time being. I didn't lose all that weight by including it as part of my diet, I think during 2019 I had a drink a grand total of four times. 2020 and lockdown and general anxiety resulted in my intake increasing. Not ridiculously, but still. More. There's just too many calories in alcohol, and I cannot stop at just one. My attempts to have just one can result in me doing Jägerbombs at 4 am. And then you have sleeps like last night's, in bed by 9 pm, and awake at 2.30 am, thanks in some part to my son being noisy in the room above me. So - that will be me hoovering the landing outside his bedroom later this morning, when he is trying to sleep :-) 

We finished our meal plan for the week before we went shopping... always a good idea.

Tuesday: Home baked ham salad followed by Slimming Eats American Pancakes

Wednesday: Two Chubby Cubs Cheats Lasagne, cheesy garlic bread and salad

Thursday: Two Chubby Cubs Honey and Garlic beef with rice or noodles

Friday: Two Chubby Cubs Caramelised Vietnamese Pork and rice 

Saturday: Slimming Eats Pulled Pork Pasta Bake, cheesy garlic bread and salad 

Sunday: Two Chubby Cubs Honey and Mustard Salmon, noodles and salad

We managed to slip three of the recipes from the new Chubby Cubs cookbook in this week. Mr G chose the Honey and Garlic Beef, I chose the Vietnamese Pork and the Honey and Mustard Salmon was a joint choice, as I have salmon to use up, and we always like to have something light on a Sunday, when we weigh on a Monday morning, either a salad or a roast dinner that's not too heavy on potato.

We navigated Pancake Day really well. I made a huge pile for the children using Nigella's Homemade Instant Pancake Mix (recipe here). It's foolproof, and the taste of these remind me very much of the scotch pancakes we used to get from a local bakery when we were kids. Mr G and I had Slimming Eats American Style Pancakes (recipe here) using our Healthy Extra B of oats. My mind was blown by these, they really did taste like thick American pancakes, I was absolutely stuffed after eating them. And to think that all they contain is 40 g of oats.

It seems like it's a pretty versatile mixture that Slimming Eats has come up with, this pancake mix was very like the baked oats mixture, only using less yogurt and the oats are ground down to a flour. I think it's also the basic premise behind the mixture for the Almost Syn Free Bagels that are popular on her Facebook page at the moment (recipe here). Oats, egg, yogurt, baking powder and then either sweet or savoury seasoning. I've personally found both the baked oats and the pancakes to be far more filling than one bread roll or a couple of small slices of bread. 

Look how thick they are? We had ours with fresh strawberries and Sweet Freedom Caramel syrup. Those syrups are absolutely amazing. I was hoping to find some of the Golden Syrup in Lidl, but it seems I missed the boat there. No matter, the caramel one was just as nice, it really reminds me of maple syrup. And at only half a syn a teaspoon, you can't go wrong. It's plant based, so it's vegan, made from apples, grapes and carob apparently. I use it mainly to sweeten the rice pudding that I make with unsweetened almond milk, and on top of Greek yogurt and berries at breakfast. 

Mr G really enjoyed his salad, I reluctantly ate mine, it's not really my cup of tea, I prefer salad as a garnish to a meal, or a more exciting salad such as the RecipeTin Eats Prawn and Mango or Mexican Avocado Chicken. Plenty of different tastes and textures. 

We didn't get to go for a walk yesterday, by the time we'd got back from shopping, kept everything, and I'd fried up all the pancakes, it was gone 3 pm. So I grabbed my headphones and I did just short of 5 kilometres on the treadmill again, just nudged my step count over 10,000 steps. I really had to push myself too. I'm not sure if we will get out for a walk today, it's been blowing a hoolie for the last two hours, anyway. If the wind dies down, I might pack a sandwich and some fruit and see if I can find a local-ish route we can take, I have a couple in mind that we haven't done yet. It's so difficult right now with exercise having to start and end at home, it's in danger of becoming very samey. 

The fixture list has been released for the upcoming season, kicking off with an away match on my birthday weekend at London Skolars. Ordinarily, I would be orchestrating a plan now, booking us on the away coach, making sure Mr G was off work, asking my mother if she would babysit, booking a hotel, and getting very excited about seeing everyone again. This season, we don't even know if we will be able to attend a home match yet. And I had a very poignant reminder on Facebook yesterday; I received the daily notification of memories, to find a message from my friend who passed away, from precisely a year ago, after our match had been suspended through flooding. 

So sad to think of the whole year of memories that we didn't get to make last year. And that there won't be any new ones made again.