Food – Life According to TJ

Partied Out…..

December 16, 2019 Steph TJ

… and it’s still over a week until Christmas.

I once worked with a chap who turned vegetarian at Christmas. Not because of some great ideological turnaround, but because he just ate far too much meat and couldn’t face eating it ever again. I think I might have arrived at that point. I may manage some chicken, and some fish, but red meat is definitely out. Joined by cheese and wine. If I never eat red meat or cheese, or drink Prosecco or wine again, I will be very happy!

How has this state of affairs come about? This year, rather than spending a chunk of time in Bristol during Autumn, we decided to split it into two smaller chunks, one at the end of October, during which we went to a wedding, and another in early December to provide us change to visit friends and family in the run up to Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been lovely to catch up with everyone – we didn’t manage to fit everyone in that we wanted to see, but the endless cycles of dinners has taken it’s toll.

shallow focus of white icing covered cake on white ceramic plate — Photo by Dmitry Zvolskiy on Pexels.com

I’m not a big drinker – maybe one or two glasses of wine with a meal – but even that is too much to face. I am, however, a dessert and cake eater, I’m one of those people with a pudding stomach, yet I can’t face another dessert this side of Christmas! I don’t even think I can face my beloved Mousse de Chocolat when we are back in Portugal.

It got me thinking about the difference in food between Bristol and Portugal. I’ve tried, I swear I’ve tried, to eat as healthily as I can when we’ve been in restaurants. I rarely order meals that involve chips only had one turkey dinner (which was a belter at the Lazy Trout at Meerbrook), but it’s the sauces. I had Seabass at Alton Marina in Stone which was just devine – but it came with a ratatouille based sauce. At Cote’s in Quakers Friars Bristol I had salmon, again divine, but again with a ratatouille sauce. Everything comes with a sauce and I like plain! Portugal plain! Where the fish is the star of the plate!

In light of recent, over eating events, I am also going to try introducing a 12 hour fast. I first heard about this on Rangan Chattergee’s, podcast ‘Feel Better, Live More’ with Professor Satchin Panda. If I think back to my childhood ‘tea’ was on the table at 5.00pm – primarily due to evening activities which my sister and I took part in which required us to be back out by 6.00pm. After that the kitchen closed. We weren’t the sort of family that did supper, a milky drink before bed but that was it. Occasionally we’d have a biscuit or two in the evening, but that largely depended on how recently the food shop had been done! Breakfast was usually about 7.00am, so that meant we’d ‘fasted’ for up to 14 hours between meals. Apparently this is good as it allows your body to digest the food properly, before you go to bed and stops the digestive problems that come with eating too late into the evening. Outside of that 12 hour window, you still eat normally – it’s just that the long break between dinner and breakfast helps the body along.

I’ve also googled steps you can take to minimise the effects of over-indulgence. According to US News the best ways to manage a food hangover are

Fill up on water and other clear liquids. I know I don’t drink enough water and am trying really hard to drink more water. I’ve added some peppermint oil to the water too, hoping that will get my system moving more quickly.
Eat healthy meals, avoid missing meals and try to get back onto an even keel as quickly as possible. Getting back to Portugal will help with this as the food is far more plain. Husband is also a superstar at cooking meals that will make my insides smile!
Eat fruit and vegetables; increase your fibre intake. Again, I know I fall short here, particularly with vegetables
Include some exercise – don’t go mad but introduce some exercise to get digestion moving.
Think about habits. This is key for me. To think about what habits led to the situation in the first place and identify things you would like to change. What I’d most like to change is my lack of will power, how easily I give in when people ask if I’d like a Prosecco, or if we’re having dessert. I have got to start doing what suits me, not other people.

I cannot quite explain just how bad I have been feeling, I felt death was inevitable, or at the very least my stomach might explode. I slept for an entire day as I was certain I had flu coming, I had shakes and I ached from head to toe. Whilst I have tried to eat as well as possible in restaurants, it’s been the habit of eating extra bits that have made the situation worse. The odd chocolate during the day from the tin in the middle of the coffee table, the odd chocolate chunk shortbread from Starbucks, the odd pastry from a bakery because I’m only here for a couple of weeks, the odd desert with meals when we have been out. All in all, it probably amounts to eating fairly badly, between meals, for the past two weeks. This is the habit that needs to stop, especially as I already know that white flour in particular makes me feel fairly lousy.

close up of salad in plate — Photo by Jill Wellington on Pexels.com

I’m not going to bother with a plan. I’m pretty rubbish at making and keeping to plans – I always forget to look at them. I am equally bad at tracking food too! I’m just going to take each day as it comes and try to do the best that I can. But in the short term I am going to aim for:

Avoiding alcoholic drinks
Avoiding needless cakes and chocolate
Avoiding red meat
Avoiding cheese

I’m not saying I will never have these things again, I’m not going to go mad and exclude things for ever, but I’m going to try my very best to take a break from them and see how it affects my health and overall wellbeing. At the moment the mere thought of eating any of the above makes me nauseous, but either way, I really cannot go on feeling quite as bad as I do at this moment in time! I don’t own any scales so I can’t monitor any weight loss, so it will all be based on feeling – how I look, how I feel, the energy I have and how I fit into my clothes. If at the end of the day I can give myself a green tick in each of the 4 areas above then I’ll consider it a good day. Once I have mastered those I might think about adding other things in, or re-introducing them to see what the effects are.

Bristol, Food and drink, Friends, Happiness, Portugal

Marvellous May

June 4, 2019 Steph TJ

What a month it turned out to be! It’s absolutely whizzed by and I have thoroughly enjoyed every moment.

At the start of the year I signed up to Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project Experience and have been half heartedly following it through. The theme for April was friends – and I kind of poo-pooed it as ‘not-for-me’. During May, however, that came back to haunt me in a big way! It’s not only Gretchen Rubin that advocates friendships, there’s a lot of research that supports the view that friendships are key – especially real life in person friendships, not the social media kind.

I suppose, if I’m honest, that I’ve largely spurned friendships in the past, thinking I’m not really the sort of person people would want to spend time with, which is largely a result of anxiety, but one thing that this month has proven is I have friends in abundance and my thoughts on the matter have been completed incorrect.

My marvellous month started on May 1st with lunch in Albufeira. Just my friend and I. She is my sort of mate – the sort that you know is there for you, but you don’t have to check in every day. The sort that really doesn’t care what you turn up in as the point of the lunch is the talking and the laughter, not the colour of your lipstick or whose shoes you are wearing. In a way that makes it even better, because when we do go out for lunch we have loads to catch up on and we laugh from start to finish. We also went out with our husbands for a beautiful lunch next to the old marina in Albufeira. My friend and I have been several times without husbands who decided they were missing a trick. Having been with us they now understand how we can take 4 hours over lunch!

Then there was the Wine Festival which takes place during the first weekend of May every year in Albufeira. We’ve always been away for it in the past, so this was our first attempt! I tried really very hard to be sensible about it – I really wanted to find a nice Rose that I could drink – rather than Casal Mendes or . What I did discover was that there are lots of beautiful wines available in Portugal, so why the restaurants all serve the same ones, I don’t know. I also learned that after tasting a few wines they all merge into one, making a choice very difficult.

This was closely followed by a walk around Faro with friends from my first teaching post in Staffordshire. I’ve done this walk before and it’s just perfect for showing people a taste of Portugal in a relatively short space of time. It was a fabulous morning walking in the sun, catching up on news and finished off with a pastel da nata with coffee at the O Seu Cafe. I always find it very peculiar when I see friends in Portugal – so to have three of them all at once was a real treat.

Prior to our return to Bristol we went out for dinner with a group of friends we have met in Portugal – some expats and some who holiday regularly in Albufeira. Over the years we have been spending time in Portugal, we have made some really lovely friendships and very much look forward to people coming out to visit. We do also travel the length of the country to return the visits when we are in the UK, so we are off to Burnley in July.

It’s always lovely returning to Bristol as it provides us with an opportunity to catch up, which generally happens on a Friday evening at our not so local pub. At the start of the football season we’d had a friendly wager on how high up the Championship league table Bristol City would finish. Our first Friday home was the presentation evening which was taken very seriously, complete with food, speeches and awards. This is what I would call typically silly British behaviour – but it’s the sort of banter that makes an evening and a friendship.

We’ve been out for dinner, with yet another couple that we love spending time with, to a superb restaurant in Bristol, Pasta Loco, one of the many independent restaurants that are now so popular across the city. We’d been wanting to go here for a long time and were always too late to book – this time I booked three months in advance and it didn’t disappoint, providing yet another evening of good food, good wine and amazing company.

And finally! The wedding! The mother of the bride was one of my friends that had visited Portugal earlier in the month. I’ve seen her 3 times in 2 months, in 3 entirely different locations, and it’s been wonderful. Whenever I go back home, the bride and her mother are always the first people I contact to arrange a time to catch up. Each time, it’s like the months since the last time we met up haven’t mattered, we just carry on from where we left off. I can honestly say that this is the best wedding I have been to – if ever there was a wedding you wanted to be at – this was the one. Everything about it was just stunning – it was true to the bride and her husband and it was perfect. It was held in a place that was special to the bride and it just oozed love in a way I have never experienced at a wedding before. From start to finish, it was about the love of two people (and their daughter) – and that shone through every moment of the day. It was a real honour to have been invited to share in the day.

In amongst all this there have been so many other things I have done with good friends. I went shopping, I’ve been for coffees, I’ve been for dinners, for lunches, walked alongside the River Avon, been along to watch Take That and danced the night away. I even popped into school in Uttoxeter on the day prior to the wedding. In the past I wouldn’t have done this, thinking there would be no-one who would be interested in seeing me. This time I went in and spent a lovely hour catching up with old colleagues – followed by a Saturday morning drinking coffee in a sunny garden wondering where 10 years had disappeared to.

I am incredibly fortunate and so very grateful to have such a wide circle of lovely, loving and loyal friends around me – of all ages and inclinations. I am also so very grateful that I have finally woken up to appreciate what is there in front of me and to take the opportunities to spend time with friends that I feel in the past I have either taken for granted or just plain ignored. The research is correct – real life friendships matter. It’s a long time since I have laughed so much in the company of good friends and I look forward to many more happy times.

Albufeira, Bristol, Happiness, Walking

Changeover Week!

May 19, 2019 Steph TJ

But these weeks are also very exciting as we remember what it is that we so love about each of the places we are fortunate enough to live in. I have talked about the contrasts between the two places before – but this time coming from Albufeira to Bristol seems to have been more extreme.

Two lots of cleaning, it’s a bizarrely northern thing I suspect. I spend hours cleaning one apartment so that it’s nice to come back to, and then spend the first day back cleaning – even though nothing has happened in the apartment whilst we were away. This time the cleaning took on additional focus as a relative will be staying in our Portuguese home whilst we are in Bristol – so I have discovered yet another level of clean – ‘relative that isn’t your parents, sister or nephews’ clean!

The last time we came was for a flying visit so that I could go on the Hen weekend in Bath, so I barely had any time to spend in Bristol and so didn’t fully appreciate it. This time we have come back for the wedding – which I am very excited about and we are here for a few weeks. Husband did ask me last week what it was I was most looking forward to about being here and it was the wedding. Now I am back here, I realise there was so much more that I miss about Bristol.

Bristol is home. Despite my best efforts to make our Albufeira apartment as homely as possible, without moving lock, stock and barrel, there are ‘things’ in Bristol which make it home. For a start there is my wedding bouquet which I made from Coalport brooches; then there are my Grandad’s books along with his certificates proudly displayed on the wall, as they have been since 1945 I imagine; my Nana’s vase and balloon lady; the dog’s radio (the dog passed over 2 years ago now, but for some reason that radio which never gets used survived downsizing); the gifts I received from good friends at my first wedding and were the treasures I took with me when I left; the daft bits and bobs that my sister has bought me for Christmas over the years. It’s not just about me, there are ornaments from my mother-in-law’s home, things that she loved and which are of sentimental value to my husband. There are other bits and pieces that represent our life together as well as those we separately bought to our home – silly little things that make a home.

Of course, there are our friends. We were fortunate enough to have lots of friends visit us during our stay in Albufeira, including the mother of the bride at the forthcoming wedding and it is so lovely to be able to catch up with them again. Or last meal in Albufeira was at an excellent restaurant, The Country Cockerel Kitchen, with our good friend Graham Evans amongst others. We also have reservations at a couple of beautiful restaurants in Bristol during this stay, along with a visit to the ‘Mighty Gate’ to watch Take That! Food, in particular, is one thing that both husband and I genuinely miss when we are in Portugal. The choice in Bristol is immense and so varied. Already this week we’ve eaten falafel from Eat a Pitta, (nothing in Albufeira has come close to the standard of these falafel) had Caribbean food from the Friday street food market outside St Nic’s market, gone along to the farmers market on Whiteladies Road. Whilst the food in Albufeira is lovely and there is a wide choice of good quality restaurants, nothing really compares to the variety on offer in Bristol – much of which is relatively cheap and of outstanding quality.

Bristol is generally a fantastic, vibrant, diverse place to be. There is no ‘normal’ that I can identify. People are just themselves, content in the knowledge that it’s ok to be who you want to be, but nobody bats an eyelid, nobody feels the need to conform. Vintage and second hand shopping is as popular as high street shopping as people hunt for unique pieces that will set them apart from the crowd. I know that I myself feel more relaxed here and under less pressure to fit in. I’ve recently watched a programme on Netflix, ‘Call to Courage’ with Brene Brown. One thing that really struck a chord with me is that fitting in isn’t the same as belonging. When you try to ‘fit in’ you change aspects of yourself to make yourself more acceptable, more popular, more normal. When you belong, you can just be yourself. I belong in Bristol, I ‘fit in’ in Albufeira and that, in a nutshell is the key difference. I’ve always been a bit quirky, a bit of a lone wolf and during the last years of my teaching I lost my individuality a bit. It’s beginning to come back now, and when I am in Bristol I truly feel I can be myself, without judgement, no matter how bonkers that might be.

Yesterday, I had a fantastic morning walking the length of one of the main routes in Bristol. From Wild Oats, a health food shop at the top of Whiteladies Road, right down to the library on College Green, past the beautiful Will’s Building which dominates Park Street. Along the way I encountered most of what Bristol has to offer, including a walk for Crohn’s and Colitis, and a motorbike rally raising awareness of Soldier F. Bristol is loud and busy, with a constant soundtrack of cars, buses, sirens, skateboarders, late-night revellers, the slush puppy wheelbarrow man, all set in a backdrop of the old city. I love it here and would be sad not to be able to experience it any more.