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October 15, 2014October 15, 2014

Post Berlin Marathon

Gosh it feels like ages ago now that I was in Berlin and running the marathon. The days after Berlin were a lot more relaxed (for me at least) than the days before, but a lot more painful as you can imagine!

After the debacle of finding Ben and my dad after the race and then trying to find our way out of the race area, we headed back to our hotel. The boys had a drink and some nibbles in the hotel bar while I went upstairs to shower. I was so thankful that this time around we didn’t have a bath-shower. After the Paris marathon I remember how painful it had been to get my legs over the bath sides to get into the shower *shudders*.

I did however have fun finding all the places I’d chaffed. Not under my arms this time but weirdly just above my bum on my lower back!

The top of my shorts must have rubbed. Fun times.

After enjoying a luxuriously warm and bubbly shower, I headed downstairs all cleaned up to see Ben had got himself possibly the most disgusting looking meal possible.

You can see a fellow marathoner’s foot in the background – there were so many in the lobby!

A curryworst. He loved it so what can I say! Looks a bit funny to me 😉 My dad ordered some chips and like a vulture I landed on those chips with a vengeance. So salty and good.

Then sadly my dad headed off to catch his flight as he was only staying to watch the marathon and had work on Monday (sucker). Ben and me had an early evening meal in the hotel restaurant. It was rather posh!

We had another one of those sharing platters with lots of antipasti style bits and pieces (I got the veg and salad, Ben got the Parma ham and bread – we work well as a team). For main I went for pork schnitzel with fried potatoes and cranberries with a side salad (well, two side salads as Ben didn’t want his). For pudding I went for a peach crumble (it was microscopic in my marathon hungry eyes…but very nice regardless).

Then we went to the hotel room. I chilled in the best way possible.

We did consider renting a film (like we did in Paris) but we were both so tired we read for a bit and fell asleep around 7.30pm. I’m not even joking. I woke up at midnight thinking it was like 3am. I had a banging headache and struggled to fall back asleep but eventually fell asleep until 7am-ish. Headache gone and we both felt so refreshed!

We decided to do some sight seeing so headed off to wander through the Tiergarten and then to the Reichstag.

We saw lots of sights, like the Brandenburg Gate, the Jewish Memorial, Checkpoint Charlie again and a huge mall. Both of us staggered along, me because I was aching everywhere from the marathon and Ben because his knee was playing up a bit after all the walking the day before 🙁

We found a crazy American-style diner (called Andy’s Diner) that took our fancy for lunch. We were both in need of a nice sit down and some food.

I chose a salad and honestly it was possibly the best salad I’ve had in a while.

Chicken, kidney beans, hard boiled egg and lots of salad in a huge crispy tortilla bowl (which is underneath all the salad in the above photo) with a creamy ranch dressing. It literally took me like 20 minutes to eat all of it.

Literally bigger than my head – my kinda salad!

Then we plodded on. In total we walked 34,000 steps (15.5 miles). We were shattered and honestly me legs felt like they would fall off. Ben found it hilarious watching me trying to get down stairs.

My dear husband finding it far too funny that I was in pain

We stopped in the afternoon for another respite. And lo and behold! I found a cafe that sold beer, coffee and cake! A winner all round 😉

I went for a delicious vanilla chocolate cake. It was all spongy and delicious. So good. Ben went for a cheesecake.

It was a huge thumbs up from us. We then chilled for a bit people watching. It was a great spot – down the road from the Brandenburg Gate and the number of people we saw hobble past was quite amusing. There were so many people who had clearly run the marathon.

Dinner that night was a quick meal in a local, but lovely, restaurant and then another early night. Honestly, sleep (and cake) was the best recovery for me!

And the next day we headed home. It was a lovely little mini-break and I loved Berlin and the marathon but, as I’ve said before, it was bittersweet. I really wish Ben could have run. But he’s deferred his place so next year I think we’ll be returning! I might run it if I get in the ballot but we’ll see.

What’s your normal ‘go-to’ meal in a restaurant? For me it’s always a salad.

Do you like to try the local food when you’re abroad? The curryworst did not appeal but the schnitzel was amazing.

Would you ever want to run the Berlin marathon?

September 18, 2014September 18, 2014

Weekend fun and Uzuma drinks

So my weekend recap is a little delayed, but hey these things happen. Weekend’s are precious. Sleeping, eating, running (god willing!), cake (separate category to eating because it’s cake and amazing), friends, family…all the best things really!

After getting over the boredom that was pool running on Saturday morning I got home and pottered about waiting for Ben. He was out doing a 30 mile cycle ride. I was tempted to go with them instead of the pool running but I wanted to do something a bit more running-specific and frankly wasn’t up for a long ride.

After eating lunch we headed to go shopping in the wonder that is West Quay in Southampton. It’s like another world. It’s HUGE (I’ve blogged about the amazingness before HERE last Christmas). One of the main reasons I wanted to go is that it’s like the only place that sells frozen yogurt outside of London in Southampton.

I went in a few shops but just felt a bit…old. The fashion right now is just not me – all crop tops and weird skirts. I’m not a fashionista (can you tell? Ha!) and just like normal clothes. So Fatface is where I found success!

After that I was kind of done. We headed straight to the fro-yo!

Notice that my fro-yo has the fruit in it!

The server asked what size we wanted and we both went for the biggest – obviously 😉 And both chose salted caramel.

Embarrassingly as we were paying the lady went “you do realise your top is on the wrong way?”. Erm…nope I hadn’t been aware of this. Epic fail for a basic human skill: dressing oneself. Hopefully it was just after trying stuff on, otherwise it was a bit of an embarrassing day and my husband doesn’t look at me anymore 😉

Genius right there

On Sunday I ran 11 miles which went well. And then for lunch we went to Nando’s with our friend, Nathan.

I just don’t get bored of that combo: whole chicken (medium spice), corn on the cob and salad. It rocks my world. I could go there every week (let’s pretend I don’t…).

The other week I was contact by the people at Uzuma to test out some of their newly released products. Uzuma are a Dutch company and have released a “green slow juice”. Basically they are vegetable (and fruit) juices that have been cold-pressed and processed under high pressure (HPP) in order to preserve the drinks and give them a shelf-life of 21 days without adding any preservatives.

“We add nothing extra to our green juices, meaning there are no preservatives, fragrances, colourings or flavourings. Nothing. What you experience from Uzuma green juice is the 100% pure power of nature. Our green juice allows us to bring you closer to a healthier lifestyle in a simple and convenient way. We do not use destructive traditional spinning extraction to produce Uzuma. All our vegetables and fruit are slow juiced using the latest innovative methods, allowing you to benefit from maximum vitamin and mineral retention.” Source

Zen flavour – broccoli, cucumber, kale, apple, lime, avocado etc.

How is it different to other juice drinks? Basically it’s the method they use in order to extract the juice from the vegetables and fruit. It doesn’t involve heat and so has a better nutritional value than regular juice drinks (i.e. it’s raw). Read more about it HERE.

Rise flavour – carrots, apple, pineapple, orange, lemon

What did I think? Well, I love vegetables so this is right up my street. Some of them tasted a bit better than others – mainly the ones with more fruit in them as this made them sweeter. But saying that, I quite enjoyed all of the flavours regardless of their sweetness.

I think the big test was how Ben found them. I made gave him one each day to take into work to drink. He is a vegetable dodger so these were more beneficial to him than me who loves veg and eats it regularly.

Shine – melon, mango, carrots and orange

He much preferred the sweeter ones and detested the one that had beetroot in it (Vibe) as he doesn’t like beetroot. But he said they were “alright” and that he could “endure taking them” to maximise his health.

Each one literally just contains vegetables and fruit. They’re dairy, gluten and soy free and they’re around 100 calories (some more, some less).

Personally I wouldn’t necessarily drink these everyday, only because I get enough veg already. Maybe I’d have some if I’d been on holiday and hadn’t eaten much veg and needed a bit of a health boost. I would definitely recommend them to people like my dad and Ben who don’t eat that much veg on a regular basis. It’s an easy way for them to get a lot of nutrition quick and easily.

Do you like juicing? What are your favourite ingredients?

What’s a restaurant you regularly keep going back to? We have many pubs we go back to, but Nando’s is the main chain we visit a lot.

Ever had an embarrassing shopping-related incident?

*** Full disclosure: I was sent the Uzuma products for free to review. But all opinions are my own***

July 16, 2014

Men drink beer, men bring back meat…

Sometimes during the week Ben might go out with some boyfriends (doesn’t work does it? – boy mates) to go do what men folk do…like drink beer and talk about whatever those men folk talk about. My delicate feminine mind couldn’t handle whatever goes on in those meet-ups I’m sure 😉

While he’s out this is usually my time to take charge of the television…catch up with the Kardashians or check in with the Housewives (both Real and fake – though likely the same thing). Maybe even have a solo-Anna family Guy sesh, who knows! Rock and roll.

Usually this is also the time I can have whatever I want for dinner without Ben turning his nose up (“how many vegetables are you having?” or the always pleasant “that looks like sick”). Very exciting. Anyway, I digress. So Ben went to the pub and very likely two hours later I went to bed (as I said: rock and roll).

In the morning Ben and me got up and were catching up, having not had the chance to do it the previous night, and he casually mentioned that he won some meat. Random but OK, that’s quite cool. What kind? “Beef something” he says.

Getting my breakfast ready I open the fridge door to find a rather large hunk of meat sort of crammed in among the yogurts and butter.

A bit of meat he says?! This could feed a small family for two weeks!! I was stunned. We don’t even eat beef that regularly! Ben appeared rather sheepishly and went “yep that’s the one”. You don’t say…

Could have been worse, Nathan (one of said boy mates) won six pork steaks and woke up in the morning to find he had eaten half of them when he got in…

Anyway I carved that bad boy up (the meat, not Nathan) on Sunday afternoon and it literally took me 45 minutes. I cut some of it into chunks after my dad suggested using some of it for casseroles and slow cooker meals, and cut the rest into steak portions. All now safely in the freezer.

It’s mildly amusing that last week I cooked us some organic beef steak and Ben really wasn’t a fan. Probably me not overcooking it and it turning out a bit more chewy than we like.

I sprinkled the steak with some steak seasoning (Schwartz) and we had it with vegetables and roasted sweet potato chunks (and BBQ sauce of course).

Well beef will be on the menu now for a fair while so I might have to get the cooking of it right! Well, practice makes perfect I suppose.

And while we’re on the subject of recent eats, we’ve also been enjoying pork steaks with a honey and soy sauce marinade served with a new-to-me vegetable/fruit (?): plantains.

I fried seasoned slices of plantain in coconut oil. I’m not going to lie, they didn’t entirely rock my world. But they were a nicely carby addition to the meal. We were slightly disappointed that they didn’t taste a little of banana… 😉

And one last meat-related point. Probably the worst time to win a huge hunk of meat is when you go to Casa Brasil, the all-you-can-eat Brazilian rodizio restaurant. I think I ate gammon, roast pork, pork ribs, beef sirloin, beef rump (I think?), and another type of beef (more chunky but lovely and salty)…

So yeah, perfect timing when I can’t even look at the deli meat in Tesco at the moment.

Have you ever won a food item in a raffle?

Have you ever tried plantain?

Are you a big meat eater? What’s your favourite meat? I must admit I’m a very boring meat eater in that my favourites are chicken and turkey. Though I love ribs…heavenly.

**Psst! Check out Laura’s blog Wholeheartedly Healthy for a brilliant giveaway –> HERE ! **

July 10, 2014

Things lately

Things are plodding along quite nicely round here. Though I’d hate to look back at my life and think of it as a “plod”. Rather that though than a sprint I suppose!

I guess you could call this an ‘odds and ends’ post of stuff that’s been happening lately:

Ben making carrot cake

This is big, big news people. For so long Ben has been promising to bake for me. But these promises have never materialised to actual calorific-dense baked goods (despite me buying him ingredients and everything). I’m the one who cooks, he’s the one that apparently bakes.

Last week he had the week off as he was starting a new job so he had no excuse. Being a typical man, he left it to mid-afternoon Friday to begin his task. I got regular text updates as to the progress of the cake…

Apart from a minor zest grating related injury (and a lovely photo of it sent my way – in case I wasn’t fully aware of the sheer hard work he was putting in), it all seemed to be going swimmingly.

That is until I got a bit of an urgent phone call: “Anna, I forgot to add the carrot in before I put it in the oven. What do I do??”.

He even sent me a selfie to adequately express how he felt.

Luckily he was able to get the cakes (there were two) out of the oven asap and stir in the hastily grated carrot (no further grating related injuries here thank goodness). Whew. Rectified. But amusing nonetheless 😉

Ta da! How good do they look? As the loaf tin was a little small for the batter, he made a mini round cake as well…with a better cake to icing ratio if you ask me 😉 It tasted divine and it was all I could do to not consume the entire two cakes in one sitting. And yes, there was carrot in it 😉

New mattress

Ben’s above selfie could also adequately describe the feelings we felt when our lovely new mattress was delivered the other day.

“Pants” would be one word to describe this situation. There are others I could use. Thankfully we can swap it (and pay the extra) for the correct mattress size. Not sure how we got this so wrong really…I don’t know how we both survive in this big wide world pretending to be adults.

Trips to London

Getting up at stupid o’clock to get the train to London for a meeting is no fun. Especially when it means eating my porridge in the car while my dad drives us to the station.

Lots of things in my life change and new habits form, but eating porridge for breakfast will never change.

And I’m sorry all you lovely Londoners but I detest going there. It’s stressful, busy, crowded…and dirty. Yes I realise most cities (and places in general) are dirty. But I freak out.

Essential requirement for me!

And just randomly, a mini escalator. For all those lonely people who have no friends to stand with…

Room for one only

Or people who are so so busy they need to use the mini escalator to hurry up them quickly, by-passing the more normal sized busier escalator (I found this out as I was dallying around taking photos of said escalator while a man tried to hurry past…).

Birthday trip to Chichester

On Sunday Ben and me went out to Chichester to go shopping for a belated birthday trip. Rant alert: I got a little bit angry in one of my favourite shops (Oasis) when I realised they didn’t stock my size is anything I liked (bar one dress). It’s not an obscure size either – a normal size eight. The lady in the shop just shrugged and went “yeah I know” and after a long pause “look online”. Gargh!! I like trying stuff on and I’m there willing to buy stuff NOW. I understand that they can’t stock masses of every size but they had about three size 20s in everything. Your loss, Oasis, was FatFace and New Looks’ gain.

We stopped at one of my favourite restaurants for lunch as well: Trents.

We had a sharing platter (hummus, sundried tomato dip, beetroot dip, stuffed peppers) to start, followed by a Caesar salad for me (of course) and a club sandwich and curly fries for Ben, followed by crème Brule for Ben and chocolate brownie for me.

I had run 10 miles in the morning and I was FAMISHED. Sadly my salad didn’t quite cut it. I enjoyed it but it wasn’t one of the best I’ve tried (no croutons and no anchovies). Ben was struggling so I helped him out with eating some of his sandwich filling (bacon and chicken) and his fries. Win.

That pudding. Oh wow. It could have done with vanilla ice cream to balance it rather than hazelnut ice cream but it was pretty damn amazing. Afterwards I was like “pft, that was easy. Three courses done and dusted.” After leaving the restaurant for a shopping continuation the fullness hit me like a ton of bricks (literally in my stomach). I couldn’t bare to even look at people eating or drinking. I couldn’t eat anything else for the rest of the day and required an hour long nap when I got home. Whew. Pretty good day I’d say!

Alfie

Kids (and adults) all over the globe are obsessed with Frozen.

Apparently so is our dog, Alfie. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what he does all day when we’re at work. He just wants to build a snowman…

Do you prefer online shopping or going into the actual shop? I like to try things on because invariably things that I think will look nice look awful. And it’s the whole faff of sending stuff back that really annoys me with online shopping. But it annoys me when a shop is seriously under-stocked in my size for pretty much everything.

Ever ordered a large purchase that turns out to be very wrong?

What’s your worst baking disaster? I could write a book for mine so it was nice that Ben, ‘Mr Baking Pro’ got something wrong 😉

April 14, 2014

Running and supporting

Happy Monday! And congratulations to all you amazing people who ran in the London marathon.

I definitely felt I was crawling by Friday. I was so tired. Normally when my alarm goes off I’m bang awake. But last week’s mornings were a big struggle. On Friday night Ben and me went out for an Indian with friends for a charity evening. But by 9.30pm I was shattered and we just had to go home. I was in bed fast asleep by 10pm.

Saturday morning Ben and me were up early to help setup our local Parkrun.

It was a lovely morning. Crisp, sunny and clear. I had no plans for the Parkrun. Just take it as I fancy. I was stood next to Ben and some other guys from the running club at the start and as soon as we started BOOM Ben was off. I was doing 6.30ish min a mile (not for long!) so I was happy to let him go.

Ben has come on in leaps and bounds with his running (his 10k PB is only a minute off mine currently – though I haven’t run one since June ;-)) I’m so pleased for him. He’s chipped away at his Parkrun time each week which is a clear indication that his speed is really improving.

Anyway, I was happy to sit nicely at 7.10min miles and didn’t feel like I was 100% blasting it, which made me feel really happy! I ran on Thursday evening as my first post-marathon run and though it was more tiring than usual, my speed was there surprisingly. I’m very pleased but I also know to take things easy and not go crazy while I’m still recovering.

In the end I finished Parkrun with a time of 21:40 and third woman, and Ben got 22:28. Not too shabby at all!

We helped clear away, had a quick cup of tea with the guys form the club and then dashed home for breakfast, showers and housework. At lunchtime we headed to my favourite restaurant…Jamie’s Italian to have a nice lunch with my parents.

I’m not even going to post a photo of my main because I had what I always have (Turkey Milanese). If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But my starter was something new.

Vegetable crudités on ice with a delicious lemon yogurt dip.

We had a nice quiet evening where we chilled out on the sofa watching Jerry McGuire (never seen it before – bit of a classic) and then an early night.

Sunday morning we got up early to get a run in before the TV coverage of the London marathon. I went for a solo 10 miles listening to my film review podcast. It was so lovely. I just ran how I felt and though it felt more tiring than usual everything felt good. The sun was shining and I was in the comfort of knowing that if I didn’t fancy 10 miles I could run 8 or 6 or whatever really. No training plan, no pressures, no stress. Just easy, enjoyable running.

In the coming weeks I’m aiming to improve my speed, keep my long runs under 13 miles and just tick over nicely.

I got back in time to quickly jump in the shower and then watch the London marathon.

I had my crib sheet next to me of the elite runners: their PBs and accolades, and my two British flags. I was ready to go. The women’s race was more exciting than the men’s I must say. I was really rooting for Tirunesh Dibaba as it was her debut and I was devastated when she dropped her water bottle. A nice tense finish though for the Kiplagats at the end.

I think we all knew Mo Farah wouldn’t win the marathon but I did think he’d break the British record. Sadly I think he made some mistakes (not being in the front group at the start for example). BUT that being said, he did amazingly for his debut. The commentator really needed a slap for what he said (“stick to the track, Mo”). Who judges someone on one race? Jeeze give the guy a break. It was good to watch and I’m pleased for Wilson Kipsang – he just looked so comfortable the whole time.

We were also tracking a lot of different people, either from the club, friends, bloggers… everyone did fantastically. Well done! You guys made me so jealous 🙂

Anywho, the rest of the day we spent seeing my sister, brother-in-law and nieces, having a long walk with Alfie and then just relaxing. Perfect!

Did you run or watch the London marathon? I desperately want to run it now!

Did you make the most of the lovely weather (if it was lovely for you)?

If you know there’s a meal in a restaurant you love, do you stick to that or try something new? I’m so boring but at least I know I’m guaranteed a good meal.