Day 26

Yesterday wasn’t particularly interesting, just too filled with life for an entry.
Lunch was quite exciting today – a hamburger with beetroot relish and a sliced tomato (the provided version substituted with a truss tomato from IGA) that was significantly smaller than anything you’d buy from a shop but bursting with flavour.
My snack was a vegetable frittata, more filling than exciting but not bad, and the oft-recurring fruit and nut mix; my additional snack was a fruit muffin with jam. I was also supposed to have some dried apricots, but the snack pack didn’t make it into the delivery this week – so far I think there have been one or two items missing every week, which is irritating but not enough to have me leave the program.
Unfortunately I more than made up for it by continuing yesterday's chocaholia, dipping into the dark chocolate several times while reading in bed - this encompasses three of my least good habits: mindless snacking, eating when reading, and staying in bed instead of getting up as soon as I wake.
The non-program eating was compounded by a family dinner. One of my cousins moved to Melbourne a couple of years ago – it was her elder daughter’s ninth birthday, and her father’s seventieth a few days early. We ate at a contemporary Australian restaurant in one of Melbourne’s more expensive suburbs, and though many items on the menu sounded tempting, I chose an entrée of that most present of vegetarian options, a caramelised onion tart with goat’s cheese, on this occasion accented with “a bacon crisp” (or, to you and me, a small and crispy strip of bacon). The dish was smaller than I expected, which is no bad thing, and was de-constructed, which was interesting – the tart was more like a disk of crisp pastry topped by caramelised onions and green salad, with a round slice of goat’s cheese alongside, accompanied by a pot of Béarnaise sauce in a tiny jug. I’m not a fan of goat’s cheese, which I tend to find overpowering on its own, but this was delicious. The tart was complex and buttery, its richness cut by the salad; I passed on the sauce altogether, but did have a couple of (fortunately slightly overcooked) French fires. I also had just under half of the chocolate birthday cake, and all of the very decadent vanilla ice cream.
And I had something of a workout, taking the two younger children outside, where they jumped off benches to be caught, swing in the air, twirled around, turned upside down and hunted for, and lifted into the air. It was fun all round, but I had to take a couple of breaks. It will be interesting to see how I do next time, when they’ll be heavier but I will hopefully be stronger. – Alex