Habanero pasta sauce

Habaneros are hot, but in the whole dish it’s not really that spicey.

Ingredients

  • Garlic, chopped medium sized so it doesn’t burn when frying
  • Basil
  • Half a ripe habanero
  • Oregano
  • Passata

Fry the garlic and chilli in a ml or two of oil, then add a little oregano with heat on. Add salt. Add whole bottle of passata, rinse bottle with a cup or so of water and add dilute remnants to pan. Add pepper and cook for 10-15 minutes. Add fresh chopped basil, allow to cook for another 5 minutes.

Chilli Beans

Ingredients:

  • 1-2 onions
  • Around 4 cloves of garlic
  • Quorn mince
  • Can of beans (or ideally rehydrated black beans)
  • Can of tomato or jar of pasata (I think tomatoes are better)
  • Oregano
  • Coriander seeds
  • Cummin powder
  • Chilli
  • Salt, pepper

Chop onions relatively finely, chop garlic into small chunks, fry both in oil, add seasoning and quorn, cook for several minutes, add tomato and beans and cook for around 30 minutes. Ready to eat after ten but longer cooking improves flavour.

A day to myself

It’s Sunday, and I have the house to myself. As someone who is constantly short on time, a completely uninterrupted day alone represents an oasis of untapped potential. The battle is with the other side of myself, which quite rightly sees that my lack of r&r is a huge problem, and wants to fill days such as today with reading, cooking, playing music and watching films.

Unfortunately awareness of the mile long to do list interferes in the enjoyment of the latter. So I imagine that working like mad will at some point end up with me sipping tea in a place like this while reading novels and playing on the internet.

And so the question I ask myself isĀ is it possible to actually do everything on said list, delegate the rest (as far as work goes)? The problem is that the list keeps growing. I guess it’s a matter of getting to a good critical mass and then everything is suddenly easy.

This is the thing with business. It’s easy, in the rich west anyway, to be relatively successful while working your nuts off. The trick is to do it without working too hard, or at least not working too hard for too long. In the end unless quality of life is getting clearly better then it’s kind of going nowhere on the smell of a promise.

So back to today. Since it’s been longer than I can remember since I successfully washed clothes, where success is measured by having cleanly washed clothes to wear, I’m starting by focusing on the basics. Washing clothes, a little cleaning, 1 hour walk in the evening, 1 hour of focused computer time later to solve a particular problem that I need to look at, and perhaps another hour if I can stomach it to proofread the last translation I hope to have to do for quite a while. In between this I’m going to watch films, keep sorting music and deleting all the crud that’s accumulated and that I never want to listen to, and sneaking off for a bit of reading every now and then.

fat and health

I’m on a trimming down crusade. How am I going to do this, you ask?

  • Swimming once a week
  • Running at least two days a week
  • Cooking more
  • Eating a good breakfast
  • Turning the thermostat down (this one’s a bit dubious, but hey, your body needs to restore core temperature somehow..)
  • Sleeping more
  • Eating slightly smaller meals
  • Avoiding unplanned snacking
  • Drinking more water
  • Wearing a fitbit, and doing at least 10k steps a day

Starting at 78.8 kg. Goal is 65. Goals are important for this, they say. Hmm. Ok. 75 by the end of March – 20 days. Quite brutal, but it’s time.