My God, It's Raining

So despite this whole marathon thing, I still really like cross-training.  I know I should be out on the road more working on that actual running thing (first 10K race is on the 9th!) but I’m still not back up to a level of fitness that I’m happy with and the gym gives me a bit of a helping hand.

For starters, it means I can work on incline running.  This place is pancake flat, and although there’s a reasonable swell heading out the west side of the town, it’s a path next to one of the main roads and I fancy training without having an asthma attack into the bargain.

Following that, I know what I’m like with regards to overtraining.  I’ve injured myself several times in the past doing completely avoidable things, like injuring my left calf muscle – I wasn’t drinking enough water (I guess) and it seized up on me while I was on a rowing machine maybe eight or nine years ago, now I have to spend five minutes stretching it before every workout to make sure it doesn’t try to leap up under my knee again.

Between that and the rest of the twinges and aches that remind me of the bloody-minded stupidity with which I previously approached fitness, I’m taking the long view with regards to building things up.  Lots of low-impact interval work on the bike and stepper and the ever-joyful 900 calories per hour painfest that is the rowing machine gives me the range to keep building up my general fitness without pounding all my joints to dust.

I will do more road miles.  Just not right at this minute.

On a side note, I made spaghetti carbonara for dinner.  It’s the first time I’ve ever made it and I considered looking up a recipe until my brain kicked in and said “it’s eggs and cream, dumbass, just cook the damn thing“.

I still don’t understand the instructions on the dried spaghetti you get in the UK, though.  It suggests boiling the spaghetti for 11-12 mins, when 6-7 is more than enough.  I can’t imagine what it must look, feel and taste like with an extra five minutes in it.

It’s Lisa’s birthday today, and in accordance with the traditions of birthday tradition, I spent the morning baking cakes for her.  She wanted me to make cupcakes, but couldn’t decide which types she wanted, so I used my own judgement to decide in the end.

First up; honey and granola cupcakes, with blueberries!

These are sweet, but have a nice texture from the granola (although I milled it by hand before stirring into the cake mix to reduce the particle size; they would have been horribly lumpy otherwise).

The other cakes I made by taking a basic cupcake mix and tossing in a handful of chopped raspberries and blackberries to flavour the mixture.  Half of them were iced and topped with a blackberry for a basic cupcake.

The other half had a scoop of cake cut from the top which was filled with raspberry conserve, chilled to set it a bit, and then iced.

So, those are the first cupcakes I’ve ever made and iced.  In spite of the repeated warnings throughout the cookbook about how desperately hard it can be to get a cupcake right, I found it pretty easy going, aside from getting the granola ones into their cake moulds.  The very low temperature of the oven meant that cooking them was a zero-stress doddle.  I think we can chalk it up as a success.

Lisa seemed to enjoy them anyway…

On the way home, I thought about what I wanted to cook for dinner.  Inspired by a friend’s tale of having made “tomato burgers”, being really big meatballs baked in passata, I thought meatballs might be the way forward.  We didn’t have any spaghetti, but that was fine – linguine is about as good in a pinch – and I got to thinking, how do I make meatballs, and what kind of sauce should I make?

Meatballs, it turns out, are the easiest thing to make even if you’re improvising.  You shape meat…into balls.   I added an egg to help as a binder, and some very finely chopped onion and seasoning, but otherwise it was like making balls of meat.  I can’t dress it up as anything more advanced than shaping spheres from minced flesh.  I’m sorry.

For the sauce, I was momentarily tempted to buy passata ready to go.  But then it occurred to me that we have tinned tomatoes, tomato paste, and access to a blender.  It almost seemed like I was pre-equipped to make my own damn sauce.  So; olive oil, garlic, onions, a bit of frying, a yellow pepper, more frying, tomatoes and paste, a big chunk of pecorino chopped up into little bits, and a handful of black olives, more heating, stuck in the blender and given a thorough homogenising, seasoned and reheated – sauce.

Interestingly, it came out orange, presumably from the cheese and pepper in there.  It looked like I’d made a carrot-based soup more than sauce for pasta.

Anyway, it was very tasty.

This weekend my good friend Allan gets married, so I will be up in Scotland helping to celebrate the happy union of he and his fiancee.  Everyone say it with me now:

Awwwwwwww.