Precocious Primavera

Sunshine! Even diluted! The more grey skies and rain we suffer, the more I feel compelled to leave the flat and go for a walk the moment the sun breaks through the clouds. It's been quite the grumpy winter this year; rather dismal and gloomy, and not having so much in the way of bright but frosty days as usual, and this far into February I'm rather guessing our chances of further frosty days are minimal, considering our average daily temperature is hovering at the cusp of double digits more often than not, now.

[ed. Since starting to write this we've had snow flurries, hailstorms and frosty nights. Never presume, Nic, never presume!]

One of the reasons I love going for walks is to take photographs to share of the sights I see that inspire me, make me wonder, or make me smile. It's one of the more pleasant catch-22s from which to suffer - I walk, therefore I snap photos of things I see on the way that to share; I want to see pretty sights of which to share photographically, therefore I walk. (Plus, of course, being influenced by the original reason behind my wanting to tramp around the city: of wishing to lose weight and drag myself, kicking and screaming, into a more healthy future.)

I don't actually mind dreich days as long as I'm not being pelted by rain (and even then, rain is fine, just not coupled with strong winds, for on those days my inner blogger/photographer/health-nut is quite happy to stay indoors and ignore the great and blustery outdoors from the safety of my tiny, but cosy flat) as well as the ‘fact' (I say fact, although I know not at all - my technical skills border on the tragically inept) my phone-camera seems to be happier with days of a lower contrast than those that have great big blobs of fire throwing shade on everything.

Example 1: low contrast daffies. Wait a minute... daffodils this far out in the middle of February??? (Well, that far out when I took this walk two weeks ago...)

Indeed, and the honeybees were also out in force, swarming over a particularly sweet-smelling early flowering shrub for which I can't, for the life of me, find the name, and the wild-fowl were out on recon, too, checking the suitability of the local floral colour, and whether their potential nesting-site was far enough away from humanity or not.

Yeah, it's pretty hard to find a spot that isn't overlooked by us pesky humans, for sure, but still, they're remarkably good-natured about having their homes tramped around, and being constantly snapped on cyber-celuloid!

But for those of you worrying about a too-early Spring, worry not, for the snowdrops are doing their job perfectly, turning up on time, flowering on time, and not being harassed by the proliferation of crocuses and daffodils already singing their end of winter praises to feel like altering their agenda any time soon! 

Blondie Ambition

My sister sent me a link to a blondie recipe the other day, and I was intrigued enough about it to feel the need to put on my amateur food blogger's cap. (It's a bit like a chef's toque, but comes with a long feather plume splashed with toner ink, looks a bit rumpled as is befitting amateur status, and is, of course, completely imaginary. The Emperor's New Amateur Food Blogger's Cap.)

:: settles TENAFBC on head a là Sheldon and his thinking cap in TBBT ::

Why this blondie recipe, and not any of the other blondie recipes I've bookmarked to date? The main ingredient caught me: chickpeas. Or garbanzo beans for anyone of an Over-The-Pond persuasion. A staple of many main meals and savoury snacks, but not one I'd seen in anything sweet before. But what can I say, I had a can in my food cupboard and all the other necessary ingredients of the recipe just sitting there, so I thought I'd give it a go, knowing that even if it was a culinary disaster that I'd probably eat it anyway.

And I wonder why I haven't reached a size ten yet...

Flourless Chocolate Chip Chickpea Blondies with Sea-Salt from Ambition Kitchen.

You need: 

1 (425g or 15 oz.) can chickpeas, rinsed and drained (I used peas very close in consistency to chickies).

125g or 1/2 cup peanut butter, almond butter, or your favourite nut butter (I used peanut butter).

113g or 1/3 cup maple syrup, honey or agave nectar (I used honey).

2 tsps vanilla extract.

½ tsp salt.

¼ tsp baking powder.

¼ tsp baking soda.

60g or ⅓ cup semisweet chocolate chips + 2 tbs extra for topping.

sea salt for sprinkling on top.

This is a very quick batter to make up, so I recommend following the recipe and preheating your oven to 175C or 350F right from the get-go because there's not going to be much in the way of hanging around waiting for a too-warm cookie batter to cool, or shortbread logs to set, so finally (finally!) no being asked to waste electricity for a couple of hours keeping an oven at optimum toastiness while you go through a long and convoluted creative sequence involving multiple ingredients, using complicated ‘time-saving' appliances.

(Don't worry, if I ever get to a place in my life where I have access to a full-sized oven, I'm sure I won't be quite so blasé with pre-heating times, or the construction process, but at the moment I own a tiny table-top oven that heats up in the blink of an eye, and am loathed to waste money I don't have on keeping it suitably cosy for half an hour while I, for example, attempt to pummel chickpeas into sludgy submission!)

So, once you have stepped off your soap-box, you are asked to add all the ingredients except the chocolate chips to a food processor, or, in true El-Cheapo fashion, add them to a rather creaky but serviceable herb chopper/hand-processor, or whatever they're called, and buzz them for a few minutes until you get a smooth batter. (Although I have to say that a creaky but serviceable herb chopper whose only working speed is ‘low' is not the most perfect implement to completely mash up the chickpeas, so if you have a proper food processor I'd use that so you don't have to attack the batter with a wooden spoon after whizzing it to within an inch of its motor's life yet not getting the mix past the chunky stage.)

But after you've achieved Batter: Smooth(ish), fold in the 60 grams of chocolate chips, 

spread the mix evenly in a prepared pan (non-stick spray coating, or greaseproof paper, or whatever method you prefer...), sprinkle the remaining two tablespoons of chocolate chips over the top,

then bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean and the edges are a light brown.

Or... um... not quite burnt.

(I ended up covering the pan in tinfoil after 20 minutes and then putting it in for another ten, because although the edges were starting to bear the brunt of the little oven's heating bars, the cake tester wasn't coming out clean. In all, it stayed in the oven for thirty minutes, enough to bake the batter through, and fill my flat with the delicious smell of chocolate and peanut butter!)

You're advised to let it cool on a wire rack before cutting it up, but be careful as it's of quite a fragile consistency, and I lost a few edges on the way from the pan to the rack, (the blondie's loss is my gain, of course), and once it's completely cool and more stable, you can sprinkle it with sea-salt and slice it up.

Of course, doling out advice about texture and appearance is something I'm hardly qualified to do, considering my Extreme Amateur Food Blogger™ status, and the state of the photo directly above, but it's fair to say that this isn't your average blondie/brownie consistency, and I've seen the suggestion in a couple of similar recipes of adding an egg to the mixture to cake it up a little. That being said, it's rather delicious, if a little dense, and the only reason I know there are chickpeas in the make-up rather than flour is because I put them in myself. Taste-wise it's just a smooshy peanut-butter and chocolate chip extravaganza, with perhaps a little nod towards the original savouriness of the chickpeas by the addition of a sprinkling of sea-salt on top, but otherwise you can't tell they're there at all.

If you fancy something a little different it might be worth swapping the choc chips with caramel chips (if you can find them) for another yummy taste combination (my sister, the reason this post exists, is a sucker for anything of a salted-caramel persuasion), but whatever you choose to do, be warned: they are moreish, and you might just have to tell people that they're made with chickpeas just so you can keep some for yourself!

Problems Of A First World Variety

I'm terribly behind with my walking posts, thanks to the loss of my dearly departed tower PC, gone too soon. No, seriously, gone way too soon, considering it was only eighteen months old. The warranty, sadly, was already six months out of date. Ach, what do you mean, another hundred euros for a five-year warranty! Pff, one year will be fine. Now take my money before I go and buy something that may not even last that long.

:: sigh ::

I've been struggling with my thirteen-year-old HP laptop since getting back from Israel, and believe me when I say that every post (including those on my Portals blog - oy, those photo posts took an age) until this one has been painstakingly crafted on a machine that takes at least fifteen minutes to load a webpage and can only cope with one open tab at a time. I read a lot of books, though. I think I got through around ten decent-length (i.e. over four hundred page) novels in the time before a friend of mine let me borrow his old-ish Samsung laptop. And let me say here HUZZAH for kind friend who likes to keep abreast of technology, who updates his technological devices on a yearly basis, yet keeps the old ones, just in case! HUZZAH!

So yes, I'm a little behind, but instead of back-dating posts which may just get messy, I'll add them here when I have the time to find the photos online, thankfully automatically uploaded to the cloud from my phone whenever I'm near Wi-Fi!

Anyhoo.

I renewed my visitors subscription to Sorghvliet Park when I returned from Israel, and took myself along to enjoy a good old tramp around the woods at the beginning of this month to find not only the normal fare of fairy snowdrops nodding their heads all over the park, but also a rather early hello from Spring herself!

But even with Mother Nature gate-crashing winter's party, I was still allowed to indulge in the sights I adore, like the sleeping-place of my favourite bluebell spot, already beginning to wake up;

I indulged in my love of black against blue (and grey);

and finally took a snap on the way home of a tiny corner near the Vredespaleis that always catches my eye: spreading ivy winding over old brick and blue-painted metal. There's something that stirs my soul when beholding the uniformity of man-made objects juxtaposed against the ever-changing, un-containable advance of life!*

*Although my first career aspirations in the plastic arts may not have come to fruition, the lessons I learned at art college in the Ways of Bullcrap obviously made a lasting impression!

Muscle Bound

“Nic never felt so stiff and sore, in constant need of a good stretch (and something to steady her cup of tea) in the days before working-out. Surely there's a lesson to be learned there? 

True, she couldn't walk and talk at the same time without gasping for breath in those days before working-out, but at least her muscles never felt the need to complain about overwork! 

#ObliquesOfDeath #TricepKickbacksKickedBack #ThereAreAbsUnderTheFlabAndTheyHateMe

#ParallelUniverseSilverLinings"

All joking aside, it's quite horrifying to realise that there really was a time when I couldn't walk and hold a conversation simultaneously. A time when I'd seriously strain a hamstring attempting to climb off a chair after changing a light-bulb. A time when a trip to IKEA was looked on with trepidation thanks to the the mountain of steps to be climbed to get from the train- to the bus-station (and thence on to the store). Seriously. I love IKEA, but those steps would put such a downer on the whole trip that not even the promise of Swedish Meatballs would be able to save the day completely.

Yes, now I'm on the exercise bandwagon, I know it's not really advised to come off, either losing weight-wise or health-wise if you want to maintain weight loss, vigour, and/or flexibility. But don't get me wrong; if I could stop exercising tomorrow and not suffer from muscles turning to fat, depletion of strength, the inevitable weight gain, and a whole host of other detrimental health issues, I'd already be scribbling out a long list of TV series to binge-watch every evening for the rest of my life while vegging-out on the couch, instead of clicking on YouTube, and beating myself up with a variety of torturous exercise implements six nights a week.

I am not one of those born-again exercisers who only live for the time when they're sweating their guts out, whilst simultaneously, and loudly, spreading The Gospel Of Burpees. No. I shall leave worshipping at the Altar of Exertion to the sweating zealots (a band name for the taking if I ever heard one). But I do have to admit to enjoying the benefits of raising my heartbeat significantly for an hour or so at a time and of taxing my muscles to the point of fatigue, and truly appreciate not having to worry any more about people accidentally sitting on my lap when I'm travelling on public transport, because they thought they were going to sit down on my coat lying bunched up next to me on the other half of the seat, and not actually land upon my spreading thigh.

I mentioned this exercise con (as I'm now calling the exercise bandwagon in my head on days I'm aching more than normal) to a friend of mine - you know; beginning a new regime with good intentions, not realising that, like pets, it's for life, not just for [after] the holiday celebration of your choice, that is if you want to maintain the good work you've achieved so far - and she agreed that it is probably just as well that those at the start of a new workout programme, health kick, or attempt to lose weight aren't made more aware that once your body begins to get used to being punished, it needs more. Well, more of the benefits the punishment and suffering bring at least, and the stinger is that if you're hurting the best way to ease the hurt is to do more of the same!

So the only answer to workout-induced aches are more workouts, which seems rather unfair in the whole positive scheme of trying to better oneself, but it's probably just as well most of us don't know The Truth when we start out. I'm not 100 percent sure that had I been given a notice saying ‘Congratulations! You're about to embark upon a life-changing regime. It's going to be hard, and you're going to hurt a lot, but the benefits will be amazing! Disclaimer: you'll never be able to stop once you start because exercise malady begets exercise remedy. Vengeful God, Old Testament style' I'd have been quite so eager to start.

I exaggerate, of course. I'm only really complaining because I ache an awful lot more now than I did when I was a couch potato; a time when the only heavy lifting I did was the dragging of my larger self from place to place, and the only ‘cardio' my heart got was the straining it had to do all day and every day just to keep me upright. Ah, good times, good times!

In essence I was punishing myself a thousand times more per day back then than I do now, in an unhealthy and unconscious way, but even though I think I've now tipped the balance in my favour, I still maintain the right to lament over the fact, yes fact, that tomorrow my rear, thighs, mid-section, and upper arms will be ruing the day four years ago when I first picked up that Wii remote and changed my life!