Fifty Shades Of Lemon

Whenever I take photos with the camera on my phone that include white surfaces or white objects, I'm reminded of a scene from ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring' where Vermeer asks Griet what colours she sees in the clouds outside. If he were to ask me what colours I saw in my photo of a white tea-towel, or the bright white enamelled cover of my table-top hob, I'd be hard pressed just to give Griet's first and simple answer. For I see pink, and purple, and green in my white, but not because I have an artists' eye, but because, really, I do see pink, and purple, and green. My lens appears to have such a hatred for white that it consistently replaces them with the palest of blush pinks in the middle, and an apple white to the edges over which the Dulux paint company circa 1985 would have cried with joy.

I say this not with any real purpose but to apologise for the lack of photographic consistency in my fake food-blogger posts. My tea-towels really are crisp and white, well, apart from the inevitable blue patterning (I'm a sucker for blue and white household goods - I'd be up to my eyeballs in Delftware if I could afford it) and my cooker top is scrubbed white on a daily... quite often. But until I'm in command of proper photographic equipment, I shall have to put up with pastel back-drops. And, unfortunately, dear reader, so shall you!

But to get back on message (apologies - I've been watching some re-runs of The West Wing) today, in our continuing adventures in Fake Food Blogging™, we are venturing away from the comfortable shores of chocolate bay and setting sail for climes of a more tart nature.

Yeah, okay, we're making lemon cookies. But not any lemon cookies. No. Today we are nicking a recipe from Gluten Free On A Shoestring and shall attempt to replicate their Gluten Free Lemon Meltaway Cookies without incurring the wrath from, or being slapped with a lawsuit by, the original recipe developer.

You need:

For the cookies:

210g or 1½ cups all purpose gluten free flour
77g or ⅔ cup icing (confectioner's) sugar
48g or ⅓ cup cornstarch
¾ tsp xanthan gum
½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
finely grated zest of 1 lemon
168g or 12 tbs unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 egg white, at room temperature
2 tsps freshly-squeezed lemon juice (plus more as necessary)
granulated sugar for dipping

For the glaze:

115g or 1 cup icing (confectioner's) sugar
2 to 4 tsps freshly-squeezed lemon juice

Shockingly, I followed the first suggestion to pre-heat my oven to 175c (or 350f), because looking down the instructions, I saw no mention of a particular bugbear of mine: being instructed to pre-heat the oven only to leave it on, pre-heating, for three hours, or overnight, while the dough rises, the shortbread log sets, or the melted butter cookies cool down in the fridge so they have a fighting chance of keeping a cookie shape whilst baking. Seriously, whose oven takes more than five minutes to warm up nowadays?

Anyhoo, this soap box seems to be developing a groove through over-use...

Find yourself a large bowl and add the flour, icing sugar, cornstarch, xantham gum, baking powder and salt, and, as suggested by the recipe, whisk to combine well. I'm guessing the whisk adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the combination process, the subtleties of which I am woefully under-qualified to comprehend. Leaving sarcasm aside, you're then instructed to add the lemon zest and to give it a jolly good mix to make sure any clumps of lemony goodness have been broken up. I took a photo of this stage, expecting to see a bowl of white (pink, green, and purple) flour decorated with little specs of yellow, but of course the zest, in the jolly good mixing, just gets coated with flour and loses its colour-defining properties.

Yes, the little shreds of zesty goodness are in there, because yes, the lemon has actually been relieved of its zest although looks appear to be deceiving, and yes, I used a wooden spoon and not a whisk. If my cookies lack a little I don't know what, then I'll know who what to blame.

After making a well in the centre of the mix, you're invited to add the butter, egg white, and two teaspoons of lemon juice to the mix, but remembering that you need to mix to combine after each separate addition. I'm such a picky language... picker (yeah, obviously it's not a super-power) that I get a little bothered by being told to add a list of ingredients, and only after you've dumped the butter, egg-whites and lemon juice in the flour well you read that, by the way, they should be added individually. Yes, the author is presuming you read through the instructions before flying head-long into the complicated world of cookie-making, but sometimes a little heads-up before the list would be helpful, because I get the impression that if a whisk is preferred to a spoon for the mixing-up of the dry ingredients, then making sure all the other ingredients aren't dumped in together at the same time might probably be important, too. Just sayin'...

My thighs are getting a really good workout from all this stepping on and off soapboxes today.

After everything has been added, and mixed in the right order, the dough should appear thick and smooth. You'll probably need to give it a good knead to get it there, and you can add more lemon juice by the teaspoon if it's not holding together properly.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper onto which place balls of dough you've rolled into a round between the palms of your hand, making sure to leave enough space between the balls to you can press them flatter without turning your tray into one huge lemon cookie. (Not, I have to say, that that sounds like a horrendous consequence of too-close cookie spacing...)

I'm not going to go into the really clumsy instructions given about how to wet the tines of a fork, dip them in sugar, and press them into the dough to make a flattened cookie with a pretty, sugary pattern on top, and just show you a photo instead.

Place the cookie sheet in the oven and bake them until their edges are lightly golden brown and are firm to the touch. 12 minutes is suggested, but I kept them in for 14 as they were still a little pale. I left them to cool on the sheet, as instructed, then transferred them to a wire rack in preparation for icing.

Never underestimate the amount of icing sugar, or over-estimate the amount of lemon juice you will need. Never. Icing sugar looks so strong and powerful in powder form, but shrivels up into a tiny proportion of its former self when faced with its arch-enemy, liquid. Do not, repeat: do NOT scoff at the ratio of powder to liquid. Never presume that when the recipe says 2 to 4 teaspoons of lemon juice to 115 grams of icing sugar, that it's playing around, and really means, ach, just use the rest of the juice left in the lemon, because it would be such a waste to throw it out when there's at least another half-lemon's worth in there...

Don't do it. Don't fall for the icing sugar scam. Especially when what is called for is a thick (but pourable) paste, and not a thin transparent glaze. You will end up emptying an only-recently opened box of icing sugar, and your kitchen will be covered with a thin, sweet powder that gets everywhere because you're getting more irritated each time you have to add another metric sh*t-ton of powder to a mixture that's stubbornly staying closer in consistency to lemon juice than to anything even approaching a drizzle-worthy state.

I'm beginning to feel like I should be adding PSA to the beginning of all my Fake Food-Blogger™ posts...

But fret not, for in the end a workable consistency will eventually manifest itself and you'll be able to artfully drizzle delicate icing zig-zags over the cookies, just like you see them do on television. Don't worry if they end up looking like a toddler was having a tantrum and decided that flinging spoonfuls of icing around the kitchen was the make-a-mess mode du jour, because these gorgeous mouthfuls of lemony delight don't taste any the less scrumptious for having been decorated by a ham-fisted spoon-and-icing noob. Seriously. My amateur drizzling skills do not detract from the gorgeousness that are Lemon Meltaway Cookies! They're light, and yummy, and do indeed melt-away on the tongue!

I may be in the mood to take apart some dreadful instruction prose, but the author sure knows how to name a cookie!

More Than Just A Number

I haven't, up until now, copied and pasted anything here that I've found interesting from the ‘net about weight-loss, but having struggled with the numbers of my scale sticking around the same place for the last goodness-knows how long, an article on myfitnesspals' blog Hello Healthy made me think a bit more positively about where I am right now.

Nah, I'm not really going to copy and paste the entire article, although the link is just above, if you want to cut out the middle man. 

Struggling with being stuck on a Table Mountain of a plateau even though I'm consistently eating well and working out has led to a lot of negative feelings in regards to how I see myself; my shape, my commitment, my goals, and not only that, but it makes me worry that my friends have similar worries about my journey. I'm aware that I'm walking this path for myself, whether it goes up or downhill, but yes I do fret about how I'm seen through others' eyes, too, those that know I'm on this voyage of discovery, and have witnessed the huge difference I've made in my life so far. It's quite traumatic for this person who spends a lot of time worrying about other people, and not wanting to let them down or to think that they might be saying, aw, what a shame - she was doing so well - after not noticing any recent tangible weight-loss.

(I doubt there's really anyone out there, except for myself, who actually spends that much time thinking about me at all in this respect, because hey, I'm proud of myself, but I've not fallen in a narcissistic hole of presuming everyone actually cares *that* much about what I'm doing. That I care about what people might or might not think probably comes from having such a positive reaction from friends and relatives about my new appearance and health after a lifetime of being judged and found aesthetically wanting. But this is a subject on which I've been writing about for a few months now in another post, and I'm still working on it, so I won't mire myself too far into this emotional mindf*ck here just now!)

So indeed, what made me stop and think enough to want to discuss the article I read online was the way I was still being controlled by my scales, and how those numbers have been the be-all, end-all of how I've been measuring my losing weight. Yes, I've posted about how pleased I am to be getting into smaller jeans, and how I'm still having to alter my clothes even though I'm stuck, weight-wise, but I've not really managed to truly convince myself that it's all good, and that I'm still on track.

The title of the piece is ‘12 Amazing Exercise Benefits That Aren't About Weight Loss', which is a little bit click-baity, but as touched on a nerve I had to have a look. I'm glad I did.

Out of the 12 Benefits which are listed as:

1. Relieves stress and anxiety
2. Improves learning and memory
3. Improves self-esteem and body image
4. Strengthens the heart
5. Builds stronger bones
6. Promotes quality ZZZs
7. Provides a bonding experience with loved ones
8. Improves mood
9. Increases metabolism
10. Improves digestion
11. Reduces disease risk
12. Decreases appetite

I can certainly relate to a few. Numbers 1. and 8. seem to be linked for me, certainly when I'm taking my long power-walks through the woods and parks, a time when my thoughts are concentrating more on my surroundings than the myriad little problems we all face every day. And it's certainly true to say that when I'm sweating and swearing my way through video workouts, there's little space left in my brain to accommodate anything other than counting reps and being an internal cheerleader to push a body that would prefer to sit and eat cake into a body that works better with sit-ups and, well, still eating cake. (Cake 4 Life, y'all!) And although I've yet to reach the fabled heights of an exercise rush, I've never finished a walk or a workout feeling worse than when I started. At least mentally!

I have no idea about number 2. Are my memory and learning abilities improved? Who knows. I still occasionally forget why I come into a room, and continually misplace my tv's remote control, so the jury is out on that one, and I'm swithering about number 3. Is my self-esteem improved? Has my body image finally dragged itself out of the gutter? Here it gets more complicated, partly due to my work as a singer, and it's a career that sometimes feels like it's regulated by self-esteem and the approval or otherwise of others. It's a very personal instrument, obviously, and I can't think of one fellow singer that hasn't been affected by critiques at least one time in their lives.

Body image is something else (even though nowadays you have to look like a Hollywood starlet to get decent work, and frequently how you look is considered more important than how you sing...) and it's a little easier to analyse. Yes, I look at myself now and feel a thousand times less horrified than I did up to four years ago, when I spent as much time avoiding my reflection as possible. I'm proud that I can now sit in a theatre chair without having to edge in sideways. I'm ecstatic that I no longer need to ask the air hostess for a seat-belt extender in front of sneering and judgemental ‘fellow' passengers. That I can walk and talk at the same time, instead of merely forming gasped and monosyllable conversations continues to be a delight. But in true Twenty-First Century, media-controlled, body-not-mind-obsessed fashion, I look at myself and rarely see the stronger frame that has had its body-fat content dramatically reduced, that enjoys healthier curves and fits in smaller, cuter clothes. I mostly still see a fat girl who continues to be shunned and ridiculed by your average person on the street, whose stomach will never be flat, arms will never stop jiggling, and whose jawline will never be taut.

Yeah, 3. needs a little more time, methinks. 4. and 5. on the other hand. Well, I'm pretty sure my heart has to be a lot stronger than it used to be. My lungs, too. It's simple to tell just from recovery period if nothing else. My beats-per-minute come down from a well-sustained aerobic rate to normal again so much faster, SO MUCH faster than when I started this little health-improving sojourn. Yes, I still get puffed-out during exercise, but it's not how knackered you get that indicated fitness, because no matter how fit you are, you still want to push yourself as far as you can go (without incident or accident), it's how quickly your heart returns to its resting rate. And my bones? Well, I ache a lot more than I did before I started this exercise regime, but I'm happy to accept that my bones must be stronger, without empirical proof.

Quality sleep, number 6... Well, it's hard to tell, as I can sometimes sleep like a log after a day of doing nothing but type on a keyboard, and I can suffer insomnia after a day full of moving about, and a killer workout. Next! Ah, 7. Yeah, Exercise bonding. I workout on my own, and although I share my ups and downs quite liberally on social media, I'm loathed to let anyone near me when I'm trying to curl up in a crunch, or attempting to make sure I don't suffer a concussion from an overly-flung kettle-bell. I bond over cake.

8. is up-post, and 9. 10. and 12. are their own little hells. Metabolism increase, digestion improvement, and appetite depression. Hmm. Well, my metabolism was never slow to begin with (although that may also have been controlled by my previously un-diagnosed gluten intolerance, because that does... *things* to the speed of digestion that can be, frankly, a little surprising...) and I can safely say that the combination of curbing my calorie intake and upping my exercise time have done little to stave off the need to bury my face ear-deep in a well-frosted carrot and walnut cake more times than I'd care to admit.

I will cut and paste part of 11. though. Because... well: “11. Reduces disease risk. Exercise can actually help prevent diseases like type 2 diabetes, stroke, metabolic syndrome [the name for a group of risk factors that raises the risk of heart disease and other health problems], and even some forms of cancer."

Yeah, 11. When sh*t gets real!

So, I must learn not to lament when those scales show me no change, because even the most high-tech weighing apparatus (or at least one that I could afford) won't be able to show me how much stronger, fitter, and healthier my body is, nor by how much lighter my mind can occasionally be lifted.

Bridges And Bunkers And Birds, Oh My!

It's miserable outside again today, so instead of moaning that I can't get out for a walk, I'll play catch-up with one of my city tramps to the Clingendael Estate that I took a couple of weeks ago, and pretend I'm out there enjoying the sun, instead of stuck indoors watching the rain snake down my window-panes.

It's a really good walk to get the the estate, around fifty minutes, give-or-take, and my first photo was on the way, at Plein 1813, where there are thirty-six commemorative horse chestnut trees (according to the plaques), the oldest of which were planted in 1925. They're a sight to behold in every season, although you do have to watch your head when passing underneath in Autumn!

The first sight that greets you when you enter the park is a wonderful old thatched house, privately owned, but probably one of the most photographed private houses in the city! I love the clarity of Winter that allows it to be seen without the shadows of Summer, but you already know how much I love the look of stark woodland and bright skies...

Instead of heading up to the main house on the estate and wandering around the Old Dutch Garden as is my wont, I headed east into part of Oosterbeek Park, and Duinbos, criss-crossed with waterways.

Scenes of such serenity seemed hardly the place to stumble upon an old Nazi bunker, but there it was, ramshakle and slowly being overpowered by nature, a concrete reminder of a terrible past.

I ended up circling back through the forest (mmm - trees and sky) to the Hollandse Tuin, to find the Heron Lady hand-feeding her faithful followers. I've seen her a lot around this time of day, and the herons are always glad to see her and her bag of bread.

After both the bread and herons were gone, I wandered over the bridge in the direction of the Clingendael Institute building, and found another heron sulking on a fallen tree,

stopped to admire some more forest reflections, and enjoyed the sight of a just-beginning-to-bud magnolia tree, before heading home and checking my pedometer... Over fifteen-thousand steps must surely equal a brownie...?