Vegan bake sale and sausage sizzle

First off, I’m so glad I had a full night’s sleep last night. Woke up voluntarily at 7.40 am-ish with a clear mind and happy mood!

I would’ve mentioned in the previous post that I had a lack of sleep moment from prepping for yesterday’s bake sale and sausage sizzle.

Worst thing ever for me; lack of sleep. It surpasses hunger or mild constipation in the realms of crappy feeling-ness.

My sleep hours are 8, and less than that I would get headaches and burning eye balls for the entire day. What’s most annoying about lack of sleep is the fact that you can’t be your active, optimistic self 100% even though you want to carry every day out to its fullest. Lack of sleep would mean I wouldn’t be able to get chemistry concepts into my head, do yoga at my optimum strength level, and have really scary bloodshot eyes to disturb your friends and make them wonder if you’d had a crazy drinking night the night before. The answer would be of course not.

But what pushed me to change my sleeping habits would be my sudden obsession over the ‘panda eyes’ antics. All of a sudden I started noticing my dark circles and got really obsessive about hiding it. This was a year or two before. I basically started smearing layers of foundation(I don’t own concealers because I’m not a make-up fan, quite a pathetic attempt) under my eyes. And I ended up looking like I’d spray tanned only around my eyes(reverse effect of spray tanning?) but not on my body.

Also, my dad told me once that sleeping early is good for your brain development because it develops etc. whatever brains do in night-time. I wanted to be brighter so I started to strictly follow his advice and ended up setting a curfew for myself of 9.30 pm bed time and 10.30 pm lights out(Right now my lights out time is 10 pm because I’m finding it harder to fall asleep) then I would wake up at around 7.30 am which is perfect. My mum said my brain had probably stopped developing, but I beg to differ. Different sources claimed that your brain doesn’t stop developing until you’re twenty or twenty-five years old so I choose to believe the latter.

Having a sleep, bed time routine doesn’t completely isolate you from everyone around you. I mean, if really needed be, I can stay up past 10 pm or more for my friend’s party or a celebration of some sort. But on normal typical working days or weekends, why sacrifice your beauty and health for just a couple of hours of hanging out with the TV or your computer?

Sleeping fully not only helped dissipate my dark circles(they’re creeping back up right now over a couple of hectic days, I had to do a 5 am one day flight to the North island a few days back) but I’m pretty sure, helped contribute to the clearing of my skin. I had a pretty dark period of acne attacks.

My skin health is also a part of why I’d chosen to live the healthy lifestyle that I now follow and idolize. I changed a lot of things about my diet that totally fixed my acne laden face. Here are some of them:

1. Drank more water. Around the amount of the recommended level of 8-9 glasses a day.

2. I stopped processed food. I was an avid snacker previously, especially on those shady Chinese packaged snacks

Deep fried broadbeans. Dangerous but so good. I could easily down an entire packet over an hour in front of the computer. Other no-no food included chocolates.

3. This brings me to the next fix-up, which is not diet related, but it was becoming more active. I quit lolling in front of the computer, grabbed the dusty sports shoes and started going for jogs, doing cardio at home, going to the gym, weights training, and now totally crazy about yoga(I do an hour every second day at home). The exercise totally helped keep the blood flow, circulation going. This flow helped excreted out the built up waste in my body and skin, and as a result helped clear it.

4. Eating more vegetables.

So these were the changes that totally helped fix my moderately serious acne issues, other than sleeping. I’d tried lots of pimple creams, etc. before and years after years, they did nothing for my skin. But along with adopting a new lifestyle, I also ordered Proactive from the TV adverts. However! I can most confidently assure you that it’s mostly because of my new way of eating and lifestyles that helped my skin. Because I’m pretty sure my skin really started clearing up after I began my new diet rather than with just proactive.

https://coutureinwonderland.files.wordpress.com/

(not all skin products work for everyone, because we’re all unique!)

So, the pictures of the bake sale haven’t been uploaded yet on ‘the’ Facebook. They’re going to have to wait.

But meanwhile, let me amuse you with my rants over yesterday’s ‘International Students’ dinner at a Chinese restaurant, whose name I shall not reveal for fear of being abducted a few days later while walking down an alley in the evening.

We had an ‘International Students’ dinner to welcome new fresh-faced, fresh off the boat students to our beautiful island country. Also an excuse to binge on a whole lot of yummy Chinese. The list of menu pre-ordered by the International Dean included(not necessarily in serving orders);

1. Roasted oily chicken with oil drenched prawn crackers on top

2. Relatively bland cashew stir fries with a lot of vegetables which the shrimps hide under.

3. Very sweet peanut sauce stir-fry with once again, lots of vegetables but also a whole heap of chicken pieces which made evading them a very hard job. Hey, you can’t get the best of everything(I was able to foraged a lot of veggies from the previous dish)

4. Salty black bean beef stir-fry. Gosh I love black bean sauces… so delicious and relatively protein filled. Would be perfectly healthy if they hadn’t showered their stir-fry with oil.

5. Fried rice with caged eggs which I did not touched of course.

6. Fried, oily noodles. The only meat-free dish(Didn’t have any because cups of oil and refined carbs, no thanks!)

7. Sweet and sour pork. I have a very bad habit of loving pineapple in sweet and sour sauce… It was my favourite ever Chinese dish along with Ma Po tofu before I went meat-free. I have a sweet tooth for savoury dishes, I must admit. But I’m pretty much out of reach by the realms of desserts and cakes. I’ve absolutely not the least inclination or cravings for them after I’d quit them entirely. Call me crazy, but it’s true.

Overall, the food was pretty delicious(Sorry about the no photos! I’m just not shameless enough to whip my Samsung out and be a good, dedicated blogger. Not just yet I mean…), it’s probably the good old dosages of oil and sugar(surprisingly hidden in savoury dishes! How can they do that?). A lot of veggies party for me, covered in lathers of delicious sauces like coconut-y peanut sauce, black bean, etc. And I pretty much helped, with this Chinese girl, obliterated the chili sauce they had set on the middle of the turning table platform. A word out for Chinese restaurants, hide your self-service chilies! Because I will obliterate them. The worse you cook, the more I will lessen my wrath by eating all your chili sauce that tastes better than your food!

So in summary, last night was a total pig out night for me(At least we weren’t dining at 8 pm or something. Dinner parties like that aren’t my favourites) because of the amount of oily veggies I ate. It was a lot. My stomach was a medium-sized balloon(like those pathetic ones little kids attempt to blow and they end up looking like giant shrivelled up raisins) and upon arrival at home, I immediately had to go to the toilet to expel my night’s exploits.

Also, the main rant from the night. After our dinner wrapped up at the late hours of 8.30 pm(by far the earliest finishing more than 10 people dinner I’ve been too!) I went up to the restaurant counter to order a takeaway for my mum who occasionally eats this late(sometimes at 9pm) because she has lunch quite late, after a late breakfast, etc. she’s a bit of an owl in summary. Anyways, mum wanted a sizzling tofu dish, which they didn’t have so I ordered ‘Sing Kong tofu’ which was something similar. Basically, when I went up to the cashier I forgot the name of the dish, ‘was it ‘Qing song’? or ‘ping pong’? or something?’ so I left the line, let some paying diners go up first. Then I came back into the line ordering the tofu dish, in which the lady at the counter chucked the changes back at me with a smile-less face. That’s alright, I know you’re probably stressed because it’s Saturday night and whatever your other problems.

Then when I came back to pick my takeaway up, the label on the box was written in Chinese, although I could read a bit of Chinese and made out the words ‘Tofu’ I still wanted to make sure. So I asked the lady to help me identify the takeaway box, in which she hastily took a look, tore the paper label off and gave a quick half nod without even looking at me. No thank yous or good byes. Basically, our entire exchange she never even looked me in the face.

I’m not expecting a million dollar posh butler service, I just hate being treated like some kind of a beggar. If you’re a medium-expensive range ‘restaurant’ then can you act like one? I paid fifteen frigging dollars for that overpriced dish, I didn’t come in and begged for a bowl of rice for you to dismiss me like a dog. I totally wanted kindly hand that hot tofu back to her to be honest(if I hadn’t paid $15 for it). Honestly, I don’t think she’d treat ‘European’ customers the same way as she did with me. I saw her smiling at a couple of blonde girls wearing fancy dresses, so she’s probably a bit discriminatory towards her own kind.

Does anyone have a similar crap service experience at Chinese restaurants? I get it quite often, don’t know why.

Anyways, enough with pessimistic ranting, onto the diet talk. Because of last night’s pigs’ night out, this morning I decided to do something drastic. I’m skipping breakfast. Replacing this morning’s breakfast kilojules with yesterday’s overhanging kilojules. It makes sense because I’m pretty sure I ate a dinner and breakfast worth of calories the night before.

I know the whole metabolism ordeal, and the whole skipping a meal slows down your metabolism shenanigans, and your body retains fat with lack of food because it has an old-fashioned mind and thinks you’re undergoing famine(Mind you, there are still people out there in the world, you wouldn’t want to believe, who still uses this adaptation of our bodies for their benefit). However, more on a lighter note, I came up with a back up plan for my breakfast fast;

1. Drink a tsp of lemon juice with warm water. I always do this in the morning to get the bowel going anyways, and because of its metabolism boosting effects. Hopefully the wee calories the lemon juice offer will silence my body down a bit, and it will help keep the metabolism going.

http://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/love-sex-relationships/health-fitness/2011/05/eat-yourself-slim-top-30-metabolism-boosting-foods#!image-number=13 (great info on metabolism boosting foods)

2. Drink water when hungry. Hopefully by chucking water down to dilute the stomach acid, I will trick my body into thinking I ate something? Don’t know if this theory makes sense, and I can’t be bothered researching on the internet.

3. Eat lunch early. I’ll probably have a brunch at 11 am just so my body doesn’t feel too faminated. I don’t think I can last till 12 pm too.

As an extra, this is the face of my lunch;

Also, If you would like to try this salmon head soup out yourself, here’s my own self-composed recipe;

4 salmon heads(can be reduced to 3)

5 cups of water

a sachet of ‘Orange curry’ mix(can possibly be found in your Asian grocery store or a Thai one)

(Lobo is always reliable. So they’ve called it sour vegetable… doesn’t sound very appetizing does it? But ‘orange curry’ is not bad. It’s not sweet, unlike Thai green curry which most people would be well acquainted with, ‘orange curry’ is sour from the tamarind paste which is good for you, and slightly spicy.)

Method: Boil the water, clean the salmon heads with water first before putting them in the large pot of boiling water. Putting them in boiling water instead of i.e. just simmering reduces the fishy smells. Boil for 5-6 minutes until the salmon looks cooked then chuck in the curry or soup mix. Let the soup mix do the work and boil on medium-high heat for 10 minutes, then to low for about 20 minutes or until the heads are disintegrated enough for your liking, or soft enough to chew on. I usually use natural Thai herbs, spices for seasoning but my mum wanted to try the soup mix so, gotta let this one pass. Lastly, dish the hot soup up and enjoy the delicious goopy-ness and omega-3 fats(great for your skin too!)

If you don’t know where to buy the soup mix, or you really don’t want to venture into the darklands of processed foods and packet soups, then here’s a simple all natural ingredients for the ‘Orange curry’ or ‘sour vegetables’ soup(through the wise made up recipe by my highly talented mum); fish sauce(or soy for non-animal eaters), shrimp paste(I omitted shrimp paste from my soup, a substitute is soybean paste but not putting it in doesn’t matter much), tamarind paste, chopped garlic, chili powder, turmeric(for the orange colour). Adjust these to your taste, the quantities of each ingredients doesn’t matter much. Apart from the chili.

Alright, I’m really hungry now so I’m gonna go have my soup(Possibly Fry’s sausages too because I have a craving for them right now). Fingers crossed I don’t pig out on lunch, as most dieters/fasters tend to do.

In the end, the bake sale and sausages didn’t even make an appearance in the post dedicated to them! 😦 Well, we’ve got next time.

Link to the vegan bake sale post here; https://obsessivenutritioncompulsive.wordpress.com/2013/07/31/vegan-bake-sale-and-sausage-sizzle-part-2-with-pictures/