30/09/06 Tummy Soothers

The next week my tummy got worse: bloated and intermittently painful. A regular complaint that I can work round, but I get a little sulky about having to restrict what I eat to certain things, and found myself mutinously planning to go for a coffee. However it got worse - and with it, I was too exhausted to go anywhere - that I resolved to get better. I turned my thinking round and decided it was not going to be a weekend of denial, but more a weekend of soft food - warm, babyish, consoling foods: the only rule was that it had to be something I love.

First stop: ‘Stoop’. My mother’s invention of a cross breed soup / stew, invariably made with whatever was lying around plus some mince.

Friday’s Stoop:

Soften an onion and 4 cloves garlic in a pan with olive oil. Add 3 stalks celery, 1 carrot and 1 beetroot, all chopped small. When this has softened, add a pack of organic mince (beef on this occasion); stir until browned, then add lots of water to make a soupy consistency. Later, add (cooked) cannelloni beans, pepper and salt.

It feels mean-spirited, but I do normally add a tin of tomatoes and eat it all with bread: both sadly out of the question for now, at least.

Other meals were porridge made with rice milk and black sesame seeds, stewed green plums and honey with plain (full fat) yoghurt, and that most wonderful standby: mushroom risotto. Oh, and the risotto came with half a roasted butternut squash, a roasted beetroot and half a bulb of roasted garlic on the side… I am taking this autumn thing very seriously!