So our oven is broken… Also a tribute to potatoes.

So last week, midway through cooking some healthy cheesy potatoes dauphenoise (is that how you spell it? maybe…) complete with extra cream and extra cheese for extra health, our oven in the flat just turned off. Potentially a sign from the gods that I shouldn’t be eating potato based cheesy goods? Admittedly yes I shouldn’t but potatoes, cheese and cream are like the holy trinity of things that are good in the world. But anyway yes the oven is broken and wont be fixed until next weekend at the EARLIEST! (Downside of living with your landlord, I have to be nice and accommodating and lovely at all times for fear of being evicted “yes two weeks without a hot meal is fine, in this cold cold November what I really wanted was a refreshing salad for dinner…every night”).

Okay, it’s not quite that bad because the hob still works so I can just fry everything I want to eat (potato circles?). Or boil it (potatoes?) or indeed use my microwave (micro chips…made of potatoes). Can we just take a minute here to appreciate potatoes and how great they are? You can roast them- well I can’t because my oven is dead, you can bake them (again, not me), you can boil them, mash them, cut them up and fry them, make chips, make crisps if you can be arsed which frankly I can’t, MAKE VODKA (again, effort), you can even make bread with them and make paint stamps for arty patterns- seriously did anyone do this in school because it was great! The possibilities with a potato know no bounds! And don’t even get me started on sweet potatoes…you can make brownies out of them! And here’s a fun fact- they’re not actually that bad for you! YES! POTATO LOVERS UNITE AND REJOICE! A medium potato is basically fat free and only has 161 calories in it, okay yes its got 37g of carbs in it but they’re complex carbs (I don’t really understand that term but I think it means carbs that you don’t need to berate yourself for eating! woo!) and it has hella vitamins and minerals! Obviously it all depends on how you cook them but this website www.potatogoodness.com/ has all the potato knowledge you’ll ever need to impress your friends and co-workers!

Potato Lovers Unite!

Okay so a bit of a tangent but I thought it was important to share that, however I now realise that today I’ve written more words about potatoes than I have on my dissertation topic…which in case you were wondering is about different perceptions of men and women in marketing campaigns, so like do people respond better to aspirational images of their gender (like athletic people used to advertise running shoes), or something they can relate to because it uses more “normal” people (for example the Dove real beauty campaign?) If anyone fancies throwing their two cents in on this idea then please do, I need all the opinions I can get!

Right, I should probably get back to writing that… but not until after I’ve had a packet of crisps to curb my potato craving!

My love hate relationship with my skinny friends.

So as I’ve already mentioned. I have always had skinny friends, I don’t know what it is. Maybe they saw me on the first day of school/uni/work wherever I met them and thought “ooh shes got big thighs, if we stand together mine will look thinner, I’ll be her friend” but then they realised how awesome I am and became my friend in a genuine way? maybe, but then again maybe I just have bad luck. Don’t get me wrong I do love them, I just wish they’d, i dunno, have bad hair or something.

But then people are like “well, they’re probably on constant diets would you really want that?” haha no, I’ll have my cake and eat it please, and then I’ll have some biscuits too, and possibly a packet of wotsits. But they’re not dieting either. See I have this friend, and she eats, she just eats, basically anything but she NEVER gets fat, and it’s for this reason that I believe that diets are a lie. If one person can eat so much and not get fat, surely someone else could go on a diet and not lose even a couple of ounces. Therefore, I don’t need to diet and I can just blame fate for my thighs for the rest of my life. Sorted.

The worst thing about skinny friends though is the things they say about themselves and about you.

“Oh I really need to slim down” – Oh? You do? Sorry, let me just eat the bait on your compliment fishing rod. No. Shut up. If you were so concerned about your weight you wouldnt have just inhaled a big mac and you wouldn’t be wearing skin tight dresses now would you?

“Oh yeah guys I just went to the gym”- Did you? Sorry, I thought you just walked around in gym gear with sweaty hair because you were attempting but failing to be sporty spice. The gym friend is not really a friend, more just a constant reminder of all the exercise you probably should be doing. But don’t worry, you can live your fitness dream through their gym experiences because they’re sure as hell going to tell , you all about it.

“But I wish I had curves like you”- Hmm. Do you? Do you like the feeling of chafing thighs? Do you like having to decide if you want your jeans to fit your waist or your bum? because you can only have one of those. Do you like buying sexy underwear only to have it absorbed into your being or to serve absolutely no purpose as the support is futile? Be careful what you wish for.

Sexy underwear, that reminds me, I went to Ann Summers with another skinny friend of mine on Tuesday as she was looking for something for her boyfriend for their “bedroom themed valentines day” (My bedroom themed valentines day shall consist of me lying in bed with a bottle of bubbly and some crappy tv, and all without shaving my legs. Whose the real winner here?). Of course, I succumbed to the illusion that I have any sex appeal and bought myself some sexy underwear, I then heard a girl on the other side of the shop say to her friend “I don’t get why single people buy sexy underwear, I mean who are they trying to impress?” It was like she knew! So I took my bag of very little material for the price it was and left. As I walked home the heavens opened and my impractical Ann Summers paper bag disintegrated, leaving a stream of lace and frills strewn across the road which I had to scamper after. A sign from the heavens that I should just stick to a good old M&S multipack?

One thing skinny friends are good for though is that they do encourage me to exercise, for example when we do work out thursdays I feel the need to keep up with them even though it nearly kills me just to try and show them that my thighs are not a result of laziness and that I’m just plain unlucky. Although it was with great smugness that I told them I couldn’t make it tonight because “Matt and I are going on a second date”. I then remembered that they both have long term boyfriends and that my measley second date was totally irrelevant. Ah well, Italian restuarant beats cardio any day.

 

 

 

My (Brief) experience with exercise

So yesterday I was tricked into doing a full intense cardio DVD with some friends followed by a yoga “cool down” after (my idea of a cool down is a nice chilled glass of wine but alright whatever floats your boat). I say tricked because I was in fact invited over with the promise of doing a “jazzercise” DVD which sounds quite fun right? But when I get there I’m greeted with full on cardio DVDs. Now, seeing as the only cardio I have ever done is run for a bus or train to avoid standing and waiting for the next one, full throttle cardio was probably going to leave me a shell of the woman I once was. If the patronising cow on the DVD telling me to stop being lazy (not even kidding, It’s like she can see me!) wasn’t enough to make me wish I’d stayed at home with my wine, the abs on all the women in the dvd certainly was. I imagine they’re put there as aspirational figures of encouragement but lets be honest, if you’re built like a bus like I am- abs and crazy muscle are just going to make you look like a body builder and so instead I spent the whole workout envying their tiny frames and bone structures rather than aspiring to be them because I’m not naive enough to think that I will EVER keep this up long enough because of how I feel today. That and the fact that after I got home I made myself a microwave prawn curry and poured myself a pint of wine in true Nessa from Gavin & Stacey style (the amount of people who compare me to her is actually incredible)

Moving on to my yoga. Now I have an aversion to yoga already as I find the spiritual element of it to be a load of twaddle and the slow pace of the whole affair makes the ordeal seem longer than is really neccesary. The sight of the male demonstrator in skin tight short shorts was also somewhat vomit inducing so maybe that was put in to put people off food after the work out too? Sadly, not much comes between me and a prawn curry.

I woke to my alarm like any other Friday, but this Friday I was greeted with a pain similar to what i imagine the gravitational pull of a black hole feels like pulling down on my thighs and bum and was unable to move for a good hour. Expecting to walk off the initial work out ache I made my way to the dentist (a horrible experience in itself as without warning I had my teeth pressure cleaned and promptly spat blood on myself whilst nearly choking on it). The pain in the offending thighs and my bum has just got worse and I have retired back to my bed with my bleeding mouth and aching body.

Have managed to find a packet of co-codamol that my grandmother gets on prescription and flogs to the rest of the family so I’m planning on having a couple of those and a nice big goblet of wine for dinner tonight and potentially sleeping until sunday.