Last week I took an impulsive four-night holiday in Split, Croatia. It was so nice to get away from the horrible so-called “Spring” we have been having here in England.

Split was the retirement home of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, who originally came from a town several miles away. As a military man he built his palace along the same floorplan as a Roman fort. For me, a keen volunteer digger at Vindolanda, it was great to stay in a place of living history. Over the years Split has adapted and changed – there is now a Christian cathedral built on top of Diocletian’s mausoleum – but it still retains the same basic layout and traces of its Roman history are everywhere you look. We stayed in an apartment in the palace walls.

The view from our window. This part of the palace was bombed (by the British) in the Second World War but has been partially reconstructed.

Our roof terrace, actually one of the palace towers, looking out over the Riva promenade.

A quiet moment inside the palace.

Evening in Peristil Square. This was the main square, where a 3000 (or so) year-old sphinx brought back as a souvenir by Diocletian still watches over visitors to the square. In the evening a cafe in the square puts on live music and you can sit on cushions on the steps and drink wine or cocktails.

Hot Romans stand a casual guard in the square every day.

Of course, it was not all about the history, it was also all about the holiday:

Gorgeous view of Split from the Marjan peninsula.

Finding a quiet beach after walking back down the hill, and swimming in the crystal clear water.

The view from Bačvice Beach.

Gin and tonic on the terrace.

Going for a swim by a waterfall in the Krka National Park.

It was also all about the food:

Our roof terrace overlooked a market selling delicious seasonal Mediterranean food. These were fresh red onions and pink garlic. I bought local strawberries for breakfast.

Snickers gelato. Amazing (and so cheap at about 80p for a cone).

I had fish for every meal. This was local river trout, and the side of potato and chard was delicious too.

Carpaccio of fish with rocket, olives and capers was delicious, and something I want to try myself but I think I’ll need to get a really good fillet knife first (I was 20 and vegetarian when I was given my Henckels knife set, so a fillet knife was unnecessary).

It was such a lovely, relaxed place to go – not to mention warm – and I really want to go back now. I see an island-hopping adventure in my future…

It’s my first Saturday off all year. I’ve gone “home” for Easter – not New Zealand as that’s too far, but to my English home, my aunt’s in the Cotswolds.

Yesterday I broke my Lenten fast.  I gave up crisps.  I always feel guilty about eating crisps because the packet is one of the only things that can’t go in the recycling bin, and they’re not exactly healthy, are they?  But over the past couple of weeks I’ve been suffering from the lack of salt in my diet, getting cramp and possibly low blood pressure as well.  I’m one of those people who craves salt and maybe with good reason.  I’ll have to find a way to get more salt in my diet.

Giving up crisps was an interesting exercise in self-deprivation.  I was hoping it might break my Pavlovian response to the snack trolley bell at work, but I still want to jump out of my seat and run for the trolley the second I hear it.

It was not my first experiment in fasting this year.  I observed the traditional dry month in January – Burns night excepted.  My love of white spirit infused with juniper and other selected botanicals is well-documented so it was a challenge (actually my new gravatar is from a fun evening behind the bar at the newish City of London Distillery, which I didn’t have time to blog but I also recommend). I don’t think it’s a challenge I met head-on – it was easy enough to drink water when I was out for dinner but I avoided bars and after-work drinks.

I also had a go at the 5:2 fast.  This was popularised last year by Michael Mosley’s BBC documentary Eat, Fast, and Live Longer.  For those who haven’t heard of it, the idea is you fast two days out of seven.  It’s not a total fast though; you eat 500 calories (600 for men) a day, preferably in one meal because it’s the gap between meals that contributes a whole host of health benefits.  I only had a couple of goes at it but I learned a lot:

1. I will not perish if I do not eat straight away. I can even manage not to be completely irritable with those around me.

2. It completely resets your appetite, so that even on the other five days, when I could eat what I liked, I didn’t feel hungry enough for a total blowout.

It did really change my appetite and although I did 5:2 lite, only fasting one day a week and only doing it a few times, I noticed the difference. There was also a bit of inadvertent fasting caused by not having enough time for lunch or being too tired to bother with dinner; it’s been a busy year.  I’ve had to stop because one way or another I lost 4kg and any more would be too much.  I already need to find a good tailor to take all of my clothes in.

All of this fasting has got me thinking.  I’m not religious but I think some of the world’s religions have got it right when it comes to fasting.  They all have periods of feasting and fasting which coincide quite well with the natural rhythms of life – for example Lent always falls around the Hungry Gap, when food is scarce anyway.  In modern times we tend to ignore these rhythms as food is available all the time and everywhere.  It’s a non-stop feast.  When food and drink are everywhere, it’s difficult to constantly deny yourself.  I actually think we are more suited to a cycle of fasting and feasting as in times gone by.  That sounds a bit like yo-yo dieting but that’s not what I mean.  I mean setting aside times of restraint but also times to indulge, guilt-free.  What do you think?  The Easter bunny is on his way!

I blinked, and a new year began. Now it’s February and my poor little blog is looking a bit neglected.

A quick recap then:

1. January was Dry January. My parents were here for Christmas and New Year’s, and left on the third, so Dry January did not start until then for me. I managed to keep it up until Burns Night, when I allowed myself a medicinal hot toddy, but apart from that stayed dry the whole month.
2. I decided February’s challenge would be Frugal February. I’m rediscovering student food. I took a trip to the new Unpackaged to stock up on lentils and beans, and I’ve been eating a lot of root vegetables and saving a lot of money. I’ve also been a complete social hermit, which can be blamed on point
3. I am currently working four jobs. Yes, four. I’m quite excited about the fourth. After my dissertation finished I revived my knitting pattern business and released two patterns, one of which I’ve been sitting on for over two years.

Loophole is a chunky, reversible hat that can be worn slouchy or with the brim folded up, beanie-style. The shaping is worked without any decreases – instead clever folding and grafting forms the “loophole” which looks the same whichever side it is turned to.

Click here to buy now.

The Snow Day Socks, named after recent weather patterns, are a snuggly pair of slouchy socks. They are knitted toe-up and with short-row heels, so they are excellent for practising these techniques. They work up quickly in one of my favourite yarns, a 50/50 blend of alpaca and wool.

You can buy the Snow Day Socks pattern here: buy now

The creative juices are flowing so hopefully it won’t be so long before my next pattern release. And I promise I won’t leave it so long before posting here again.

On Friday I realised my black ankle boots, purchased this time last year, were worn completely down at the heel. I was actually walking on the leather, which had worn a hole at the back as well. With a week to go until the Christmas break and not a whole lot of other winter boots in my wardrobe, it was a shoemergency!

On Saturday I was due to meet my friend Steph in Shoreditch for brunch. I decided to take my boots in to the cobbler for fixing on the way, however when I got to my local place it was closed. Steph recommended Hoxton Shoe Repairs on Hoxton Street, so after brunch (buttermilk pancakes at Ozone), I headed there. I also realised that the boots I was wearing were in desperate need of attention. But when would I be able to pick them up? This week is quite hectic…

Turning up at the repair shop I explained my predicament, and asked if there was any way they could fix my boots while I waited. I was happy to sit and wait in the shop, but the owner persuaded me to wait in a local cafe with a newspaper he lent me. He led me down the street to a nice-looking cafe, installed me at a table there, I gave him my boots and I was left there in my stockinged feet!

Do you know a freshly squeezed orange juice costs £2.10 in Shoreditch? Which was, apart from a large quantity of coppers, exactly the change I had in my purse. The OJ lasted an hour until my boots reappeared by my table, and I went back to the shop to pay and pick up my other boots, stopping only to dump my coppers into a charity bucket wielded by a Santa-hat-wearing carol singer.

What an amazing job – I wish I had taken a before picture to show the damage. It really was so nice to get such amazing service, from guys who take real pride in their craftsmanship. Plus my boots now have a whole new lease on life. It’s good for the environment, for the local economy, for my pocket and for my feet!

Inspired by their example I went home and darned my favourite woolly tights. It really is so satisfying to mend clothing rather than throwing it away. I urge you to stop putting off those mending jobs, sew that button back on, darn your socks, fix that moth hole in your favourite jumper (try Woolfiller, amazing stuff), and take your shoes to be fixed.

Over the next two weeks, Recycle for London are running a food waste challenge. Being a slightly competitive individual (I’m sure my family and friends are chuckling at the understatement there), I couldn’t help but sign up.

The challenge runs over two weeks and started yesterday. All I have to do for the first week is to record all of the food I throw away. In terms of what to count as waste, the instructions are:

* Don’t include the stuff that you would never eat. For example: meat and fish bones, egg shells, banana skins, orange peel, tea leaves, tea bags, coffee grinds, pineapple peel

* Do include everything else. For example: apple peel, potato peel, bread crusts, fish skin etc

Now my big disclosure here has to be that I have already had the Love Food Hate Waste training, so I should be a pro at this. It will be very embarrassing if I fail…

Yesterday I only ate one meal. I went along to the Scandilicious Killing Lunch to celebrate the start of the third season of The Killing yesterday. We were instructed to wear our best jumpers, and it was fun to see the other Lund-alikes in the room:

(I knitted my jumper myself!)

The food was delicious, and mostly served family-style. This makes it easy to only take what you need to eat. Only there was a slight problem for me – as I don’t eat meat, I was given my own plate of pearl barley and herring. I was still eating long after everyone else had finished but I was so determined not to waste any.

Here’s what I ate:

Sorry about the bad dessert photo, we were losing the light by that point. I forgot to take a photo of the empty plate but you can safely assume I finished it all.

Thanks Sig for a wonderful afternoon, I think Scandi food has some powerful mood-altering properties! It was lovely to meet a whole bunch of Killing anoraks and a great prelude to the excitement of the third series starting.

Who else is doing the Food Waste Challenge? Are there any other Killing fans here?

So it’s over. I finished my dissertation and handed it in last week. I thought I would be elated, and want to party all month, but in the end all I really wanted to do was crawl under the duvet and hibernate. And eat comfort food. It’s a bit like a bad breakup really; my two-year intense relationship with my MSc is over.

From my position under the duvet I started reading blogs again. The Spoon PR blog described Sarah’s obsession with macaroni cheese a la Modernist Cuisine. Modernist Cuisine is the multi-volume molecular gastronomy tome produced by Nathan Myhrvold and his team; retailing at several hundred pounds it is a book for professionals. However, for the home cook/obsessive, he has recently released Modernist Cuisine at Home.

Of course, the merest mention of macaroni cheese is enough to make me long for it and stop at nothing to get it. Mac and cheese may be one of the most distracting substances known to man. The Mishkins version is a thing of such joy it nearly caused me to miss the start of a show once; a crisis only averted by turning up at the theatre five minutes late to discover the performance had been cancelled. So the day after hand in day, feeling particularly susceptible to the seductive combination of carbohydrate and dairy, I got through my half day at work with Sarah’s macaroni cheese still on my mind. I had to have it.

I do not own the book, but luckily the recipe is available on the Modernist Cuisine website. It’s not your average macaroni cheese. There is no flour in the recipe; instead, the cheese and liquid are emulsified using something called sodium citrate. There was a lot of discussion on Twitter about where this could be found, with several suggesting it could be procured from a pharmacy. Down to my local independent pharmacy I went to ask. It turns out sodium citrate is used as a treatment for cystitis. Awkward. The pharmacy had it, but only in cranberry flavour (by the way, if cranberry juice has been debunked as a treatment for UTIs, I suspect cranberry flavouring isn’t going to work either). Explaining that I needed it for culinary purposes and that cranberry flavour simply wouldn’t do, I continued my quest. Boots didn’t have anything matching that description, so it was on to the independent pharmacy in Camden Town where I also buy my citric acid (I have no idea what the medical use for citric acid is, but I use it for making elderflower cordial). This time I was prepared with my “I am making a recipe that asks for sodium citrate. Do you have any?”. The pharmacist foraged behind the counter before producing another packet of cranberry flavour. Nope. Then we realised that not all of the packets looked the same, and there was one packet not labelled with a flavour. Bingo!

A quick stop in M&S produced the other necessary ingredients and me and my now gnawing hunger headed home. My only goal now was to get this mac & cheese into my stomach as quickly as possible. I heated some milk, grated some cheese, put some pasta on to cook and opened the packed of sodium citrate. Inside there were several small sachets. Oh.

See that? Yeah. But did I mention how hungry (and by this stage, slightly delirious) I was? It gets worse – a quick scan of the ingredients revealed it didn’t just include sodium citrate but also citric acid and sodium bicarbonate. Remember making “volcanoes” with bicarb and vinegar as a kid? However, a quick internet search revealed that bicarb + citric acid = sodium citrate. So, what harm could it cause, really? (I should mention that the recipe warns against substituting citric acid for sodium citrate…. this is cooking on the edge, people!)

Hmm. Not looking very appetising at this stage. I sniffed, but couldn’t detect any discernible lemon scent. I didn’t want my mac & cheese to taste like Fairy liquid. Perhaps cheese would help. Cheese makes everything better.

The recipe instructs you to add the cheese a handful at a time, blending each addition with a stick blender. It did indeed blend down into a silky smooth sauce. Sarah warned that when she made it the sauce was slightly too thin for her taste, but maybe the sparkling lemon added a little je ne sais quoi to my creation, because it came out quite thick and showed a tendency to stick to the pan, the stick blender, and anything else it came into contact with. Including, finally, the pasta:

It wasn’t half bad, although on balance I don’t mind a cheese sauce with a bit more texture, and possibly a crust on the top. I ate a few mouthfuls to satisfy myself it wasn’t poisonous before taking a plateful to my flatmate, who was home sick from work. I’m sure if she’d had cystitis she would have been up and out of bed straight away.

Variation: try using cranberry-flavoured Cymalon and cranberry-studded Wensleydale.*

* the book promises several variations, “including stove-top, baked, and fat-free versions, that can be made with any cheese blend you like, from gouda and cheddar to jack and Stilton” – all of which I’m sure are delicious. The book possibly also vindicates my mother’s favourite cooking technique by suggesting that you can in fact steam perfect fish and vegetables in the microwave.

You all know how I feel about cupcakes (which admission nearly prompted Lady Loves Cake to disown me as a friend) .  But when American cupcake pushers Bea’s of Bloomsbury announced their summer popup Crawfish Boil, now that was something I felt I could get on board with.

So along with the aforementioned Lady Loves Cake and two blogless friends, we booked tickets for last Thursday night at Bea’s Maltby Street Market diner. Pre-warned to come in our eating clothes (“clothes you can burn afterwards”), we arrived to find the room set with long trestle tables covered in paper, with big rolls of kitchen paper on the end of each table, and a bib each. It set the scene for some serious eating.

The “crawfish” in question (in the States this refers to freshwater crayfish) are American Signal Crayfish. These were introduced here in the 1970s to deal with over-trapping and declining numbers of native crayfish. They were intended to be farmed, but found their way into the waterways and the bottom fell out of the farming industry. The American invaders are outcompeting the native crayfish, creating an environmental own goal for the UK government.

The crawfish were supplied by Crayfish Bob, who has the fantastic mission to go out of business due to lack of stock. It was clearly my patriotic duty to rid our waterways of as many of these critters as possible!

Tray upon tray of crayfish, sweetcorn, sausages, and potatoes arrived at our table, and we gobbled them up as quickly as we could, accompanies by garlic bread and tasty sauces and dips.

PROPER GARLIC BREAD

There were margaritas and strawberry lemonade to wash it all down with.

Our cute little crawfish friends… yum! (apparently the bigger ones get exported to Scandinavia, but it’s important to eat the little ones too in order to stop the destruction they cause)

I really took my duty very seriously. The body count was high…

All you can eat crawfish, sweetcorn, and garlic bread… it really was a fantastic evening and I have never had so much fun saving the environment.

Bea’s Crawfish Boil is on Thursday nights until September 14. All you can eat for £24, bookings here.

On Sunday I went to the Olympic Park. I had already read a lot about food and drink at the Olympics. Of course the top food and drink sponsors are Coca Cola, Cadbury and McDonald’s, leading the Children’s Food Campaign to brand it the “Obesity Games”. I quite like this infographic they released.

Before the Games there was a lot of information and misinformation about food at the Games. I knew that Sustain had been working with the organisers on the 2012 Food Vision – among other things, this means that all fish served at the Games is sustainable. Meat only has to meet the minimum Red Tractor standard though. There’s also a good article in the latest Jellied Eel.

Then there were the reports that McDonalds had banned chips at the Olympics and that it was a fries-only zone. They then relented and allowed fish to be served with chips.

I was also alarmed to read on the Tapwater website that Coca-Cola had banned drinking water from the Olympics. I thought this was strange as in the email I received before my chosen event (women’s 3m synchronised springboard final) it said I could take in an empty plastic water bottle to refill at the Games (even more strange that Tapwater moderated my comment pointing this out). I only have a stainless steel bottle from Tapwater, but I thought I’d risk it.

I’m happy to say the Army guys on security were sensible about the water bottle (they have metal canteens themselves, don’t they?) and just checked to make sure it was empty. Once I got inside, a refilling point was easy to find.

Walking around the Olympic Park in search of food, I was so impressed by the wildflower plantings everywhere. The park is actually really beautiful.

Green wall on the stadium

I really thought the food would be wall-to-wall McDonalds, with some pies and fish and chips thrown in. I wanted to see if it was possible to eat healthily at the Olympics and avoid McDonalds, Coca Cola and Cadbury!

Let’s see… World’s Largest McDonalds

Check. I walked on for five minutes or so, and then thought I must have gone in a circle because there in front of me was another one, exactly the same! With queues out the door.

However there were also plenty of other food concessions:

The salad didn’t look too healthy to be honest – dressing and a “crunchy topping”. I didn’t check whether the calorie counts were listed.

“World food” options in World Square.

I would have liked a burrito but the queue was immense. So I chose salt fish (MSC Haddock) and ackee instead. At my local Caribbean place, I get it with rice, but this time it came with these deep fried dumpling things – so much for trying to choose the healthy option!

After wandering around and eventually finding a fork to eat it with, I tried to find a seat at one of the picnic tables under a Coca Cola umbrella, but ended up on a park bench as there was no space in the seating area.

Salt fish and ackee, with a side of fat.

No sooner had I sat down, than lightning lit up the sky and the loudest thunderclap I have ever heard rumbled away. And then the heavens opened.

Holding umbrella with one hand, trying to eat with the other, and getting drenched down my back.

Dry people eating their lunch.

For a drier and fancier (though not much fancier) option, there was a Seafood and Champagne brasserie. Prices started at £29 for two courses – no thank you! Produce was British but out of season – purple sprouting broccoli in July?

Despite the on and off rain, there was a real party atmosphere in the park. Witness these people playing Twister:

It was hugely exciting just to be there – it seemed such a long way off and now it was finally here. I worked at the Torch Relay on Thursday at a community breakfast, there wasn’t a sponsor in sight and it melted my cynicism right away. The Opening Ceremony did us all proud. And then I was there, at the park, at the Actual Olympics!

As for the food, I think next time I would take a picnic. And maybe buy some No.1 Fruit Cup to drink with it:

(Cynicism returns: Pimm’s, not being a sponsor of the Games, is not allowed to be called by its real name).