Sunday 2 October 2011

Unprocessed Day 2

Breakfast: wholemeal bread with butter and salted salmon, coffee. The bread is baked, the salmon cured, the coffee roasted, but it all counts as unprocessed, bizarrely.

Snack: More of the bread with some cheese and a pint of homebrewed stout. The bread was heavy and dense and smelt of malty bran flakes, but it’s quite good with savoury things like the cheese and salmon.

Dinner: mushroom curry with polished white basmati rice. I guess the rice counts as processed, but I don't care.

#Unprocessed Day 1

A bit difficult today as I spent the night at my mum’s.

Breakfast: fried bread, eggs, bacon. Maple syrup and brown sauce (not unprocessed). Coffee.

Dinner (at cafe): wrap with lamb kobba, salad, baba ghanousch. Processed tortilla chips on the side which I gave to my friend.

When I came home I had a few slices of salted salmon and made bread dough to be baked in the morning.

Saturday 1 October 2011

#Unprocessed

I’ve been humming and hawing, trying to decide whether or not to take part in #Unprocessed. It’s a virtual event designed to enable people to feel smug about their diets by eating nothing “processed” for the whole month of October.

The name is a misnomer, of course, as many foods are processed in some way: bread and beer are some of the oldest processed foods. But in this case a very liberal notion of “unprocessed” applies.

But can I do without Nutella for a month?
I eat (or think I do, at any rate) relatively little “processed” (in the sense of October Unprocessed) food anyway, so it will be interesting to see what difficulties I encounter. What I don’t make from scratch passes the “kitchen test” in most cases: bacon, jam, pasta ... things I could make in my kitchen if I really wanted to.

So while I have my reservations about the concept and am aware there are likely to be a lot of food faddists on board of the sugar-is-poison school, eating more whole grains and fewer things packed in plastic can’t be bad.

I have already slipped this morning and had brown sauce on my bacon and eggs. So I’m not going to be a purist and will be guided more by common sense than someone else’s criteria. I’ll still choose a home-baked white loaf over a wholemeal one from a supermarket.

At the moment I’m thinking of what to do with the box of mushrooms in my fridge. I would make risotto, but I don’t have any stock, and stock cubes are out of bounds. When you make risotto with stock cubes it just tastes like packet soup anyway, so perhaps #unprocessed is doing me a favour.