Cheese jokes! First thing on a Monday! Hollaaa!

(That joke occurred to me on my walk to work this morning – yes WALK, stomp stomp – you should have seen how pleased I was with myself. Pisa! Cheese(ah)! Hahahaha….. urgh)

No “blogging” over the weekend – very very bad. BUT also very very good as my weekend was full of extravagant successes! (Success? Successes? Meh) I’ve really got to get this exaggerating under control. But there WERE some successes – mainly – riding my bike with noooo haaaaands! This has absolutely zero impact on my speed or strength over distance but it makes me look cooool when I stop at the red light on the Regents Park ring road. Take THAT Islington cycle club – you may be wearing matching lycra and going twice as fast as me but I can ride with no hands, therefore I win. (It doesn’t make me look cool, I most likely look average. I don’t care. I FEEL cool. Cooler than when Erin tried to teach my tumble… sorry sorry… FLIP turns yesterday in the pool. Ridiculous. I am sure I used to be awesome at somersaults in the water when I was little?!)

So I better talk about this leaning tower I guess. I really did make one, look look! Picture below! WHAT a saddo. Made me chuckle though. You should have seen me trying to get the gradient just right – trickier than it looks folks! I have just had another amazing joke pop into my head whilst writing this though – I should have said “cheeeese” when taking the photo.

…..I’ll get my coat

Moving on! Cheese. Cheese makes us fat. Booooo. But cheese tastes amazing. Yaaaaay! So how do we strike a balance? Think strong. No not mentally “just say no” strong. I mean flavour and smell strong. The stiltons, extra mature cheddars and parmesans of the world are our friends. Why? Well because you only need a little bit to make things taste friggin’ awesome. Case in point: Blue cheese dip. Drool. Think chicken wings (baked, love – we don’t need no KFC here), think toasted pitta (post sweating/training/working out), think vegetable sticks (not as good as chicken but still not bad), think using as a salad dressing, think mixing into mashed up cauliflower. This stuff is gooood. And if you can’t make it then you need to have a word with yourself. Now, be smart about this, you can’t go launching an entire block of stilton into this and think you’re being cunning. You’re not. You’re kidding yourself. Learn what 50g of stilton looks like – because it has around 200 calories and around 16g of fat. Now smush it up with a fork and mix it into a 170g tub of 0% Total Greek yoghurt, now very thinly slice a spring onion, maybe half a spring onion depending on your oniony tolerance and mix that in. Little bit of salt. Little bit of pepper. VOILA! Cheese delight! This entire tub of glory has around 300 calories, which, if you ask me, is pretty damn awesome given you can do loads with it and provided you don’t eat it morning noon and night (maybe best to only eat half – ergo half the calories), it won’t make us fat! Hurrah!

I won’t start writing lines and lines of cheese recipes but I do have a few up my sleeve so if you are really interested then I will do you a deal. Share my blog with people you think will like it, shoot me a message in the comments below and I will dedicate more tap tapping on my keyboard to the marvelous world of dairy. (FYI – I’ve had people reading this in Costa Rica and St Lucia! Whoever you are – hiya!)

I still haven’t got to the main point though! Quark! My leaning tower of protein and calcium dense magic! Seriously though, I need some kind of Quark Addict Anonymous group. Oooooh there’s definitely room for a QUACK type support group name in there. Anyway, quark, the definition is as follows: “Quark is a type of fresh dairy product, common for the cuisines of German-speaking countries, northern Europe, the Netherlands, Hungary, Israel, of Slavic peoples, and of Ashkenazi Jews” – yeah yeah whatever. Nobody cares where it’s from. The point is, it’s a bit like cream cheese crossed with Greek yoghurt? Just get on it, trust me. I get mine from Waitrose (other supermarkets nation wide are stockists – just to prove I’m not a Waitrose snob). It is £1 a tub. I buy 6 at a time. Waitrose chappy on checkout definitely thinks I’m weird. It has next to zero fat, around 20g of protein in a tub (you want protein with every meal – want to know why? Ask Jack), is ridiculously versatile and for greedy folks like moi, you get a decent serving in a tub. Kicking goals left right and centre. Eat it with the Chia Seed Jam (want the recipe? Same deal as the cheeeese recipes), eat it with fruit, nuts, honey, peanut butter. Use it in savoury stuff. Spread it on crackers. Use it as a sauce. Too. Many. Options. I eat it every day. So it must be good – haaaaa – only joking.

So, all in all, eating cheese can be easy…..cheesy?

I’m going now.

Happy Monday! Look at that work of engineering!

C xx