So when I got home I started reading a lot about food. First I read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (good for turning you instantaneously vegetarian. I'm not quite there but have drastically reduced meat consumption). Then I read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which is good for ensuring you never want to eat anything again, ever (Still worth a read though). And then, in a much more uplifting way, I found The Extra Virgin Kitchen by Susan Jane White. White is a food writer who recounts her interest in healthy eating as stemming from a hospital stay. The account opens her book and is powerful shit. She talks of the epiphany she had that her and all her fellow patients were essentially 'digging their graves with their teeth'. I wasn't on morphine by this point and the weight of that sentence hit me like a ton of bricks, and I properly cried. Snivelling, inconsolable body-shaking sobs. I suddenly realised that I could have shuffled off this mortal coil in blood stained Moomin pyjamas in a body that was a total fucking wreck, and decided there and then that something had to be done about it. Fortunately, SJW book is just the book to set you off on this quest. She is hilarious, and refreshedly un-po-faced. She doesn't want you to weave your own yoghurt or knit with hemp. She just wants you to eat a bit less processed shit.
This is obviously a bit easier said than done. I have accumulated some handy gadgets to assist in the last couple of months. Firstly, a Fitbit, to make me move my useless arse a bit more. If you have a desk job it is easy to become sedentary, but this evil little wristlet will render you the human equivalent of a hamster in a wheel. Secondly, a Nutribullet. This really just smooshes shit up like a fancy blender but is good to shove vegetables, seeds, and a wee bit of fruit into in the morning to start your day right. My friend Zoe has compared these drinks quite rightly, to 'being a bit like drinking somebody elses cold sick' but it is HEALTHY cold sick, so drink your medicine and shut your face. I'm just in the early stages of all this gubbins, as I am unsurprisingly still battling with anaemia which is a total and utter bastard. But I feel like baby steps are better than no steps at all. My life has become an endless round of walking, chopping things, smooshing things in a Nutribullet, and washing stuff up. The vegetably crud often left on many surfaces by the bullet and various other cooking detritus led to The Bear uttering the impossibly sexy sentence 'Why do you always smell of bleach at the moment?' when I got into bed the other night. Better than a diseased colon though I suppose.
Still, I am far from perfect, and neither are any of you bastards reading this. Every now and again you want something sweet. Sugar is getting a hell of a bad rap at the moment, and rightly so. It is something I have tried to exclude in its processed forms, but when the hormones come a-knocking they will not simply be fobbed off with A Fucking Apple. So whilst still in a pretty drug addled state I made these brownies one night a few months ago. They are pretty good and even fooled The Stepchild, who like any other teenager would usually smell a healthier alternative from seven miles away, like some sort of sucrose crazed bloodhound, and then dispense with it in the bin.
Ingredients
- 1 fairly large sweet potato (Yeah I am putting veg into cake, get over it, you eat carrot cake don't you?)
- 4 tablespoons of buckwheat flour (you could use regular flour but I avoid it these days, buckwheat is probably better for you and fairly easy to get hold of)
- 1 heaped tablespoon crunchy peanut butter (I like Whole Earth, the proper hippie shit)
- 2-3 tablespoons of honey. (Get local untreated stuff if you can. Even my garden centre sells these days it so it really isn't that much of a ballache to obtain. Don't act like I am trying to get you to procure a surface to air missile)
- 2 tablespoons of coconut oil
- 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder (I like Green and Blacks in this one but you could use that raw cacao stuff if you want, but you would need less as it is stronger)
- 4 eggs
- Teaspoon of baking powder
Method
1. Bake your sweet potato in its skin at about 180C until soft, this will probably take at least 30 minutes. Leave to cool, turning your oven down to about 170C.
2. Meanwhile melt the honey, oil and peanut butter on a very low heat. Whatever you do, do not taste this, as it is literally the most delicious thing and you will end up wanting to drink it. Don't drink it. Or do if you want, I'm not your Mum. (But you will need to make some more up for the brownies.)
3. Beat the eggs in a bowl. Add the flour, baking powder and cocoa, then the delicious honey-ey/oily/peanutty stuff.
4. Squeeze the innards of the sweet potato out into the mixture and give this a stir too.
5. Put in a lined tray-bake type tray. I use a square one which is 20cm x 20cm
6. Put in the oven for approximately 15 minutes (but check on it after 12).
7. When cooled I then cut this into 16 squares, each one is approx 76 calories for those of you that give a shit about that sort of thing.
Eat whilst feeling immensely grateful that these are not THOSE brownies that you had at Glastonbury sometime in the nineties which made you think you were A) covered in ants and B) having a conversation with Jimi Hendrix when you were actually talking to a rucksack.
