Plenty of activity in the past month, some good, some bad. Variety and texture remain problematic but overall, sticking to veggie and fairly vegan for the past few weeks.

Some product updates to share. First, the good ones:

• Sojade – A bifidus soya yoghurt-alternative. This is a shocker. Smells and pretty much tastes like natural yoghurt. Has that lactic tang which is so missing in most soy products. Used it in a curry instead of yoghurt and could not tell the difference. Pretty sure you could add pureed fruit to it to make normal yoghurts and not be able to tell it lacks dairy. Got it and several other recent products in Quay Co-Op in Ballincollig. It’s not as big as the Cork one but handier for me to get to.
• Silken Tofu – Found this shelf-stable stuff in Scally’s in Clon. Total disaster when I tried to fry it and use in curry. It just melted. However it makes a brilliant dairy alternative for many recipes where smoothness and creaminess required. I used it in a pea puree recipe instead of cream and it worked a treat in the food processor. I’ll post that recipe soon, it was a big success.
• Quorn Mince – Yesterday I made traditional spag bol for the kids but used Quorn instead of minced beef. All of the kids loved it and rated it delicious. I told none of them what they were actually eating. Proves, yet again, my point about a lot of foods being easily replaceable with plants, if you can get the texture right.
• Dal – After reading most of an Indian Vegetarian cookbook, I finally did one of the recipes yesterday (minus the relentless Usli Ghee on every page). This was a spicy dal with 6 chillis and red lentils. Utterly gorgeous. Had more of it today and will have more again tomorrow. Total win, full of protein.
• Darina Allen’s Cucumber Pickle Recipe – if you loved the jars and miss them, her recipe is identical and only takes a few mins with a mandolin to do. Apparently they cancelled the supermarket product as the stuff was fermenting and blowing the lids. You can still get it fresh in Midleton Farmer’s Market. I’ll post the recipe here soon with full attribution.

Now for the failures:

• Quorn Smoky Bacon Slices – Horrible. Imagine a plate of BBQ-flavoured Rancheros with the rest of your food. Nothing is right about this product from taste to smell to texture
• Quorn Chicken Pieces – I’ve gone completely off this. Texture is just so wrong.
• Some veggie sausages with leeks – You can’t just mush spuds and leeks together into a tube and call it a sausage. It’s a bloody croquette. Nothing wrong with the taste, it’s just false advertising.

Apart from that, still doing some Oatly but finding it too much in every cup of tea. Tea is really my downfall for the vegan bit. Still doing low-fat milk there and in the morning porridge. A bit of goat’s cheese in the two-weekly homemade pizza too. That’s about it for dairy.

More stuff on recipes in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, seek out that Sojade, you won’t believe how good it is!

Overall, it’s still entirely vegetarian except for the Friday chicken curry and I’m be strongly tempted to replace that with something veggie soon due to a great Indian Veggie book my sister got me. Apart from milk in my tea and porridge and the odd bit of cheese on a homemade pizza, I’m still also pretty close to vegan. Those fake cheese really did turn out to be disgusting and were binned. Oh I nearly forgot, I also still love mayo which has eggs. Those vegan alternatives were like cheap own-brand salad cream. Texture people, texture!

One big problem is that I’ve been totally unable to find an acceptable milk substitute. Soy Milk is the work of the devil and Rice Milk is the work of his assistant. Try either in tea and you will pour them down the sink immediately. A Chai Tea Latte in Heuston Station was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever put in my mouth and I’ve eaten pigs brains.

But a few weeks ago I bought something called Oatly and I just tried it in a cuppa and wow wow wow, it works! No nasty aftertaste, no horrible texture, just a nice creamy addition to my tea with a not off-putting different shade to the usual milk one. I’m thrilled and will buy lots more the next time I’m in Quay Co-Op.

The Oatly stuff is really interesting on several levels. It’s made from oats, water and oil using a process from the University of Lund in Sweden. I love the idea of using products that are grown locally in a country to try and find new uses for them. As we all know, oats are very good for you too. So this is a win, win, win for me I think. Tomorrow I will try on my porridge which is amusing I guess, since they are both made from the same thing.

Week to week I am sticking with the tempeh, smoked tofu, lots of veg, lots of fruit, hummus, falafel, ramen, curries, miso soup and a jam-packed morning porridge with goji berries, chia seeds and honey. Those Chia seeds are mad and I’m a fan. If you’ve read Born to Run, you’ll already know all about them. A guy in Waterford is selling them branded Chia Bia which is a nice touch so I’ve bought those.

I continue to buy Dee’s Burgers but we have failed to spot her new ready meals in the usual West Cork haunts and I really want to try them. Maybe in Scally’s today?

The main thing lacking right now is variety and that’s down to time. I need to dig deeper into the Veganomicon for fast recipes. I had a real win last week after watching an episode of River Cottage Veg Every Day where Hugh FW and the guys had a veggie sambo competition. I would never have thought of putting orange or carrot in a sandwich but they were gorgeous. However both myself and my bro-in-law Phil would lay claim to having invented the beetroot sandwich many years ago, so hands off!

What else? Oh yeah, I tried some of the Quorn fake sliced meats (turkey and ham). Nah sorry, completely the wrong texture and too dry. I’ve been banging on about the texture problem since the start so I was thrilled to see this NY Times video posted on Facebook by my old collegemate Bernard who has been a vegan for decades and is currently trying out the raw food approach. If this product hits the shelves I’ll be a very happy bunny:

More updates when I’ve tried a few curries and sandwiches.

There are two reasons I’ve been doing this. The first is that I use a miracle stomach drug called Omeprazole which solved over 20 years of chronic stomach problems when I finally discovered it (and other PPIs like Nexium). Getting the branded versions via prescription here would cost an arm and a leg but it is available as a non-prescription (i.e. OTC) generic in the US.

The second is the criminal difference between the cost in Ireland of normal NSAIDs like paracetemol/ibuprofen and the cost in the US. How about 500 ibuprofen for $12.99 or 500 paracetemol (acetaminophen) for $11.99? Compared to maybe €2 for 24 generic paracetemol here? Also, it’s 500, not some idiotic packet of 12 that Micheál Martin forced on us during his reign.

Whilst the products were cheap, the shipping and customs really added up so we would buy 6-9 months worth of products at a time and made big savings. Unfortunately drugstore.com decided to stop doing direct international shipping a few months ago which had me very worried. However they did say they were happy to use a third party shipping agency in the US. They recommended one but I decided to go with US Unlocked, with whom I already had an account.

US Unlocked is a great service. I signed up with them to get an online US Credit Card to buys things like Amazon VOD TV shows etc but their core business is providing people with US shipping addresses. The idea is that you have a unique address with them in New Jersey and when you order, you provide that address to the vendor. You can order from multiple vendors and wait until everything arrives there. They notify you of each arrival. Once you are ready, you tell them what you want shipped and they quote you a price via UPS. You pay the fee (normal credit card, PayPal etc) and they ship. Simple.

I did an order recently with drugstore.com and another from Florian Tools who make a superb ratchet pruners that my mother loves. Florian used to have very cheap shipping to Ireland but when I checked recently, the shipping cost more than the product! This is a common issue in the US.

For this order, US Unlocked quoted me $67 to send a few hundred dollars worth of stuff, which I thought was very reasonable. No other fees were involved and all the US-based drugstore.com deliveries were free. It took a week to arrive due to some weird hold-up with UPS in Germany but everything arrived perfectly today.

Note that you may incur customs charges depending on the products, so factor that into your spend. I’d recommend doing a big family order twice a year and share the shipping cost across the family.

I’m really thrilled how well it worked out. Big thumbs up for both drugstore.com and US Unlocked.

I’m still picking at the odd bit of ham/turkey and I’m still doing the Friday Chicken Curry but apart from that, it is all veggie. If I removed the milk from my tea I’d basically be vegan. But that ain’t happening.

Foods I continue to love on this diet:

• Hummus
• Falafel
• Asparagus
• Broccoli
• Avocado
• Portobello mushrooms
• Beetroot
• Tomatoes
• Salad leaves
• Pomegranate seeds
• Porridge with linseed and goji berries/prunes
• Ryvita
• Brown Rice (surprisingly)
• Dee’s Burgers
• Linda’s Sausages
• Home made pizza (one reason for needing fake cheese)
• A wide range of relishes, chutneys and pickles
• Lemon, Balsamic and Soy sauce for sparkle

Things I found a bit meh:

1. German Tofu with Kombucha
2. Quorn sausages
3. Quorn chicken pieces

Today I did a run to the famous Quay Co-Op in Cork to get some other things I wanted to try plus some staples. I’ll do an update after I try the new things but purchases included:

1. Sheese fake cheddar
2. Cheezly fake mozzarella
3. Quinoa
4. Chia Seeds (I literally just read about these in Born To Run last night. Some miracle seeds apparently. Or so the Beanstalk boy said.)
5. Tempeh
6. Udon Noodles
7. Miso Soup
8. Oatly oat-based milk substitute
9. Stevia sweetener
10. Sauerkraut
11. Prunes
12. Puy Lentils
13. Smoked Tofu
14. Apple puree
15. Ramen
16. More porridge flakes, brown rice etc
17. Agave sweetener

I have a blogpost forming in my head about how the veggie-world needs a giant processed food corporation (Kraft, Nestle, etc) to throw all the knowledge of their food scientists at making better substitute products. I’m convinced something far superior to all this extruded mushy stuff can be created. The fatal flaw in most of the products I have tried remains texture. The sponginess of the tofu, even fried, was particularly horrible. Looking forward to seeing if Tempeh is better.

Also, given how far removed a chicken nugget is from actual chicken, I am 100% sure McDonalds could do a Vegan McNugget that was indistinguishable in taste and texture to a “chicken” one.

So onwards we go. I need to expand the range of things so I don’t get bored. Time to dig into the Veganomicon more.

UPDATE 1: Just made a Sheese toastie. Not the worst thing I’ve ever tasted. The Sheese out of the packet smells rank and tastes like standard processed cheese. It doesn’t melt brilliantly but when paired with a decent mustard, I scoffed the lot. Needed a slice of ham or something tho!

UPDATE 2: Tried the Agave sweetener in my tea. Perfectly tasty but then it is mainly just fructose. It says low GI but really, I have to wonder. The Stevia thing is interesting tho. From the makers of Canderel. Very new product. No calories but lots of lactose. If it lacks the after-taste of Saccharin, Aspartame and Sucralose, I’ll be happy.

UPDATE 3: The Cheezly smells as rank as the Sheese but melts ok and tastes fine when melted. The third type of veggie sausage was nasty and dry. The ramen were lovely. And the real winner was the Tempeh. Nutty, solid, fries well, great texture. Gonna use a few different ways this week.

As I have been officially obese for the past few years, I was in my regular new year weight loss mode and wanted to do it in a healthy way. The book sounded like an intriguing approach so I bought it on Kindle.

Unlike the relentless quackery that surrounds diet and diets, this was written by a man who worked his entire career as a doctor and researcher. His credits include the NIH and the Cleveland Clinic. I have to say, he makes a very strong case. If you can’t face the very very long book, grab a copy of the Forks Over Knives documentary which summarises his and other doctors’ thinking.

The core argument is that the gigantic increase in meat and dairy consumption is to blame for many of our ailments and these problems can be stopped and even reversed by switching to a much more veg-based diet. Basically like we used to eat in every society before we became rich.

So for kicks and giggles I have decided to try a mainly plant-based diet for the next “while” (duration TBD). I haven’t given up meat and dairy completely but I have cut down hugely.

In the past two weeks I have had no red meat, no eggs, cheese once, some weekend rashers/sausages and a smattering of turkey/chicken. The only dairy I get is a splash of milk in my tea. I tried both rice milk and soy milk and they are gross. A soy latte is an abomination.

On the veggie side, I have had lots of veg (duh), lots of fruit, seeds, wholemeal breads, porridge, hummus, salad and pickled veg. On the pure veggie side I have had Dee’s Spicy Bean Burger (not bad), Linda McCartney’s veggie sausages (surprisingly spot-on both for texture and taste), Brendan’s Vegetarian Burritos (nice taste but pure slop) and fried tofu with a ras el hangout coating (texture is too squishy).

Things I cannot stand about most veggie food in cafes etc are the ubiquitous bell peppers, aubergines and courgettes. Everything tastes the bloody same.

Tomorrow I’ll do a middle-eastern type thingy with falafel which I have become addicted to.

On the recommendation of several veggies I got the Veganomicon cookbook which I have just started and is a good fun read.

Plan for next week is more beans, more texture and less chicken/turkey. The only thing I’m not giving up is the Friday chicken curry. I did a butternut squash curry last week and I’m sorry, but no.

Texture remains an issue with all the non-meat proteins. I’m going to take trip into Quay Co-Op on Saturday to see what else they have. Seitan maybe? I’ll also see what else Tobairin in Bandon has (they do the burritos and the tofu).

Funnily enough I’m doing more a vegan thing than a vegetarian thing. Who would have thunk? Let’s see how long I last.

Another update in a few weeks.

My type of running is known, by experts in the field, as walking Last year I did the Courtmacsherry 10k, the Dingle Half-Marathon and the Galway Bay Half-Marathon. All done incredibly slowly and all tough. My dodgy ankle did not help.

My aim for Bandon is to shave at least an hour off my time. It’s not going to be easy since the route is pretty challenging due to hills. But that is balanced by the fact that the views are great. TBH I really didn’t enjoy the Galway race. Urban running, in traffic, even with sea views, cannot compare to something like the Dingle Peninsula. The Bandon run is in some of the lovely back roads between the Clon road and the Dunmanway road near the river. See below:

If you have never run before, why not go for the 10k route? It’s a great way to spend a morning and the pints taste mighty fine afterwards.

I believe the Dingle weekend is their busiest business weekend of the year. Let’s hope the same ends up being the case for Bandon.

Hopefully see you on the route. I’ll be the mentalist wearing these:

“It Must be the Music” is a night of Musical entertainment in aid of Action Breast Cancer, brought to you by Laoise O’Hanlon, joined by a variety of Cork women singers, including Kay Deering, Jamie Harper Kingston, Roos Demol, Bernie Harrington, Sinead Tracey, Jenny Bradley and Molly Lynch.

The accompanist is Deirdre Long and the MC is Ciarán Bermingham

Tickets are only €15 and are available from Roos on 086-8508548 or An Tobairín on South Main Street, Bandon.

Lots of discussion about it over on Facebook if you want to know more.

Yesterday I did my first ever Half Marathon in Dingle. Yes it nearly killed me and I had to walk lots of it but I finished and I had several hundred people behind me. Compared to some of my friends who regularly do Triathlons, my achievement is nothing special. But for someone who spent 20 years sedentary and started running in January, aged 41, with a gippy ankle and hugely overweight, I’m pretty proud of myself.

One application I have been using is CardioTrainer on my Android phone. It started as a pretty simple app but just gets better and better with each revision. It uses GPS to record distance, speed and elevation as you exercise. The most recent version finally has a “permanent account” feature so you can change phones and keep your exercise history. It saves everything on the phone and online. It also posts to Facebook which I love.

Last night whilst watching TV with my completely seized up left knee, I played a little more with it and suddenly discovered it has Google Health integration. This is a service that has always intrigued me but I had never used. Unlike many people, I would love to have a permanent online store of all my records that all my health providers would input to and read from. No more silos. My GP, various hospitals, physios etc could update and access what is appropriate to them.

So this afternoon I signed up for Google Health and connected CardioTrainer to it. I’ve been sitting here for the past hour looking at it with some “big ideas” bubbling around in my head. They are not quite formed but it goes something like this.

1. Android phones will become ubiquitous in the next two years
2. You can already get basic models for £100 un-subsidised in the UK
3. CardioTrainer is free in its basic form. They just released a calorie counter app and have an inexpensive weigh-loss app
4. Google Health is free
5. There is some opportunity around tracking your exercise, eating, weight, etc and uploading via CardioTrainer to Google Health
6. Your health professionals could track your progress and give advice, feedback and encouragement
7. The HSE could hand out those phones and create a preventative care group for billions less than it costs to deal with the health problems related to obesity, diabetes, alcohol, heart disease, smoking etc etc etc. Hell they could even outsource the whole thing to Malaysia.
8. Someone from FourSquare could help with gaming dynamics to build incentive systems into these apps to encourage people to get healthy
9. Think “Operation Transformation” for everyone
10. If Google wanted to do it themselves, they could finally find a practical use for Latitude.

Ok, so you can see where I am going with this. As I said, the idea isn’t fully formed but there is something valuable here centered around cheap mobile technology, the cloud and the health of our country.

Please head over there and show your support.

The concert, which still has no name (ideas welcome) will be held on October 29th in the Brogan Inn in Bandon. At the moment we are practising a barbershop song. It is quite challenging, but we’re having a lot of fun with it.

So from Dec 29th to Feb 9th, I have lost 20 pounds.

How? No booze, no snacking, no sweets, normal breakfast, normal lunch, smaller dinner, fruit whenever I’m peckish and a small amount of treadmill Mon-Fri.

My BMI, body fat and visceral fat are all still atrocious but on the way down.

On advice from @adventsparky on Twitter, we invested in a body fat analysis machine (aka tarted up weighing scales) on Amazon. This Omron BF510 Body Fat & Composition Bathroom Scales has both feet pads and handgrips to give a much more accurate analysis of fat by running a small signal through your body.

I then track that in a spreadsheet in Google Docs.

Next major milestone will be the 2 stone mark. I figure about another 2ish weeks for that.

Eventual aim is 4+ stone reduction by mid-late summer. Fingers crossed.

#1 – The first rule of Fat Club is, you must talk all the time about Fat Club online.

#2 – The second rule of Fat Club is, you MUST TALK about Fat Club online.

#3 – If someone says stop, goes limp or taps out, the de-fatting has just begun.

#4 – Lots of guys fighting fat.

#5 – One kilo at a time.

#6 – Baggy shirts, running shoes.

#7 – De-fatting will go on as long as it has to.

#8 – Every night at Fat Club, you have to weigh yourself and Tweet/Facebook it

I’m in. Anyone else?

You can expect to see a lot of information about the treatments in which he specialises (particularly Frequency Specific Microcurrent) appearing on the site in the coming weeks.

If you are in need of services like this, Eoghan is a real pro and you won’t regret having a consultation.

Imagine if, instead, those millions of people went outside, dug up a square metre or two of their perfect lawns and planted some vegetable seeds? Or if they lived in an apartment in Ireland, they contacted Irish Allotments about organising patches in their locality?

Then instead of some silly hour-long nonsense they could:

• Reduce CO2 throught the action of the plants
• Reduce petrol consumption through less shopping
• Reduce fuel miles by not buying foreign vegetables
• Save money
• Get their kids outside
• Take part in Seed Saver schemes
• Eat healthier
• Get fit

We could call it Gardener’s World

Of course taking care of this veg patch takes a wee bit longer than one hour a year and isn’t news-worthy so maybe we should just turn off the lights and keep playing mushroom instead.

I just got a lovely email from someone who was in such a hospital in the 1950s wondering if I’d got any feedback. Unfortunately I hadn’t. So I thought I’d just pop this up with the aim to allow anyone to give their thoughts, reminiscences etc of these places. Good and bad. Feel free to pass on to anyone you know who had TB back then. Of course commenters can remain anonymous/pseudonymous.

If the State’s Chief Medical Officer says that dioxin is only dangerous if a person is exposed to it over a long period of time, then why the hell are we destroying millions of Euro worth of food?

We all eat chicken that spends its life sitting in its own faeces in the dark and lots of the pork we eat is dosed up to the eyeballs in sub-therapeutic antibiotics, so how is a slight possibility of a touch of PCB going to make our health any worse?

Related to this, I’ve met with a few small food producers recently and I don’t know how they stay in business with the nonsensical levels of paperwork and measurement that they have to deal with. Is this actually part of the problem? An unbelievably bloated bureaucracy unable to measure and react quickly because they are drowning in irrelevant form processing? A bit like Sarbanes-Oxley in the US causing people to be so obsessed with process, they forgot about the intent and allowed the banks to trade recklessly for years. 

Finally, I thought we had full meat traceability from field (or concrete pen) to fork? Why not just release the tracking codes of all the individual batches we need to destroy? Or are we all a bit too thick to manage that?

This Sunday’s rasher sandwich brought to you by the letter P and the Caherbeg Television Workshop:

The range of products on sale there has always amazed me. From vitamins to organic food, chocolate, cosmetics and alt-med stuff, she has something for everyone. Now I’ll be totally open here, I’m not a fan of a large number of alt-med approaches despite having a friend who is a homeopath. However, having said that, there is a huge amount to be gained in the area of health by everyone thinking about the products they use on their bodies, and more importantly, the things they eat.

So her new project, the Fionnuisce Healing Centre (web-site not live yet) in Heron Court on Market Quay holds great interest for me. Apart from the alt-med side, there is a large meeting room with a demonstration kitchen area. So far this space has been used for yoga, dance and various workshops including cookery demonstrations in co-operation with Karen Austin of legendary Lettercollum Kitchen Project.

There are lots of interesting cookery events lined up for September that include a Sushi Saturday and Mediterranean Veg.  In October Karen will offer Indian Vegetarian, November Thai and December Christmas Veg.  There will be a wholefood cookery night class running Tuesdays from 1st week in October for 10 weeks with Dorothee Clarke.

She had me at sushi

They are also running a cool 1-day drama workshop on Sunday 13th July by Belinda Wild who describes it as being for anyone with or without experience in Drama who is interested in exploring creative self-expression through the medium of theater – and she guarantees to make you laugh. I’d honestly be tempted, having played Sybil Walling in “Brush with a Body” in the Kieran’s College school play, aged 17.

If you are interested in any of the above, shoot Mary a TXT on 086-3882440. I’m trying to convince her to start a blog since I think any place that has regular events is ideally suited to one instead of a static brochure page. It might be worth her putting all the events up on Yahoo Upcoming too.

UPDATE: Some of the dates for the foodie events are as follows:

• Saturday 6th September, Succulent Sushi with Delwyn Klevenow
• Suturday 20th September, Mediterranean Vegetables from Karen Austin’s abundant garden
• Saturday 18th October, Indian Vegetarian with Lettercollum Karen
• Saturday 15th November, Thai Cookery with Lettercollum Karen
• Saturday 12th December, Vegetarian Christmas with Karen

Women’s voices count in politics. Two Tits and a Vote is an online Irish Women’s Health Campaign empowering you to advocate for better women’s healthcare in Ireland. You can be part of improving Irish women’s health care from the comfort of your very own chair. Learn how to take part now!

I think the name is superb and cuts through all the bullshit to get right to the heart of the matter. The time for politician’s weasel words and acceptance of the criminal incompetence of the HSE and Dept of Health has to end. I hope this effort by Sabrina and others plays a big role in that. Please sign-up on the site and support them.

2007 hasn’t been a great year for ground-breaking innovation since most things I’m familiar with have just really been refined. I haven’t heard about one thing that make me stop and go “wow that’s incredible”. I might do so when CUH stop sending out hand-written appointments and use a fancy thing called a computer and Microsoft Outlook to schedule x-rays.

I mentioned BiancaMed in a previous post and I’m going to nominate one of their developments as the Invention of 2007. In fact their whole product line should get the gong. I don’t just say this because I was in college with Conor Hanley and Conor Heneghan, their developments are the first step in an entirely new approach to medicine. Expect these guys to exit for a huge amount of money in the coming years (or buy GE Healthcare!).

The BiancaMed Overnight Sleep Monitor sits on your bed-side locker and measures your breathing patterns with no contact whatsoever. It can provide critical data to diagnose sleep apnea and other sleep disorders and medical conditions. It will be able to send that information via mobile phone to a back-end system that your medical practitioner can log on to and analyse. It is genuinely revolutionary and there will be a multitude of spin-off products from this including baby monitors and fitness equipment.

As someone who has slept badly since he was 6 years old I’d love to get access to this and maybe finally get to the bottom of it. As a parent, I know many people will pay a LOT of money for a baby monitor which may help avoid SIDS.

A bit more impressive than a poxy phone, isn’t it?

The benefits of such a machine could be enormous

• Massive reduction in GP queues
• Reduction in incorrect self-medication (e.g. anti-biotics for viral infections)
• Prompt addressing of potentially dangerous conditions
• Diagnosis by subject-area experts globally rather than by potentially incompetent local hospitals
• Blue Sky: Your own portable MRI with “lump” detection

We are starting to see this sort of thing appear here and there, from equipment for diabetics to portable defibrilators to the awesome sleep-apnea equipment by the BiancaMed guys. Some day we’ll get to the point where your health isn’t in the hands of a dysfunctional bureaucracy and you’ll control your own destiny.