Saturday involved another trip to the food mecca that is Petone, and a final cheese toastie at Cultured (their store is now closed D:), a bag of biltong from OnTrays, licorice from the Dutch shop, and a hanging planter for Brend. The planter is the only new thing I bought in October that wasn’t food or entertainment! A present for someone bought from a store owned by someone I’ve met in real life totally doesn’t count as failing Buy Nothing in October.

While in Petone we popped in to Sweet Pea, a new high tea place that looks so fucking cute. I absolutely adore Martha’s Pantry in the city but Sweet Pea was really spacious and felt like it would be more relaxed. When I’m next in Petone and not full of cheese I’ll definitely try it out.

After drooling my way around Petone I drooled all over the awesomeness at Craft 2.0 and then dragged myself home in the hot sun to finish the icing on my Halloween party cookies! They had scary words on them like ‘Babies’ and ‘National Government’ and ‘Feminist’.

Hungover on Sunday meant french toast and reliving the costumes from the night before. Best dressed went to Tim as Ron Swanson that time he got back with Tammy 2 and ended up in prison with corn rows; and Fiona dressed as Al Swearengen from Deadwood. She wore a chest merkin, and kept a glaring scary look in her eyes. We managed to not die before seeing Drive at the Embassy, where we also sighted John Waters in the wild!

Also I never used to understand the Ryan Gosling hype, but now. Daymn.

A month sober.
A month without cheese.
Almost two weeks with cake, or chocolate, or anything else good.

Here’s to eating and drinking so much this birthday weekend that I’ll need another detox next week to recover!

While in Asia I discovered a secret. One that has been hidden by juice makers all over the country.

The secret is this: You do not need four different fruits, two fruit juices, a tub of frozen yoghurt, and $9 to make a smoothie!

We drank so many blended fruit drinks while we were traveling and we watched while they were made. We watched while nothing but one type fruit (or two if you’re faaancy) was put in a blender with ice cubes and water and maybe a little sugar syrup sometimes, and blended. We drank so much fucking watermelon.

I cannot wait till watermelons are back in season. But for now I’m blending bananas (discounted ones because they’ve gone a little spotty!), and pineapple from a tin. Or a cup of frozen berries, and a banana. Or oranges, and berries, and a banana. Bananas are cheap and filling ok.

What are your favourite fruits for blending?

12 September – 23 September: 3 bottles of water a day; no cheese; no alcohol; maximum 1 caffeinated drink a day; maximum of 2 coffees a week; 2 days a week where sugary food is allowed.

Day 1:

It’s only midday but I’m already feeling virtuous for swapping the morning coffee for a bottle of water. Since returning from Asia the water drinking has been waaaay down. Less than a bottle a day usually, so a bottle is actually quite an achievement.

11am: I catch myself staring intently at the chocolates at the checkout.
The panic that has appeared over not being able to eat sugar is ridiculous (!) but proves the point that the time to get over this addiction is now.
I have a birthday celebration on Wednesday and I’m getting tattooed on Thursday, so I already know my sugar day allowances will have to wait till then.

2pm: Every mention of tea on twitter makes me want to drink it ALL. Apparently I follow a lot of tea lovers. Second bottle of water has been downed in protest.

4pm: Jason is home from work and enquiring whether I want anything from the dairy. “Don’t even tempt me.” “You’re probably saving lives in Colombia by not buying coke anyway.”

This coke or this coke Jason?

Day 2:

A BLT and smoothie for breakfast. When you’re doing the Best Detox Ever^TM you get to eat things like BLTs for breakfast. There’s no cheese so it’s fair game. Apparently the reason I love cheese so much is because I’m addicted to morphine. This is turning into the get Kim to rehab show.

12pm: The water isn’t going down as easily as yesterday. But I am determined to have my entire digestive system transmute into pure mother-of-pearl.

Cake made by Laura.

Day 3:

Thank god it’s a sugar day. These pieces of coconut rough are like sex in my mouth. Cannot stop fantasising about the man shaped cake I’m going to eat tonight.

Day 4:

Went a little crazy on the sugar last night. But must keep going today. It’s tattoo day and I need to keep the sugar up. Lest…something.

Day 5:

Ugggggghhhhhh. Two days of sugar and I feel like absolute crap. My throat is sore, I’m bloated, my arm feels like it’s had a million little needle pricks.

12pm: My burger without cheese or cheese sauce is not as good as my usual burger with cheese and cheese sauce. I hope it’s not because I’m still addicted to morphine.

4pm: Oh shit, I think I’ve caught Kate’s cold. I knew sitting in the sun at Park(ing) Day was too much stress on my pasty white skin.

Day 6:

Yep, definitely caught the cold. Thank goodness Brendan isn’t working today so he can be my slave. Am I the only person who wants to eat cake when they’re sick? Brendan refuses to try to make me a cake, his friends are over or something. Poor excuse.

Day 7:

Brendan is working today though, so I have to fend for myself. This cold seems to be one that kills you straight away and then retreats rather quickly, I’m at least able to walk today.

12pm: In my feeble state I failed at healthy supermarketing and have to designate today a sugar day. A 4 pack of muffins, mocha flavoured milk, mac and cheese in a box (doesn’t count as cheese cause it definitely doesn’t have any cheese in it), and some fruit & vegetable juice so I could trick myself into feeling virtuous.

Day 8:

What a waste of a sugar day. I decided to finish of the half a muffin I had left and then realised that totally counted. Laaaaame. Is this the normal amount of sugar people eat in a day? How do they even enjoy life?

I’m really really craving a glass of wine tonight. Only a couple of weeks till I can have one. Ahh!

Day 9:

3am: Insomnia fuck yeah. It’s times like these it sucks to be in a couple. No watching bad tv in bed for me.

8am: I’m surprisingly functional considering I spent about 5 hours in bed either staring into darkness or at my little phone screen.

7pm: Eggs have crossed the line from tolerable texture, to omg am I eating slime texture. In an attempt to try new ways to eat them I made this super easy avolegmeno, it’s like fancy sour chicken soup. SO so good. Like eating cream without the horrible side effects eating cream gives me.

Day 10:

3am: Finally going to sleep after spending the last 4 hours trying to clean up malware I found on the site. It wasn’t infecting anyone else and wasn’t even visible if you came straight here, but search engine results made me looks like I was peddling Viagra. Fuck you you fucking fucks.

Still craving sugar but I’ve noticed how my stomach looks when I don’t eat it. Flat!

9pm: I made up for the lack of alcohol at tonight’s pub quiz by eating a second dinner.

Day 11:

11 am: How do you eat french toast without sugar? Is it even possible? I couldn’t so I sneaked a sachet of equal. Only one though, and that shit totally doesn’t even count as sugar.

Halloween must be approaching because I just saw a photo of candy corn on twitter. My friend in high school would go to America sometimes and bring me back candy corn, that shit is sweet sweet nectar, I doubt my teeth could even handle it now. Twitter friend was nice enough to link me to the devil website where I could get some for myself though.

Day 12:

I just realised I’m not complaining about cravings as much. Maybe this detox is actually working? My strategy has been to get so stuffed on savoury food that there’s no room to think about sugar.
My life revolves around food so I’m happy with my decision to give up pescetarianism, because it means I get to eat the new pulled pork burger at Monterey. Pulled pork is where the meat lover was rereleased last year.

7pm: I missed out on all the cheese with dinner at Brend’s sisters place, but the cheery pie and pretzel chocolate chip cookies at Jo’s were too much to pass up. Technically that means I’ve used up next weeks sugar day allowance a day early. Technically that means no sugar treats for the next two weeks! I hope I don’t hurt myself when I fall off the wagon.

I’d love to be a food people. Unfortunately I’m better at eating food and squeeing over cute plates and good service than I am at actually cooking. I leave that to talented boyfriends and flatmates.

Thankfully I didn’t have to do any of the cooking this weekend. We drove out to the food mecca that is Petone in the morning and visited a bunch of new (to me) foodie places.
The Dutch Shop where we picked up chocolates and licorice bullets.
On Trays where the small isles are full of delicious looking jars, drinks, cheeses, olives, and a whole lot of South African dried meat. Brend and I chose a bag of delicious Biltong, but it didn’t survive the day.
An Indian store full of spices and dried pulses and ready to eat curries.
And finally the supermarket where we picked up salmon and ribs and capsicum to smoke.

Back in town the boys got the smoker going while I headed to Martha’s pantry for some girly high tea with Jo, twitter friend Selina (Jo’s IRL friend), and Selina’s daughter Shannon. On entering Martha’s Pantry I started kicking myself for not having been earlier; it’s a wonderfully girly heaven. Full to the brim with cute cup and saucer sets, frilly aprons, delicious looking sweets, and a million kinds of tea. The furniture is painted white and paired with kitschy table cloths, ours had cross stitched flowers.

I topped off all the high tea goodness with a walk home in the unusually warm Wellington weather; (almost) a bottle of bubbles; and smoked ribs, salmon, and salad.

Unfortunately overly sweet bubbles give me hangovers so I spent Sunday eating pie sandwiches, microwaved sausage rolls, custard squares as big as my head, and drinking orange cordial. I watched 5 movies as well.

Looking back on it Chiang Mai was one of the best places we visited during the trip. Definitely my favourite place in Thailand. It’s such a shame we didn’t get to explore the city properly, or get any photos of it (because of Songkran). And that we didn’t have enough time to go back again. I’d really love to go back one day when the city isn’t full of bucket wielding maniacs.

However, the boys loved our time in Chiang Mai because of the bucket wielding maniacs. Or because they were the bucket wielding maniacs. The day after we arrived the water fighting started and it hadn’t stopped when we left about 4 days later. I only participated on the first day (lame I know, I just wasn’t having any fun being saturated by iced water when it wasn’t even sunny!), and even then I went back to the guesthouse after a few hours.

Thankfully the boys didn’t let me stop them from having a good time, which meant finding a “gang” of both tourists and locals to join and terrorise the streets with. They loaded themselves up with aforementioned iced water and stopped anyone and everyone, even going so far as to wave down songthaew in order to douse the passengers. Meanies.

A bit tired of only being able to leave the guesthouse hours after the sun had gone down we booked ourselves in for a cooking course on our last day. Pui, the overly talkative teacher, was so great. About 10 of us showed up at her house in the morning for a full day of cooking (and talking, and playing with her dog Lady Gogo). Even though it was a small kitchen with one cooking station we all got a chance to participate and ask as many questions as we needed. After eating the huge feed we had cooked ourselves we were invited to rest in her garden or her lounge and have a little nap before we cooked even more food!

See all the Chiang Mai photos on Flickr

There is a decided difference between the boys and girls in our house. The boys are full of drive, electing to get large amounts of exercise, writing, and other artistic activities out of the way before settling in for the night. The girls however need deadlines and rewards to get what they need to do done.

We were having a discussion about it the other day. Kate and I would both like to make our businesses work and we’d both like to lose our winter weight. The boys suggested we just do what we needed to do to get it done. We both lamented that our minds don’t work like that. In lieu of a very real deadline we need the switch. The thing in your mind that clicks over one day without much of a reason, that lets us put our mind to something.

Thankfully my switch to stop with the daily scone breakfasts, candy binges, huge lunches, and snacks after dinner flipped a couple of weeks ago.

The change has been dramatic and apart from weight loss the best result has been less sore tummies. I have colitis so eating fried food, and anything with high fat dairy or high amounts of sugar make me feel a bit sick. That’s how bad I was before. Willing to put my health at risk for a sugar fix. It’s the closest I’ll get to being an addict.

How do you get the things you need to do done? Can you just use your natural drive and grab what you want or are you more like me?

A) Started eating meat
B) Smoked a substance for the first time
C) Took a new boy to meet my mother
D) All of the above

We love winners in this country right? Well you’re all winners. Because in the past week I have done all of the above! (D: or :D ?)

It all started 2 weeks ago as we had a final gathering before Kate and Jason left for 2 months of honeymooning in America. Jason made pulled pork and I’d heard about his pulled pork since the day I moved into 361. I gave in. I realised I wasn’t so disgusted by meat any more. And I haven’t stopped eating it since.

At some point at the gathering a (I’m assuming very drunk and stoned) friend dropped a wee bag of weed on the kitchen floor and I found it while cleaning up. It had been decided a while ago that I would try marijuana at some point, so this opportunity was kind of perfect. Prior to this I’d never even had a puff on a cigarette. So my throat burnt, and my eyes stung a bit. But I did it, and am apparently one of the few that is affected in the first try. An odd feeling of knowing what I was doing but not being able to control it ended up making me think throwing a marshmallow back and forth was pretty damn hilarious.

Last but not least I am writing this from Mum’s house. All the way up in Ngaruawahia, an 8 hour drive from home.
Having not seen Mum since January, when I finally convinced my friend from school to come see me in Wellington I decided to drive back up with her. B (man friend for the past 6 months, have I told you about him yet?) agreed it was time to meet Mum as well and so we all piled in the car for the long drive. Mum says ‘he seems like I really nice guy’. I say ‘he’s just putting it on to impress you’. I kid.

Although our new sommelier friend was loud and crass and drunk, ruined a (gross pashing) couples date, broke a glass and ended up being politely told by his friend/the owner (Blair – so lovely despite our rudeness) that it was time to leave, his wine choosing ability was not impaired. I have neither the interest or money to need to remember what we drank but I can tell you it was two whites and a red that were fucking amazing, and I’m quite glad I don’t know how much they cost or I’d be feeling more than a bit guilty.

For the sometimes wine drinker like myself who can’t tell one amazing wine from another it wasn’t so much the wine I was interested in. I didn’t realise I was there for the food either, until I tried it. And boy oh boy, did I try it. Like sex on a plate the antipasti platter was some of the best food I have tasted in my whole life. I am kicking myself for being oblivious to the delights of Vivo until now, labelling it as a wine bar I wouldn’t be interested in when really the perfect food and comfy but flashy booths are everything I have been looking for.

I know where I’ll be taking my next out of town guest!

Vivo Enoteca Cucina, 19 Edward St, Wellington